Category: Art

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Allan Bloom & Leo Strauss and Real Political Correctness

The 20th was a century unlike any other.

I am this moment interested in one particular difference– the democratization of knowledge– the massive influx of middle-class and poor students into post-secondary institutions of higher learning that occurred in the 1960’s, and our ever-so-sweet, controversial, apocalyptic moral decline. Here we are. We’ve declined. We have the morality of alley cats. How did we get here?

For all the white noise and rhetorical flashes over the issue, it’s really not all that complicated. Until the 20th century, only the children of very rich, very privileged people could receive a higher education. These were children of people who benefited from the status quo. They were the status quo, either the church or the aristocracy. And all intellectual conversation took place on their terms, in their language, in a manner congenial to their ultimate self-interests, especially when it concerned noblesse oblige.

And then suddenly you have democracy and a prosperous middle class and suddenly children of hard-working middle-class parents get to go to college, and buy records, and go to movies, and read books, and suddenly Leo Strauss and Allan Bloom are whining about the tragic loss of culture and learning when what they really mean is that their privileged little ivory towers no longer command the landscape, and those suckers, those helplessly inane but physically peerless farmer’s boys, were no longer mindlessly willing to go immolate themselves on spears and in trenches in order to preserve Allan Bloom’s right to buy $4,000 dinner jackets, smoke Cuban cigars, and troll the streets of Paris looking for rough trade.

The same elitist attitudes certainly exist today. There has been no decline. If anything, there is probably more elitist achievement and behavior today than there ever was before. But the elitists are outnumbered. And they hate it. They just can’t stand the fact that Bruce Springsteen sells more copies of his songs about seducing New Jersey girls named Sandy with tight unzipped jeans, than the Chicago symphony will ever sell of any work by Beethoven. More people have seen “Blade Runner” than will ever see “Hamlet”. Besides, I’m not all that sure that “Hamlet” really is more important, or more of an indication of sophisticated and developed taste than “Blade Runner” is.

The bottom line is never surprising. Neo-cons like Bloom and Strauss and their disciples (who don’t occupy quite as many positions within the Bush administration as they used to) want to build a world in which their social and political class get to dictate culture to the masses. For all their bitter complaining about the “nanny state”, they are far more authoritarian, and far more willing to over-rule popular taste.

They are and always have been the real advocates of “political correctness”: patriotism, chastity, prurience, and consumerism.

 

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Wedding Videos

Have you looked at a “cutting-edge” wedding video lately? It looks a bit like Tarantino crossed with Fellini. “My Wedding Day 1/2”.

What might be going on is the same process that happened to “art” at the end of the 19th century. For about 2000 years, the goal of painting seemed to be to replicate, as accurately as possible, the image of something. A lot of technical break-throughs, like the use of perspective, the development of different paints and mediums, were the result of artists struggling to unlock the secrets of making a painting look real. Popularly, art functioned like early photography, as record-keeping, information transmittal: here’s a portrait of the pope– in other words, this is what he looks like.

Once photography began to replace that function, artists began to change their styles, and the meaning of art changed. Van Gogh’s sunflowers don’t tell you about what sunflowers look like, but what he felt like looking at them. Monet’s famous pond got more and more abstract as he immersed himself more and more deeply into his backyard.

Professional artists had to find something new to distinguish themselves from hacks and photographers. The hacks continued to try to paint representational images, or, worse, narrative. They were regarded as uncool (like Norman Rockwell). Same with photography: now that anyone can take decent, well-lit, and auto-focused pictures, what’s cool? Out of focus, blurry, badly coloured prints. I can’t wait ’til they start selling instamatic cameras again– to professionals.

In the same way, now that almost anybody can buy a video camera and can master the basics of using a tripod, the “professionals” have to find something new to distinguish themselves from amateurs and hacks. So they imitate film journalists from war zones, and documentarists and Dogma95.

I’m not saying it can’t be used well. I would say, though, that when it is used “for effect”, when a tripod is perfectly available and appropriate, that it has gotten silly.

When a style gets carried too far, as in, arguably, modern art, it becomes ridiculous and irrelevant. The most absurd thing I saw in the last year was a wedding video that featured a wobbly camera, sepia-toned segments, dust and scratches, fast-cutting action sequences, out-of-focus zooms—– it was hilarious. All of these shots taken not in the heat of action, but in the bride’s backyard, and all the scenes were posed. They were phony. But the guy who made it thought he was a genius, and, if I remember correctly, so did the Association of Wedding Videographers which gave him a prize. Probably, so did the bride, whose friends probably took one look at it and — this is America, folks– promptly demanded that their wedding videos be out-of-focus, black and white, dirty, hairy, and wobbly. Why not just hire a drunk?

Anyone remember the sequence in “The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz” where that is exactly what happens? A film-maker is hired to do a bar mitzvah. He is an alcoholic, and seriously demented. He produces a bizarre montage of scenes from the holocaust, an actual circumcision, and various other weird shots– avant garde film-making at it’s “finest”– intercut with scenes of the actual bar mitzvah. At the end, the crowd of family members sit in stunned silence. Painful seconds tick by…. until a rabbi perks up: “I thought it was edifying”. Then they all leap up and applaud, and Duddy gets all the new customers he can handle.

I happen to think that most– not all, but most– current hand-held camera work is ridiculous and annoying. It’s a bad imitation of artists who might have had a good reason for using that style at the time, but those reasons don’t exist in someone’s backyard on their wedding day. Why not just go handheld, without deliberately shaking all over? In ten years, I think it will look damn silly.

By the way, Stanley Kubrick used it for action sequences in one of the greatest films ever made “Dr. Strangelove” (1963), and rarely used it again. That puts it well ahead of “Hill St. Blues” and “MTV”.

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Bamiyan

A few years ago, the world watched in horror and disgust and contempt as the Taliban, those freaky arch-Victorians of the Islamic imperium of Afghanistan, destroyed the massive sandstone carvings of Buddha in the side of a mountain in Bamiyan.

The statues were not remarkable artistically, but they were deeply significant for historical and cultural reasons. (Sorry if you do think they’re beautiful– I don’t. They look like something a bunch of monks without great artistic talent would create.) In the seventh century AD, there were over 5,000 Buddhist monks living in the caves around the statues. Islamic Arab tribes drove the Buddhists out by the ninth century– they didn’t destroy the statues, though.

That would be barbaric.

The destruction of them by the Taliban was an act of mindless, philistine thuggery that astounded the world. If one was not, until then, convinced of the barbarity of the Taliban, this one act did it.

The Taliban repressed women, of course, and was famously intolerant of freedom of expression, diversity, freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, or any kind of fun whatsoever. But those statues were just sitting there, harmlessly, impressively (175 metres high). It takes a peculiarly vindictive and petty and malicious mindset to destroy something like that.

In 2003, the Americans invaded Iraq. The marines that arrived first in Baghdad immediately secured the oil ministry buildings and guarded them diligently during the first weeks of the occupation. Down the road, the Baghdad Museum featuring an absolutely priceless collection of some of the world’s most important antiquities sat there, unguarded.

The Americans stood by as Iraqis of unknown affiliation or devotion destroyed and looted the museum. The marines did nothing. They didn’t even seem to care.

It is not that the Americans were unaware of the significance of the collection. Well, maybe they were. But they certainly knew that cultured and educated people in the U.S. and elsewhere regarded the collection as invaluable and irreplaceable. Experts from around the world had made efforts to ensure that the Americans didn’t bomb it by mistake, and had taken measures to protect the collection once they occupied Baghdad. The Americans said, “yeah, yeah, fine, we’ll take care of it.” Then they didn’t.

The Washington Times uncovered a March 26 memo that showed that the Pentagon had communicated, to the coalition commanders, a list of important sites to be protected during the war. The Baghdad museum was number 2 on the list. Somebody in the Pentagon had a brain.

The world should never forget or forgive Donald Rumsveld for sloughing off the destruction of the Baghdad museum as just “so many vases”. It was a wonderful moment, if you think shocking revelations of the deep-seated idiocy are “wonderful”. He really didn’t care. He really didn’t grasp the significance of the collection. He really could not imagine why anyone would worry about the loss of these absolutely unique examples of the art and expression of mankind’s earliest civilizations.

That’s fine, really. Nobody cares if some asshole called Donald Rumsveld sits in his cave somewhere picking his teeth while contemplating the eternal symmetry and beauty of a plum pit.

But George Bush, during his election campaign, never once informed the voters that, given the opportunity, he’d appoint people who would happily stand by and do nothing while priceless antiquities are looted and destroyed. Donald Rumsveld surprised us.

Jack Valenti, the head of the Motion Pictures Association of America (MPAA), goes around the world berating governments for supporting local film industries at the expense of Hollywood productions. He wonders why anyone would bother with indigenous film, when they can have as many copies of “Ernest Saves Christmas” and “Dumb and Dumber” as they want.

Bush should hire him. He belongs in this White House working with Mr. Rumsveld. They can both be put in charge of the world’s priceless antiquities.

Do you think any of these leaders of the free world care about the beauty of the rain forest, or a pristine wilderness area, or coastal wetlands, or a medieval cathedral, or a rare endangered species, or live theatre or the ballet, or opera, or Mozart’s birthplace, or humpbacked whales, or snowy owls, or Dostoevsky’s manuscripts, or Shakespeare’s original theatre, or a Scottish castle, or the Great Wall of China, or mummies, or cuneiform tablets, or anything at all, other than the stock market and McDonalds and Disneyland?

Think again. When they come to your neighborhood promising the delights of democracy and free enterprise, get ready for drive-thru’s and golden arches.

If you never knew it before, you know now that George Bush and Rumsveld and Perle and Cheney are to culture and history and civilization what McDonald’s is to gourmet cooking.

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Acoustics

In spite of the fact that many American auditoriums in the 19th Century were based on European designs and traditions, there was never any conscious attempt to develop a “science” of building acoustics until 1898 when Wallace Sabine was commissioned by Financier Henry Higgenson of Boston to design a new symphony hall.

Until Mr. Sabine made a conscious effort to discover the objective properties of “good acoustics”, most American builders either modeled their designs on successful European buildings, or went with their instincts.

Carnegie Hall in New York was designed without reference to any acoustical science whatsoever. Apparently, it is quite good.

Many buildings are designed with reference to good acoustic principles. Then the buildings’ owners make a last minute change– add a balcony, or increase the width or something– and don’t go back to the architect for a re-reckoning of the acoustics. The results: disaster. The main auditorium at Redeemer College in Hamilton, for example, looks fabulous, but the sound is horrible. Choirs howl, instruments screech. (You don’t believe me? In all fairness, I must say that many people think the hall sounds just fine. I confirmed my impression with a music professor who led the choir that performed most often in that hall. I think we’re right.)

Sabine came up with a formula: the reverberation time multiplied by the quantity of absorbent material equals a constant that is proportional to the room’s volume.

Sabine then measured the reverberation time of some classic European halls, including Leipzig’s Gwandhaus and the Music Hall in Boston, and applied it to the design of the Symphony Hall. Symphony Hall is still around today and it is reputed to still have excellent acoustics.

Avery Fisher Hall (Lincoln Centre) had poor acoustics. The acoustical engineers tried and failed. They spent millions trying to fix it.

By the 1930’s, with the development of electronic amplification systems, the marriage of acoustics and structure began to fall apart. Today, whether you are watching a movie in a theatre or a live production at the Pantages Theatre, you will not hear the sound of the building. Everything you hear will be electronically processed and manipulated. That’s why singers can now project their affections for each other with breathless intimacy. That’s why people who can’t project at all– but can hold pitch– can now star in a musical production.

That’s probably a good thing. Why should only big people with voluminous chests get to sing? And I like the breathy, intimate sound of the quiet human voice. But don’t go away thinking that the building has “great acoustics”. The acoustics of the building are now largely irrelevant, as long as it doesn’t have vast hard surfaces to create feedback. What you are hearing is the result of electronic engineering.

Unfortunately, some shows now use taped or synthetic music to accompany the singers. Sometimes they use part of a real orchestra and a keyboard with synthesizer or digital recordings. People don’t like it a lot, so there is a bit of flimflam there– the producers want to keep their costs down by employing as few actual musicians as possible, but audiences want to feel that they had an “authentic” theatrical experience for their $75 a seat, so they put up a show of an orchestra.

In 1906, Julia Barnett Rice, who was married to the publisher of Forum Magazine, organized “The Society for the Suppression of Unnecessary Noise”. New York had a “Noise Abatement Commission” in 1929. See? There was a time when people cared about ambient sound. I don’t think we care today. Maybe we’ve just given up on trying to control it. Until you’ve camped in the wilderness, you probably have no idea of how much constant, ambient sound you are inundated with. And I doubt that anybody fully understands how much stress this creates in the human nervous system.

One of these days, I believe we will find out that regular periods of silence are more effective than Prozac.

Did you know that “jazz” comes from the word “jass”, which was slang for “jasmine”, the smell of the perfume worn by prostitutes in the Storyville District in New Orleans? I didn’t know that.

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A Visit to Ottawa – Part II

Bill’s Trip to Canada’s National Capital: Part II

I stayed in Ottawa recently to take a course in Oracle, the world’s most powerful and expensive data base. I stayed at the Lord Elgin, which is really pretty fancy, though I assure you it is priced very competitively with Holiday Inn. They took my car away from me from the moment arrived– I haven’t even seen my keys in four days– so I was forced to walk everywhere.

I walked down the Rideau looking for a Wendy’s. There were two Burger King’s, a McDonald’s, a Dairy Queen, and a food court in the Rideau Centre, a giant shopping mall. I ended up with a Mozza burger from A&W and New Yorker Fries and a complete waste of dinner.

On the way back, I stopped in at Chapters to try to find a book on humor by Gershon Legman. The staff were not helpful. Well, I’d never heard of him either until recently. The computers they have scattered throughout the store are supposed to help you find books. It found Legman’s book but it declared that not only was it not in stock, but it wasn’t even “available”. This is a book that some people with opinions I respect think is a very, very important book.

On the way back, I dropped into the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography. There is a long staircase descending from Rideau St. to a long, empty hall, and then another staircase that descends to the main hall. On the upper hall is a display of photographs of images from a television set of an 8mm camcorder video taken by a guy named Ho Tam. In these images, Ho “moves between the roles of observer and participant” and produces a series of “grainy yet sensitive pictures”. Ho reflects on his schooling experiences (the shots are taken in a Catholic school he attended in Hong Kong) and, “most importantly, the ‘lessons’ learned during those formative years— love, desire, discipline, trust, fear, and loss of innocence”.

To me, they looked like a bunch of badly lit, badly aimed Kodak Instamatic photographs. What’s in them? What did you think would be in them, given the description above– “loss of innocence”? They consist of a bunch of images of the buildings, the kids playing soccer or hanging around, and the toilets, and foliage.

Well, that’s the problem with modern art, you know. I say I wanted to see some very sharp, specific images of faces and people acting upon each other and their environments. The artist asserts that I am oppressing him with a paternalistic and fascist sense of structured literalistic meaning.

But let’s think about this. Why do we have modern art? Because artists since 1920 have been so wildly inventive and imaginative that they have single-handedly struck upon a mode of expression that contains the unparalleled potential to illuminate the zeitgeist of our own era? No. Modern Art exists because photography came along and removed the figurative, representational purpose of painting and sculpture. With nothing else to do, art turned in upon itself and became self-referential, drawing attention to it’s methods and material elements and structure. The next thing you know, it is mocking those very self-referential elements, and then it is trying to draw attention to the fact that it is mocking itself, and then it tries to be so cool that it doesn’t even seem to be mocking itself, all the while demanding that patrons pay outrageous sums of money in order to exhibit these products upside down in their living rooms.

So you have Jackson Pollock with his splatter-paintings, and Andy Warhol with his soup cans. So you have the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art in New York fighting bravely for the honor and respect of modern art now caught in it’s own theological disputes over whether or not post-modernism really exists and should have a place to display itself.

And you have Ho with his deconstructed photographs. What is he doing?

He is using a technology to imitate an art form that is a revolt against his technology.

Is he a genius?

No, because he doesn’t understand what he is doing. What he thinks he is doing is making his photographs “artistic”. How do you make them artistic? Well, good heavens, not by finding interesting subjects and photographing them accurately. You make them artistic by finding uninteresting subjects and photographing them in uninteresting ways, with uninteresting angles, in degraded colour and low resolution, and then you mount them on the wall and point to them and tell people–you have to tell them, or they won’t know– that this is art.

Your artlessness camouflages the fact that you have no creativity to offer, that you didn’t do the hard work of composition, lighting, camera angle, colouration, and so on.

Most importantly, you ban cameras from the building.

I’m not kidding. I’m looking at these awful illustrations on the wall and reading a sign and the sign says that anyone trying to steal these images will be prosecuted for copyright violation. God help us, someone might try to steal a photograph of your bad photographs! It makes me think of an old, fat, diseased whore: “Don’t you even think of trying to get me to pose nude for you, my boy!”

Down the hall, in the main hall, don’t you know, are more mature works by a more respected visual artist– Pierre Boogaerts.

I am reading the program notes on Pierre Boogaerts. Is there any greater testimony to the bankruptcy of modern art than phrases like this: “… belongs to the generation of artist who adopted photography as their preferred means of expression in the early 1970’s”. Isn’t that bizarre? It sounds like elevator conversation– you have to say something, so say something inane. Anyway, his work is “marked by a conjunction of influences from Pop Art, Land Art, and conceptual art, and called into question the formulation and function of the work of art itself”.

That kind of consummate gobbledygook may have been excusable once upon a time, when the philistines were upon us, or when Stravinsky almost started a riot in Paris with “Rites of Spring”, but to write that kind of crap in 2001 of a mediocre artist like Boogaerts raises the question of whether the curators of this museum themselves must realize that it sounds like a joke.

There’s more:

“The Exhibition is selected from the entire body of work donated to the CMCP by Boogaerts in 1994. Poetry, an essential dimension of Boogaerts’ production, which is frequently masked by its conceptual art trappings, is highlighted in the structure of the exhibition through the use of analogy. This approach focuses attention on the visual beauty and associative processes inherent in the medium, which influenced the development of the artist’s ideas.”

Maybe you can rationalize away the word “entire”, as if he had another body of work that wasn’t “entire”, or the coy link to poetry, and maybe even “conceptual art trappings”, but I defy any sane person to excuse, in the name of literacy, “associative processes inherent in the medium”.

If you’re still interested, his photographs consist mainly of repetitious shots of leaves and buildings, arranged in various uninteresting collages or shapes and sizes.

I was the only person in the museum for the first ten minutes of my tour. Four or five other people came in while I was there. The staff, three people, well-dressed, behind the main counter, seemed discernibly alarmed when I came in. A security guard tried to follow me but I think she didn’t want to appear to be too suspicious so she hung back and tried to look nonchalant while making sure I didn’t stick a photograph of a leaf under my coat. They didn’t check me for anthrax or bombs or anything– does Osama Bin Laden know that the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography is a sitting duck?

It reminded me of a moment in Europe, in 1977. I toured the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, which was great, and very busy, and the Van Gogh Museum, also in Amsterdam, and the Louvre in Paris. At either of the latter two, I could easily have walked out with any painting, including the Mona Lisa. Shortly afterwards, a mad Dutchman sliced Rembrandt’s “The Night Watch” and that was the end of that era.

Everybody jaywalks in Ottawa, even the police. Well, perhaps I exaggerate. I didn’t actually see any police jaywalk, but I saw several of them sitting in cars or Jeep Cherokees near busy intersections and not one of them tried to arrest me for jaywalking.

Being the law-abiding sort, I wanted to wait for the lights to change, but this young girl who looked like she knew what she was doing blustered ahead of me and charged through the red “Don’t Walk Sign” so I followed. In fact, she demonstrated a convincingly degree of leadership, so I followed her for several blocks, at a discrete distance of course. She was good at it. She knew exactly when you could charge safely through a red stop sign and when it might not be safe.

We passed a demonstration near the National Arts Centre. I didn’t notice what it was for. I was instantly sympathetic with their cause…. until they started chanting. That’s when I am forced to tell myself that I could never be one with the poor and oppressed of this earth. I am genetically programmed to become nauseated at the first sound of a sing-along, group chant, slogans, and such. I would be a lousy demonstrator. When the woman with the bullhorn demands, “what are we going to do about it?”, I would shout, “I don’t know. What? Can we think about it?”

There was some kind of diplomatic gathering at Hotel Laurier. There were about twenty limos there with various chauffeurs standing around, shaking hands and gabbing. It looked like a United Nations get acquainted party. The cars, each with a distinctive red license plate, were parked all over the place, including on the sidewalks. I noticed that some of the “limos”, probably from poor third-world countries, were Neons and Jettas.

I saw something on the sidewalk and picked it up. It was some kind of identity card, which must belong to someone important. This person is so important, he doesn’t need his name or any other identifying marks on his card. It just has a magnetic stripe., and it is attached to some kind of belt clip with a yoyo type wire that reels back into a little disc. Very cool. I looked around at the chauffeur drivers but none of them met my eyes, so I walked off down the street with it. A few blocks later, I passed a cop and thought of turning it over to him, but then I thought it might arouse suspicion in these paranoid times, so I tucked it into my pocket and walked back to my hotel.

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Conrad Black

So it’s now Lord Black.

I personally find it completely offensive that there still exists, within the British Empire, an institution whose very foundation rests upon assumptions about class and lineage that should be utterly repellent to any democrat. The House of Lords is a bastion of exclusive White Rich Male Privilege (no matter how many token women and blacks are added) and British Upper Class Twittledom. And now, Mr. Twittledom himself, Conrad Black, who started a newspaper (and did a good job of it) just so he could show bad pictures of Jean Chretien and declare the Alliance winners before the election was held, is a Brit and a Lord and gets to wear hysterically funny costumes that remind me of the arch stereo-type of British Lords as, well, er, gay. Shall we say, fops. Precious. Delicate and righteous.

It’s Barbara Amiel who really annoys me, though. She once wrote an interesting article on Leonard Cohen, and I believe admitted that she agreed to strip for him in exchange for the interview. Correct me if my memory fails me, Barbara. She also wrote an article for Chatelaine once– my memory is clearer about this– in which she provided a vigorous defense of the art of gold-digging, which is, of course, the art of offering sex in exchange for position, power, and vast amounts of capital. Other than the prostitution angle, I suppose, not much to quibble with there, but it should suggest to us that perhaps Lord Black wasn’t himself so passionate about the cause of privilege as his wife, who now gets to be known as Lady Golddigger. Perhaps Mr. Cohen, recently descended from Mount Baldy (I kid you not) would consent to strip for the aristocracy.

The only thing that disturbs me is that she was a fan of Leonard Cohen. She should have been a fan of Frank Sinatra instead. Maybe she was. That would have been perfect. Frank was exactly the type of man who could see the value in an expensive Lordship. Perhaps she admired both. That’s possible nowadays. There was a time when any person acquainted with the work of Leonard Cohen could be counted on to be a dissident in some way, and remarkable for independence of thought, and, perhaps, a passionate spirit. Nowadays, it is obligatory to honor Mr. Cohen, which is precisely what is beginning to make Mr. Cohen boring. I say it makes Mr. Cohen boring not because his earlier work has become boring, but because Mr. Cohen has begun to believe in it himself.

Which leads me to the question of how one becomes a Lord. Well, it’s quite simple, really. If you have any doubts about my insinuations above just ask yourself a really easy question: is there any way that you or anyone you know could become a Lord? Yes, there is, of course. You simply have to have enough money.

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Mad Magazine

All right– so it wasn’t always funny or incisive, and it could be tired and dowdy at times. And occasionally it picked the wrong targets in some misguided belief that all sides of every issue deserve equal measures of humiliation. And it hasn’t been really relevant for twenty years. Still, you have to shed a tear for the death of Mad Magazine.

Not that it’s actually died.

The new owners of Mad Magazine — the quintessential greedy, ruthless, heartless corporation– AOL/Time Warner– will now accept advertising, thank you.

How can Mad Magazine, which used to mock the fundamental principles of hucksterism and commercialism, continue to attack the great hypocrisies in American culture while simultaneously urging you to buy Schlock Beer or Fuds Candy Bars?

My guess is that they will do the insidious thing: they will install a pseudo-hip self-mocking irreverence in the advertising itself, thereby confusing the reader into thinking that it can be cool to be an idiot– precisely the sort of clever marketing strategy that Mad used to mock.

I don’t think any sell-out on my list makes me sadder. Poor William H. Gaines (the original publisher of Mad, who refused all advertising).

Mad was no great shakes as a magazine. It had it’s faults. But the one thing I loved dearly about it was that it alone, among all American media outlets, had the courage and audacity to defy the one real sacred cow of our culture: that greed is good.

Sob.

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Bugs in Lingerie

Have you ever seen Bugs Bunny in black lingerie? He sidles up to some Arab sheik and bats his false eye-lashes and giggles….

I’ll bet you’ve never seen it.

I’ll bet you’ve never seen the horse’s ass that turns into the face of Adolf Hitler in an old Popeye cartoon either. Actually, I’m not sure if it was Popeye. I seem to remember that it was Donald Duck’s three nephews who were trying to hoist the horse into their bedroom. It spun around as Donald Duck or Popeye or whoever it was turned to look and with a swish of it’s tail, there it was, Adolf Hitler’s face.

Now, you probably don’t think it is very important that you or your children ever see Bugs Bunny wearing sexy black lingerie. You probably even think that it is a rather perverse idea, after all. What on earth is Warner Brothers doing showing that stuff to our vulnerable impressionable children? You may have seen the great documentary, Crumb”, in which the celebrated underground artist admitted to an unhealthy sexual infatuation with Bugs Bunny.

But that is not the point at all. You can take Bugs Bunny in his black lingerie or leave him, but the problem is that you did not have a choice. Some flunky at some big corporation simply decided that, from now on, you were not going to see Hitler as a horse’s ass or Bugs Bunny as Mae West or Al Jolson. They decided that it would not be appropriate or suitable or honorable or profitable for Warner Brothers to continue to issue the cartoons as they were created by those renegade Disney animators who couldn’t stand Uncle Walt’s control-freak mentality.

These cartoons, incidentally, were not necessarily originally intended for mass audiences in the uncontrolled environment of the family living room. They were shown in theatres, before the main features. They were shown in glorious Technicolor projection, forty feet high and sixty feet wide (or 16:9 or whatever…).

Did those early audiences storm out of the theatre when Bugs showed up in black garters and panties, trying to seduce an Arab sheik? Did people of Arabian descent start picketing the Warner Brothers’ studios in protest against the crude stereotypes?

Yes, it must be admitted, that it is not only the humor and sexual content that have been edited out of these cartoons. The original animators were not, as it were, sensitive, by modern standards, to racial stereo-types. Native peoples, blacks, Italians, women– we might squirm today at the broadness of their humor.

A few years ago, Disney produced an updated version of “Huckleberry Finn”. In the modern version, the word “nigger” was completely expunged from the text. Disney didn’t want to offend anybody– except for the broadly caricatured racists.

This is ridiculous. Does it really need to be explained to anyone? Mark Twain recreated the language of his day. He brilliantly imagined the dialogue between Huck and the runaway, slave, Jim, as it would quite likely have sounded, including the word “nigger”. What is the point of removing it from modern versions of the story? To deny that we ever used that word? To pretend that white Americans in the 19th century referred to African-Americans as “blacks”, “coloured”, or “negroes”?

The point is to re-imagine history in a way that is flattering to ourselves, that panders to our sense of personal worth, that sells.

It is important that we know that, in the 19th century, most white mid-westerners referred to blacks as “niggers”. It is important to know that people used to smoke in offices. It is important to know that women used to breast feed babies. It is important to know that children of all ages and genders often slept in the same bed. It is important to know that there was no indoor plumbing. It is important to know that people trapped together in a life-boat occasionally had to urinate.

It is important to know that Bugs Bunny’s creators thought it would be funny if he wore black garters and panties. If you don’t want to watch– fine. Don’t.

But please allow some of us the freedom to have our history without blinders.

Update (2001-05-03]

AOL/Time Warner is holding a Bugs retrospective on The Cartoon Network next month, but don’t look for those rare original Bugs cartoons I was talking about. Warner Brothers, concerned, apparently, about the commercial value of the Bugs “property” won’t let those cartoons be shown. In other words, this retrospective will be anti-historical. It will deny history. It will pretend it never happened. Without a doubt, these are the same minds that would decide to do “Huckleberry Finn” without once using the word “nigger”, as if white mid-westerners in the 1880’s didn’t use the word.

What next? Will they digitally remove the smoking from offices in 1950’s movies? How about the the rape in “Water Hole #3”, the James Coburn flick that suggests the woman enjoyed it? And should we really allow Nazis to appear in “The Sound of Music”?

If you can find an original copy of The Wabbit Who Came to Supper (1942).  Wait a minute– where?

That Wascally Wabbit

More information about cross-dressing Bugs.

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Pennies for Peanuts

Yet if the characters’ faith in a better future is quintessentially American, it travels well. “Peanuts” merchandise, starting with a six-inch plastic Snoopy in 1958, now includes toys, videos, clothing, Hallmark cards, sheets, MetLife ads and… well, more than $1 billion in sales every year. If the “Peanuts”-ing of the world seems crassly exploitative to some critics (even one United Media insider says it “casts a mercantile pall over something innocent”), it’s because Schulz can’t say no. It is as if Schulz—who worries that promised TV interviews will be canceled once people realize how unworthy he is—thinks spurning a deal would tempt fate.

Yeah, give it a rest. The truth is that Charles Schultz sold out big time. He was quite capable of making a wonderful living writing a nice little comic about a loser and his pet dog, but he got greedy. He wanted millions, not hundreds of thousands. He wanted his own hockey rink. He wanted an empire. And he got it, because people did not take offense at the idea of cartoon characters designed to enrapture children being used to huckster insurance or phony sentiment (Hallmark).

Stop soft-pedaling the fact that Schultz sold his soul.

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Left Behind

In Toronto, right at this moment, a large film crew is working on a $17 million production called Left Behind, about the end of time: the apocalypse. It is based on a book written by Tim LeHaye and Jerry Jenkins, who believe their story is based on fact. The producers are Peter and Paul Lalonde. The “facts” are found in the Revelation of St. John, the last book of the bible.

This is a very strange story. The faithful few will be “raptured”– taken by God to be in His presence– while– pardon the expression– all hell breaks loose on earth, as the Anti-Christ tries to do what the United Nations could never do in a million years: make the U.S. pay up on its delinquent dues.

The LeHaye-Jenkins books do very well, in terms of sales. They sell millions of copies. I have no way of knowing how many of their readers take this stuff seriously. Judging from the interviews on television and radio, lots and lots of people do take them seriously.

Anecdotally, I recall more than a few conversations with people who are convinced we are in the “end-times”. The signs are all around us. Rampant immorality. Confusing technological developments. Uncertainty and confusion. Murder and mayhem. Bill Clinton. No one thinks this is the normal state of circumstances. Everyone thinks that something really special is going on. They would be disappointed, you almost think, if the crime rate went down or peace broke out. They would be very disappointed to find out that “it was ever thus”.

But let’s go on to something more interesting. It fascinates me that people like LeHaye and Jenkins use movies, with all the technology and special effects money can buy from Hollywood, to get their message out to the world. You see, a lot of people think that these technologies are part of what got us into the supposedly sorry state of affairs we are in now.

On the other hand, some people would argue that technology is neutral. It is neither good nor bad. People use it for their own purposes, whatever they may be.

That’s a pretty shallow view of technology. Philosophers like Karl Popper have convincingly shown that technology (the application of science) is rooted in the way we look at the world. Good philosophies produce good science. Bad philosophies produce bad science and eventually die off. Popper means science in a broad sense– I think he would include culture in the equation: good philosophies are very productive culturally. We think of the lousy art produced by the state-sanctioned artists of the Soviet Union. We think of all the great artists who fled Nazi Germany. We think of the flowering of the visual arts during the renaissance. We think of Elizabethan England.

Popper doesn’t think philosophies are ever true, in a transcendental, universal sense of the term. They are merely models– or paradigms– of the way we see the world. As long as they work, they are useful. Then we discard them.

If this is true, then all the humanistic amoral licentiousness of our times must be rooted in good philosophy, because it has been extremely productive. It has been more productive than any other philosophy in the history of the world. It has provided us with enormous wealth, dazzling electronic toys, and breathtaking medical breakthroughs. In terms of culture, perhaps the jury is still out. Perhaps not. I would argue that Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Tom Waits, Leonard Cohen, Ingmar Bergman, Francois Truffaut, Alice Munro, and Michael Ondaatje have produced a pretty good body of work.

But, some Christians would object, just because we can produce all these baubles doesn’t mean that our society is morally good. But Christians have essentially agreed with Popper for centuries, except that they word it differently: they believe God rewards virtue, in this world. The more “Christian” our culture and society is, the more productive it should be.

And if Popper and the Christians are right, then the best and the most successful writers, artists, musicians, and film-makers in the world, would all be Christians.

Unfortunately, I don’t think that you could show that Christians produce the best culture in the world. In fact, you could make a pretty good case for the argument that right now they produce the worst. Have you ever watched the Christian Broadcasting Network? Artists lip-synch maudlin lyrics to mindless pap. They never show anything that could remotely be called “cutting edge”.

That’s why I expect that “Left Behind” will be a crummy film.  It will be poorly written, poorly acted, and filmed like a sitcom: camera 1, camera 2, camera 3.