Arts and Letters – Desultory Notes

Mural – impish character

1970 review of Elton John at the Troubadour – Los Angeles Times

Beyond his vocals, melodies and arrangements, there is a certain sense of the absurd about John as a performer that is reminiscent of the American rock stars of the mid-1950s.

Only someone with that wild, uninhibited view of his music would dare ask the audience to sing along — something that is almost never done anymore — or drop to his knees, like Jerry Lee Lewis used to do, in a rousing piano finale on “Burn Down the Mission.” It worked wonderfully well.

Robert Hilburn, LA Times

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/music/la-et-ms-elton-john-1970-at-the-troubadour-hilburn-20190523-story.html

Consciousness metaphors – Desultory Quotes

“The central metaphor of these four chapters is that the mind is divided, like a rider on an elephant, and the rider’s job is to serve the elephant. The rider is our conscious reasoning—the stream of words and images of which we are fully aware. The elephant is the other 99 percent of mental processes—the ones that occur outside of awareness but that actually govern most of our behavior.”

Haidt, Jonathan. The Righteous Mind . Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

“That ability would seem to be at odds with early epiphenomenalism, which according to Huxley is the broad claim that consciousness is “completely without any power… as the steam-whistle which accompanies the work of a locomotive engine is without influence upon its machinery”.

Epiphenomenalism @ Wikipedia

“when I woke in the middle of the night, since I did not know where I was, I did not even understand in the first moment who I was; I had only, in its original simplicity, the sense of existence as it may quiver in the depths of an animal; I was more destitute than a cave dweller; but then the memory—not yet of the place where I was, but of several of those where I had lived and where I might have been—would come to me like help from on high to pull me out of the void from which I could not have got out on my own; I crossed centuries of civilization in one second, and the image confusedly glimpsed of oil lamps, then of wing-collar shirts, gradually recomposed my self’s original features.”

Proust, Marcel. Swann’s Way (In Search of Lost Time) (pp. 5-6). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
(alternate translation – “would come like a rope let down from heaven to draw me up out of the abyss of not-being”. See that quote @ goodreads)

“But let us go further. Consciousness is a much smaller part of our mental life than we are conscious of, because we cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious of. How simple that is to say; how difficult to appreciate! It is like asking a flashlight in a dark room to search around for something that does not have any light shining upon it. The flashlight, since there is light in whatever direction it turns, would have to conclude that there is light everywhere. And so consciousness can seem to pervade all mentality when actually it does not.”

Jaynes, Julian. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (p. 23). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Kindle Edition.

The madman – Chesterton quote

“If the madman could for an instant become careless, he would become sane. Every one who has had the misfortune to talk with people in the heart or on the edge of mental disorder, knows that their most sinister quality is a horrible clarity of detail; a connecting of one thing with another in a map more elaborate than a maze. If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgment. He is not hampered by a sense of humour or by charity, or by the dumb certainties of experience. He is the more logical for losing certain sane affections. Indeed, the common phrase for insanity is in this respect a misleading one. The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.”

Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton

Three Murals inside Denver, Colorado

Up There and Down Here / The Prince of Persia

There’s also a spatial dualism. There’s a dualism of up there and down here, and so you have things that go on on the earth are simply shadows of what’s going on actually in the heavens. It’s like every country, according to Daniel, has its own prince, by that he means some kind of angelic being. The Prince of Persia refers in Daniel to some huge angelic super human being who actually rules Persia. The Prince of Judah, the angel of Judah tends to be Michael or some other angel that you’ve probably heard of, like Raphael. Each of the nations has its own angel so you can imagine sort of that Russia has its angel, and so then America has its angel, and if Russia and America were to go to war this would be actually simply an earthly shadow type reflection of the true reality which would be going on as the angel of Russia was battling the angel of America in heaven. So everything that goes on in our cosmos is simply a mirror image of these battles that are going on the heavens. So that’s another dualism of space.

Introduction to the New Testament History and Literature
RLST 152 – Lecture 23 – Apocalyptic and Resistance
Dale B. Martin

Soldier Recalls Vietnam

He said, “Erhard you better keep the mouth shut until you know what’s going on around here.” And I think it was at that point that I realized things were not quite what I was expecting. It went downhill from there.

Sunshine Hotel

SunShine Hotel_

A portrait of one of the few remaining men only ‘flophouses’ on New York City’s infamous skid row, the Bowery.

Amazon prime

Mike Watt – Against The 70’s

The kids of today should defend themselves against the 70’s
It’s not reality, just someone else’s sentimentality
It won’t work for you
Baby boomers, selling you rumors of their history
Forcing youth away from the truth of what’s real today

Fernando Pessoa visits a barbershop and reflects. Book of Disquiet quote.

“I went into the barbershop as usual, with the pleasant sensation of entering a familiar place, easily and naturally. New things are distressing to my sensibility; I’m at ease only in places where I’ve already been.

After I’d sat down in the chair, I happened to ask the young barber, occupied in fastening a clean, cool cloth around my neck, about his older colleague from the chair to the right, a spry fellow who’d been sick. I didn’t ask this because I’d felt obliged to ask something; it was the place and my memory that sparked the question. ‘He passed away yesterday,’ flatly answered the barber’s voice behind me and the linen cloth as his fingers withdrew from the final tuck of the cloth in between my shirt collar and my neck. The whole of my irrational good mood abruptly died, like the eternally missing barber from the adjacent chair. A chill swept over all my thoughts. I said nothing.

Nostalgia! I even feel it for people and things that were nothing to me, because time’s fleeing is for me an anguish, and life’s mystery is a torture. Faces I habitually see on my habitual streets – if I stop seeing them I become sad. And they were nothing to me, except perhaps the symbol of all life.

The nondescript old man with dirty gaiters who often crossed my path at nine-thirty in the morning… The crippled seller of lottery tickets who would pester me in vain… The round and ruddy old man smoking a cigar at the door of the tobacco shop… The pale tobacco shop owner… What has happened to them all, who because I regularly saw them were a part of my life? Tomorrow I too will vanish from the Rua da Prata, the Rua dos Douradores, the Rua dos Fanqueiros. Tomorrow I too – I this soul that feels and thinks, this universe I am for myself – yes, tomorrow I too will be the one who no longer walks these streets, whom others will vaguely evoke with a ‘What’s become of him?’ And everything I’ve done, everything I’ve felt and everything I’ve lived will amount merely to one less passer-by on the everyday streets of some city or other.”

Pessoa, Fernando. The Book of Disquiet (Penguin Modern Classics) .

Acting – Two Approaches

“We were, and indeed are, very different actors and people. I will always be an active actor, and John a passive one. I’m a peripheral player who goes out to the character, whereas he stays in the center, finds something in the part that will suit him, then pulls it in towards himself.”

Olivier, contrasting himself with John Gielgud. On Acting, Laurence Olivier.

What became so popular at your school that the teachers had to ban it?

Rulers. Year 10 in HS for whatever reason someone decided to smack a guy across the head with a ruler. Then everyone went out and bought a ruler.

Suddenly everyone was a knight with a sword. Staff kept confiscating them but rulers are cheap so kids just went out and bought them by the handful.

They ended up banning rulers. At a school. The kids who were taking geometry that year and needed them had to be assigned rulers at the beginning of class and then turn them back in.
…
If you rub the metal edge of a ruler against the sole of your shoe really fast back and forth it gets hot enough to seriously burn someone and leave a scar.
…
A kid did that to me back in 8th grade. Hurt like hell and left a mark that took a decade to fade. I was pissed!
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When I was in elementary a girl took one of those rulers with the raised rubber grip on the flat side and rubbed it up and down in the middle of her forehead really fast. Ended up leaving a scar at least until end of highschool. None of us ever understood why she did that.

Edit: thank you, kind stranger, for the gold. I’m very happy this poor girls misfortune could get me a Reddit award. Stay strong, she-who-shall-not-be-named.
…
Kids did that with erasers on the back of their hands at my middle school! They’d rub until they had an open wound and they’d just keep it up so that it never healed. School couldn’t ban erasers, but kids with open wounds on the back of their hands got in trouble. And this wasn’t the emo crowd doing this, the most popular kids in school started the trend. I thought it was stupid in middle school, and now as an adult I’m honestly concerned about the girls who started the trend…
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I had a girlfriend in high school do took an eraser and rubbed my initials into her arm when we broke up. I think that only reinforced the fact that I made a good decision to break things off.

First Memorial Day, Charleston, South Carolina

African-Americans invented Memorial Day, in Charleston, South Carolina. There are three or four cities in the United States, North and South, that claim to be the site of the first Memorial Day, but they all claim 1866; they were too late. I had the great, blind, good fortune to discover this story in a messy, totally disorganized collection of veterans’ papers at the Houghton Library at Harvard some years back. And what you have there is black Americans, recently freed from slavery, announcing to the world, with their flowers and their feet and their songs, what the war had been about. What they basically were creating was the Independence Day of a second American Revolution. That story got lost, it got lost for more than a century. And when I discovered it, I started calling people in Charleston that I knew in archives and libraries, including the Avery Institute, the black research center in Charleston — “Has anybody, have you ever heard of this story?” And no one had ever heard it. It showed the power of the Lost Cause in the wake of the war to erase a story. But I started looking for other sources, and lo and behold there were lots of sources. Harper’s Weekly even had a drawing of the cemetery in an 1867 issue. The old oval of that racetrack is still there today. If you ever go to Charleston go up to Hampton Park. Hampton Park is today what the racecourse was then. It’s named for Wade Hampton, the white supremacist, redeemer, and governor of South Carolina at the end of Reconstruction and a Confederate General during the Civil War. And that park sits immediately adjacent to the Citadel, the Military Academy of Charleston. On any given day you can see at any given time about 100 or 200 Citadel cadets jogging on the track of the old racecourse. There is no marker, there’s no memento, there’s only a little bit of a memory. Although a few years ago a friend of mine in Charleston organized a mock ceremony where we re-enacted that event, including the children’s choir, and they made me dress up in a top hat and a funny old nineteenth century suit and made me get up on a podium and make a stupid speech. But there is an effort, at least today, to declare Hampton Park a National Historic Landmark. See you Thursday.

The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877
HIST 119 – Lecture 19 – To Appomattox and Beyond: The End of the War and a Search for Meanings
David Blight
https://oyc.yale.edu/history/hist-119/lecture-19

Minglewood Blues, Cannon’s Jug Stompers

Minglewood Blues by Noah Lewis

Don’t you never let one woman rule your mind
Don’t you never let one woman rule your mind
Said she keep you worried, troubled all the time

Don’t you think your fairer was li’l and cute like mine
Don’t you wish your fairer was li’l and cute like mine
She’s a mar- She’s a married woman,
But she comes to see me all the time

Don’t you never let one woman rule your mind
Don’t you never let one woman rule your mind
Said she keep you worried, troubled all the time

Well I got a letter mama and you ought to hear it read
Well I got a letter Lord and you ought to hear it read
If you comin’ back baby now be on your way”

via reddit

Sneak Previews Season 3, Episode 9

Movies reviewed:
The Idolmaker
The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith
Every Man for Himself
Fade to Black

via imdb

-ism

-ism is a suffix in many English words, originally derived from the Ancient Greek suffix -ισμός(-ismós), and reaching English through the Latin -ismus, and the French -isme. It means “taking side with” or “imitation of”, and is often used to describe philosophies, theories, religions, social movements, artistic movements and behaviors. The suffix “-ism” is neutral and therefore bears no connotations associated with any of the many ideologies it identifies; such determinations can only be informed by public opinion regarding specific ideologies.

The concept of an -ism may resemble that of a grand narrative.

via wikipedia

First ones I thought of:
capitalism
marxism
alcoholism
fundamentalism
extremism
miserablism
terrorism
antagonism
denialism
escapism

Kitchen sink realism

Kitchen sink realism (or kitchen sink drama) is a British cultural movement that developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s in theatre, art, novels, film, and television plays, whose protagonists usually could be described as “angry young men” who were disillusioned with modern society. It used a style of social realism, which depicted the domestic situations of working class Britons, living in cramped rented accommodation and spending their off-hours drinking in grimy pubs, to explore controversial social and political issues ranging from abortion to homelessness. The harsh, realistic style contrasted sharply with the escapism of the previous generation’s so-called “well-made plays”.

List of films
Look Back in Anger (1959)
Room at the Top (1959)
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960)
The Entertainer (1960)
A Taste of Honey (1961)
A Kind of Loving (1962)
The L-Shaped Room (1962)
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962)
This Sporting Life (1963)
Billy Liar (1963)
Sparrows Can’t Sing (1963)[11]
The Leather Boys (1964)
This is My Street (1964)
Alfie (1966)
Georgy Girl (1966)[12]
The Family Way (1966)
Poor Cow (1967)
Up the Junction (1968)
Kes (1969)
Bronco Bullfrog (1969)[13]
Spring and Port Wine (1970)

List of plays
Look Back In Anger (1956)
My Flesh, My Blood (Radio play, 1957)
A Taste Of Honey (1958)
Sparrers Can’t Sing (1960)
Alfie (1963)
Up the Junction (TV play, 1965)
Cathy Come Home (TV play, 1966)

via wikipedia

Pablum

Pablum is a processed cereal for infants originally marketed by the Mead Johnson Company in 1931. The trademarked name is a contracted form of the Latin word pabulum, which means “foodstuff”. The name “pablum” had long been used in botany and medicine to refer to nutrition or substances of which the nutritive elements are passively absorbed.

In a broader sense, the word can also refer to something that is bland, mushy, unappetizing, or infantile.

wikipedia