tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-193463662024-03-18T22:50:01.085-04:00Face to Faceagnostichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12967177967469961883noreply@blogger.comBlogger2587125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19346366.post-26149014505691150042024-02-27T18:38:00.005-05:002024-02-27T19:39:26.197-05:00Aaron Bushnell: assessment, and online reactions (TikTok Zoomer carelords vs. Twitter Millennial ironycels)<p>First an assessment of the US Air Forceman who self-immolated in front of the Israeli embassy in DC, to protest his being called to duty to support Israel's war against the Palestinians in Gaza. But mainly, a look at the polar opposite worlds of Twitter vs. TikTok, in light of their reactions to the seismic event.<br /><br />The main questions being spun by the take-havers are what should we categorize this event as (mere suicide, expression of mental illness, martyrdom, sacrifice, etc.), and what effect will it have?<br /><br />We can rule out mere suicide since nobody who simply wants to end their life lights themselves on fire in a public space and announces it and performs it as a political spectacle. Most mere suicides occur so inconspicuously that they may not be detected by acquaintances of the deceased for days or weeks, and are known only to the general public through amassing them all into national-level statistics, unaware of any single individual who committed suicide and/or their motives.<br /><br />Nitpicking the reasons why mere suicides never choose self-immolation is irrelevant -- it is simply an objective truth that 0% of mere suicides use this method, which means we do no lump it into that category when engaging the pattern recognition lobes of our brains (which is only a branding exercise for most take-havers, they are highly ideological and retarded).<br /><br />Why do some insist it's mere suicide, a call for mental health help, etc.? Probably projection from their own depressive mindset, their impotence in political activism, etc. Surely if I'm a depressive failure, everyone else is too. Sure thing, buddy.<br /><br />But analyzing take-havers' motivations is not interesting. The main point is that they're objectively wrong when downplaying the severity and gravity of the event.<br /><br />Both libtards and conservatards downplay it. Sometimes for the same reasons -- projecting their own depressive symptoms onto others. Sometimes for opposing partisan reasons -- libtards wanting to prevent a further fracturing of the Democrat coalition, since they are deeply divided over Israel vs. Palestine, and conservatards wanting to prevent a loss of faith in their own efficacy, after getting upstaged by a leftist against US intervention in the Mideast, something that their media hero Tucker Carlson is usually a champion of, in favor of focusing on America's domestic crises instead.<br /><br />So, it's just like Bushnell described it himself -- an extreme form of protest, destined to become a spectacle.<br /><br />That raises the next question -- what will come of it? It has already become a spectacle, there's no putting that genie back in the bottle. People may not talk about it every day for the next 100 years, but the effect will last in their minds.<br /><br />Just like it only took one spectacle on election night 2020 -- the Great Ballot Count Stoppage -- to irreparably damage the legitimacy and authority of the national government, whether or not the masses keep grumbling about it every day for the next 100 years. The effect remained in their minds, and therefore in their behavior -- when ordered and threatened to take an experimental drug over a potential bad flu, those who were inclined not to do so, refused. They defied federal orders because they are illegitimate after having occupied the office only after the Great Ballot Count Stoppage. Why obey those who stole their way into the White House?<br /><br />Why do take-havers mistakenly believe it'll all blow over, just cuz it'll no longer be the top trending hashtag on Twitter within a few weeks or months? Again, not interesting, but for the sake of completeness -- because they're projecting their own obsessive fixation on ThE DiScOUrSe onto everyone else. Since their own attention is in constant flux according to what's trending in the media, so must everyone else's be.<br /><br />But 99% of the country doesn't fixate on discourse, and is not mentally unwell enough to be take junkies, and will not flush out last week's events just cuz this week has new events. The typical normie Republican voter still remembers the Great Ballot Count Stoppage, and treats the federal government as illegitimate to this day -- regardless of a zillion other events having flushed it out of the media over the years, including right-wing media.<br /><br />Parents will never forget the insane torture that was foisted on their children through the school system during the Covid hysteria. Their eagerness to move on and get back to normal does not mean that they've memory-holed those events, just cuz their Facebook feed no longer has message after message about the topic. The next time they are asked to comply with systematic insanity against their children, they are going to say HELL NO, and the power-tripping administrators and teachers union have had to back off.<br /><br />How many people forgot about 9/11 after a few weeks or months? It took at least 5 years to no longer be in the foreground of daily conversation, and it's still remembered and influencing our behavior to this day, over 20 years later. People react to actual events in the real world -- not to the topics du jour of the media. If the real-world importance was big, they will file that away as worth remembering, while irrelevant events will get flushed out of their memory. Only obsessive discourse junkies fixate on the topics du jour, and forget the milestones of last month, year, and decade.<br /><br />The impact will not be the same everywhere, of course. It will cause shockwaves inside of the American military, the Democrat party, and the actively pro-Palestinian / anti-Israeli governments and militaries of the Middle East -- Yemen under the Houthis, Iran, and Hezbollah and allied Shia of Southern Lebanon, not to mention within Palestine itself (but then they have a self-interest in fighting against Israel, whereas the others need a higher purpose and inspiration to join the fight against Israel).<br /><br />Given how unstable Egypt has become, a spectacle like this could set off a positive feedback loop there as well, whether it spawns a wave of self-immolation protests, or rouses the Egyptian people to topple their bought-off government (since the Camp David Accords of the late 1970s), or inspires a coup within the military that results in active warfare against Israel (breaking the Camp David Accords).<br /><br />The ability of Israel to lash out at the Palestinians with no consequences, was predicated on converting the Arab-Israeli wars into a domestic Israel-Palestine conflict. Before the Camp David Accords, Israel was at war with the broad Middle East (which would've also included Iran if they'd had an Islamic government, rather than the US-allied Shah). Israel got bitchslapped out of Egypt's territory by an American Republican president in the good ol' 1950s (Suez Crisis), then won a resounding victory in the '67 war, but was quickly quagmired to a stalemate during the '73 war.<br /><br />Only with the US buying off Egypt and Israel together -- the major militaries involved -- could there have been a slow winding-down of the Arab-Israeli configuration of the wars, shrinking it into a narrow domestic conflict between Israel and Palestine.<br /><br />When Egypt's elite can no longer refrain from intervening on behalf of Palestine, and therefore against Israel, that whole reprieve from regional war is over. Egypt has never been more unstable in that matter, so it's only a question of how soon, not whether it will happen at all. And these public spectacles of martyrdom are just the sort of thing that could accelerate the timeline within Egypt.<br /><br />And it will not merely go back to the Arab-Israeli configuration of the mid-20th century -- this time a more powerful Iran will join the anti-Israeli side, and it's not out of the question that the other regional power-player, Turkey, could side against Israel (probably not heavily, though). Not to mention global powers like Russia (militarily) and China (economically), likely the Saudis and perhaps Pakistan if Israel keeps pissing everyone else off. The Saudi-Iranian alliance is already a massive change since the last time, and weighs against Israel's survival as a Zionist state.<br /><br />Thus, the downplayers are also projecting their own irrelevance in this conflict. They are not members of the military, so they think no one else is in the military either -- and won't take this much more seriously than civilian bystanders will. Those who are not Democrats, assume no one else is a Democrat either -- and so, no Democrats would listen to Bushnell, since Democrats don't listen to Republicans (projecting being a Republican onto everyone else).<br /><br />Some are not Americans, projecting that onto actual Americans, who will of course take this more seriously than those in countries that are not party to the Israel-Palestine conflict. And most of the downplayers are not from Yemen, Palestine, Egypt, Southern Lebanon, or Iran -- and project their own "big whoop" attitude onto the masses and elites, civilians and soldiers, of those places that are heavily involved in the conflict, assuming no positive feedback loop will get activated over there because of an act in America.<br /><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">* * *<br /></p><p><br />It's ironic, cuz during the Trump years including the BLM / Antifa riots of 2020, the right-wing take-havers explained that right-wing protests would not change anything, that protests only work for leftists, because leftists are in power, and protests are really an internal form of bargaining within the liberal / leftist / Establishment system, akin to a bratty child throwing a tantrum at their parents.<br /><br />In other words, there could be a million Trump voters marauding through the streets, and they would get shut down instantly and overwhelmingly, for being anti-Establishment, whereas BLM and Antifa are approved and sponsored by the Establishment, so their marauding would be forgiven and maybe even their demands met. Hell, the January 6th protesters got far worse treatment, and they didn't even burn down bookstores, police offices, or murder bystanders like BLM / Antifa did.<br /><br />So then, by their own admission, Bushnell's act will succeed -- he's a leftist, not a right-winger, he's in the military and thus able to petition the military, and he's an American petitioning the American government. In none of these domains was he "politically homeless" and doomed to impotence at best and cruel persecution at worst.<br /><br />Unlike BLM and Antifa, though, his refusal to take anyone else out with him will make him more sympathetic to neutral / independent types, as well as right-wingers themselves.<br /><br />Although it's a minor tendency, some woketards of the BLM / Antifa persuasion did try to lessen his status by saying he was an evil white military man, so don't praise him or copycat him or anything like that.<br /><br />But it's not 2014-2020 anymore, so the peak of politicized violence is over (zero protests or riots after Roe v. Wade got repealed). Most on the left did not amplify woketard voices in this instance.<br /><br />If anything, this event will catalyze a shift away from BLM / Antifa organizing and violence -- none of which required sacrifice from the participants, they got away with everything and were never in any danger. They were not suicide bombers, nor self-immolaters -- they were just paramilitaries of the Democrat party running riot throughout the turf they controlled. They destroyed other people's stuff, not their own. They took others' lives, not having to risk their own in the process.<br /><br />There's nothing inspirational about that kind of protest, except to those consumed by seething bitter revenge fantasies. But politicized anger has run its course and is getting exhausted, not replenished, after 2020. So, few to recruit to a would-be re-run of the 2014-2020 riots, driven by vindictiveness rather than martyrdom.<br /><br />The starkest sign that Bushnell's act does not belong to the same category as BLM / Antifa actions is that no one in power is parroting him, lionizing him, etc. Unlike the top-level politicians and CEOs wearing black arm-bands, taking a knee / raising a fist, plastering the relevant slogans and logos on their social media, and so on and so forth. One is confronting the powerful, the other is in cahoots with the powerful. Anyone eliding this crucial distinction is just a propagandist for the Establishment, regardless of their branding.<br /><br />There's also been a huge, rapid change in the generations within the relevant age group -- 25 year-olds today, like Bushnell, are Zoomers, not Millennials. For the record, 99% of woketards, BLM rioters, and Antifa paramilitaries were Millennials, with a small Gen X vanguard in leadership, and no Zoomers (who were too busy doing high school homework during 2014-2020, to go burn down a police station or summarily execute a MAGA hat-wearer, or even launch fake rape accusations during the #MeToo hysteria).<br /><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">* * *<br /></p><p><br />That leads into what I thought would be a major topic of this post, but looks like will be more of a reflection in an epilogue after all. And that's the unbridgeable chasm between the two main social media sites -- Twitter and TikTok (Reddit being parasitic off of Twitter, not the other way around, and like its Twitter host, being reflexively hostile to TikTok per se, as existential nemeses).<br /><br />All of the depressive, projecting, ironypoisoned, coping downplaying comes from Twitter. I was really shocked after checking TikTok, but there is nothing like that there, from either political faction. It's more sincere, serious, resisting the ironic detachment from the Twitter-verse -- confessional, emotional, staring directly into the camera, and connecting honestly with the viewer one-on-one, heart to heart.<br /><br />There was a big crowd within Tumblr that was like that, and they have migrated to TikTok, or they were too young to be on Tumblr but the would-be carelord Tumblr youths of today choose TikTok to begin with, since Tumblr's dead. The insane woketard SJW types migrated to Twitter (and somewhat to Reddit).<br /><br />I realize that the Twittertards project Twitter-dom onto TikTok, and assume that everyone there is an insane ranting SJW with blue hair, which has opened up a lucrative (cash or clicks) market for rage-baiting Twitter accounts like Libs of TikTok, who provide the Twitter users what they want to see from TikTok -- i.e., the minority of unhinged SJWs who are speaking their crazy Twitter-esque threads out loud rather than writing them in text format.<br /><br />But just scroll through the videos within the #AaronBushnell hashtag on TikTok, and hardly anyone looks counter / sub-cultural, none are ranting at the top of their lungs, they aren't demonizing white people, saying Bushnell should not be honored cuz he was white / male / in the military, or whatever Satanic imagery the Twittertards want to be shown via Libs of TikTok. No irony poisoning in their messaging (from any side), no glib dismissive tone of voice, no smugness, no Daily Show snark and caricatured facial expressions of superiority, no cynicism -- it's just the polar opposite world from Twitter.<br /><br />Mainly this is generational -- TikTok is largely Zoomers, while Twitter has always been and still is mostly Millennials (and some Gen X-ers). Bushnell himself was a Zoomer, as is the right-wing public risk-taker Kyle Rittenhouse. Millennials are too selfish and entitled to sacrifice, they've always been that way, and they'll never change. Exploring why is not relevant now, the point is descriptively, that's how they are.<br /><br />Libtards trying to downplay Kyle Rittenhouse's defense of public spaces during the 2020 riots was also largely projection of their own cowardliness and selfishness, based on generational differences. Who's this high-school pipsqueak trying to defend a public space at grave risk to himself? You're just supposed to burn it down when the elites grant you immunity, like a good little Millennial brown-noser and seething revenge-fantasy-masturbator.<br /><br />Branding Zoomers as nihilistic doomers is, once again, just projection by cynical Millennials who have been defeated by the world and given up.<br /><br />Zoomers certainly do not hold a rosy view of their future, but that does not lead them to passivity, cynicism, and irony-coated depression. If anything, they are pissed at the certain shitstorm that the future holds for them, and they're inclined to take bigger risks to make life livable -- they have nothing to lose, unlike Millennials who grew up in relative harmony and material paradise and upward mobility (until they had to leave home).<br /><br />Call it idealism, zealotry, whatever -- they are far less inclined than Millennials to just take the shit sandwich the world is handing them, and obediently gulp it down. Millennials had much to lose, and Zoomers little -- how much worse could life actually get by slapping the sandwich out of society's hand and taking a big risk to get something good to eat?<br /><br />Millennials learned not to bite the hand that feeds, since that hand fed them plenty. Zoomers grew up being fed by a stingy hand, and now owe no obedience.<br /><br />And no, that's not their literal parents' hand feeding them -- Zoomers' parents fed and clothed them all right. But society writ large did not. Claiming that Zoomer risk-takers are just "mad at dad" is, once again, pure projection from Millennials who were overly indulged by their wealthiest generation in world history Boomer parents, imagining that the only reason a young person would lash out at the system is cuz mom & dad didn't give them enough money to hang out at the mall on the weekend.<br /><br /></p>agnostichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12967177967469961883noreply@blogger.com85tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19346366.post-80849005695913616622024-01-23T17:30:00.000-05:002024-01-23T17:30:01.005-05:00Wide-ranging thread on shoot 'em up video games, vidya in general, and Japanese vs. American aesthetics<p>Might as well put a new post marker here, since the comments section for the last is getting a bit long. I'll be adding post-length-comments to this post, to make an ongoing thread.<br /><br />The basic topic is shoot 'em up video games, inspired by watching Fuwamoco play a 2000s Touhou "bullet hell" game the other night. It is rare for non-Japanese people to play video games, rather than simulators, so I take notice and appreciate it every time it happens! But then, they're turbo-weebs, and you can't integrate yourself into Japanese culture without playing video games (created by the Japanese, with an illustrated, not photorealistic, style).<br /><br />Below is the first "post in the comments" that kicked it off, which I'm putting here to get the ball rolling. More to follow in this post's comment section...<br /><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">* * *<br /></p><p><br />Frogger was the original "bullet hell" game -- not even appropriate to call the genre a "shooter" or "shoot 'em up" etc.<br /><br />*You* are the one getting shot at, like crazy, and you don't shoot back -- you can only navigate your way through the moving geometric minefield of bullets, much like the frog navigates his way through the geometric formations of moving hazards, i.e. the vehicles that make up the several lanes of traffic moving in opposite directions, the alligator teeth in the river section, etc.<br /><br />In "bullet hell" games, you shooting the enemies is only 5% of the gameplay, and it's like shooting fish in a barrel, after the difficult other 95% of gameplay has been performed -- i.e., dodging the bullet waves.<br /><br />Frogger is only missing that 5%, but it would be trivial to program it in -- right before you land on the safe space at the end, you have to lash out your tongue to hit a dragonfly that's sitting in the way of the lilypad you're trying to land on.<br /><br />Surprisingly, no one has drawn this clear parallel before. However, the wiki on Frogger says that it was created explicitly to tap into the female demographic, as opposed to the highly popular shooter genre which girls were not very into (e.g., Space Invaders, Galaga, etc.). And they succeeded.<br /><br />This may explain why "bullet hell" games are at least semi-common among female streamers -- Fuwamoco just played Touhou: Mountain of Faith, and Marine is a huge Touhou player and fan. They're more about fine-scale motion, not large-scale swerving and zigging / zagging, slow speed, not racing all around the screen, defensive rather than offensive, hide-and-seek rather than being aggressive and chasing down the enemies.<br /><br />They still take a lot of spatial skill, so they're not very common among female players -- but if she does have spatial skill, this defensive and cautious style of playing is better suited to her personality, as opposed to an offensive and risky style that characterizes "shoot 'em ups" proper, which are for guys with spatial skill.<br /><br />Then there are the bona fide "gamer girls" (not just empty branding) like Korone, who take on Salamander (Life Force in America), which is not only a shoot 'em up, but one of the hardest ones ever made! Much respect. ^_^<br /><br />And yet even "bullet hell" games have lots of male fans -- it's part of the broader trend in video games towards taking away your offensive abilities, and making you passively hide-and-seek from an all-powerful enemy. Same time-frame as the survival horror genre, which largely robbed you of weapons and ammo (mid-'90s through IDK), and then took them away altogether (from IDK through the 2010s and '20s).<br /><br />A Euro-LARP-ing pseud would use a fake & gay term like "slave morality," i.e. glamorizing the behavior of slaves. Gamer nerds call it "masocore", a more straightforward term. They're not slaves, they're just downers or masochists or hide-and-seekers, rather than aggressive, offensive, and active. It's a reflection of the broader end of our imperial expansion (and ditto for Japan's failed imperial ambitions), and with it, the end of the heroic age of our culture (and those in our orbit, like Japan).<br /><br /></p>agnostichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12967177967469961883noreply@blogger.com209tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19346366.post-15634791594047320472023-12-12T05:33:00.006-05:002023-12-12T06:21:13.498-05:00Venetian ethnogenesis and its role as the creative hotbed of the Italian peninsula after the fall of the Roman Empire<p>I've been trying to write up various posts on describing and tracing the history of striking visuals in cinematic history, having been motivated by watching the 1970s TV show The Incredible Hulk -- from what I've seen, easily the best photographed TV show ever made.<br /><br />It's not as great as the movies from the same time period, since they had long production schedules and could deliberate more over composition (how things are arranged within the frame), unlike a weekly TV show. And perhaps the more talented people went to work in movies instead of TV. But I've been blown away by how vibrant the colors are, and how much contrast in brightness is shown within a single scene (i.e., dark shadows along with bright highlights).<br /><br />But the iconic look of movies and TV from the second half of the '70s and into the early '80s is for another post. And so is the history of high-contrast visuals within movie history (not so surprising spoiler -- back to D.W. Griffith, in his shorts from the late 1900s, before his features and way before German Expressionism).<br /><br />Then I thought how far back such a style goes in visual media that are not photography or movies. Naturally I looked into European painting -- Caravaggio, chiaroscuro lighting, that whole phenomenon. But that wasn't what I was seeing in the Hulk TV show -- Caravaggio et al. are using contrasting bright-dark tones for the purposes of rendering 3D volumes within a 2D medium like a painting.<br /><br />When you see someone's face being half lit up and half in shadow, with the dividing line down the middle, it tells you their face is not flat but protrudes along that line -- that protrusion of features is like a mountain chain that is blocking the light, coming from the direction of the lit-up half, from reaching the other half, leaving it dark. Or using shading to show muscles in full 3D sculptural pseudo-reality.<br /><br />I'll call this the "sculptural" use of chiaroscuro.<br /><br />Certainly the classic TV shows and movies of the 1970s employ this form of chiaroscuro -- which can be used to render the 3D volume not only of individual people, but animals, buildings, particular elements of a building (like a column), and other objects that could be placed within the frame.<br /><br />What makes the Hulk look so striking is not just this form of chiaroscuro, but its use at the total composition level -- breaking up the frame into regions of darker light, and brighter light, often several such regions alternating with each other as a function of distance "into" the frame, or from left-to-right across the frame. That is, not just a simple breaking-up of "left half dark, right half bright" -- even though that, too, is a welcome degree of contrast from a uniformly lit scene that leaves the aesthetic lobe of our brain unstimulated.<br /><br />I'll call this the "compositional" use of chiaroscuro. Typically, works that use it also use sculptural chiaroscuro for the smaller-scale figures, buildings, etc. within the overall scene. It's taking that for granted, and applying it at a higher scale, and for purely aesthetic purposes, not necessarily for realism (if only our everyday environments always had such striking contrasts in them...).<br /><br />It is most evident in exterior scenes that involve some kind of landscape -- across such a distance, some regions may be naturally brighter because there's nothing blocking the sunlight from directly striking them, while other regions may be darker due to a building, a large tree or group of trees, a patch of clouds, or some artificial obstruction put there by the movie-makers in order to give some variety to the brightness levels around the landscape.<br /><br />In still photography, this compositional chiaroscuro is the defining feature of the work of the American pioneer Ansel Adams, and sure enough, that is mostly of landscapes. He used crafty technical tricks after already taking the negative, like "dodging" and "burning" to brighten or darken the targeted regions within the final print, increasing the contrast from what he'd originally shot. Artificial or not, it makes a more striking result, and that's all that matters. As a great artist, he didn't want his audience to suffer from an unstimulated brain.<br /><br />I doubt any such tricks were applied in post-production for a weekly TV show like the Hulk, and even in feature films, I think it's more used for limited optical effects, not the entire look-and-feel of the movie.<br /><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">* * *<br /></p><p><br />Well, Caravaggio and others under his influence were not using chiaroscuro compositionally -- at most, it may have been applied to a small intimate space like a room where a half-dozen people are gathered together. And more likely, to a single individual in a portrait, for sculptural purposes.<br /><br />He was working in Rome circa 1600, and even back when that city was the center of a thriving imperial culture, they did not use chiaroscuro compositionally. Roman frescos use shading to carve a 3D form out of a 2D painting on a wall, but not to create dramatic tension and variety across an entire scene or landscape.<br /><br />Nor, for that matter, did the more well-funded painting style of Florence. I was really shocked to see how little the big names of the "Italian" Renaissance -- Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael -- used striking brightness changes across a composition. They're way too evenly lit, on the scenic scale, to make an impression on that lobe of our brain.<br /><br />Their lesser known contemporaries in that region were scarcely any better, although some might have used it once in awhile to experiment, or because that specific patron wanted that kind of look, I don't know.<br /><br />But to give credit where it's due among the Florentines, Ghirlandaio used chiaroscuro compositionally in his <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cappella_Sassetti_Adoration_of_the_Shepherds.jpg">Adoration of the Shepherds</a> (1485), where there are alternating levels of brightness "into" the frame (basically, bright-dark-bright-dark-bright). And across the frame, the right two-thirds is relatively darker, and the left third is brighter -- but this simple scheme has several sub-regions that stand out from that, to make it a more complex rhythm, with the top-left being dark, and the bottom-center being bright, and the distant bright landscape on the right side that is shown through a dark opening.<br /><br />Partial credit for his <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Old_Man_and_his_Grandson">Old Man and His Grandson</a> (1490), where a small landscape in what is otherwise a large portrait has varying brightness levels into the distance. Most of this painting uses shading sculpturally (facial features and clothing folds), and even then it's pretty evenly lit, not like Caravaggio.<br /><br />Raphael's very late <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Transfiguration_Raphael.jpg">Transfiguration</a> (1520) is about as close as the Florentines got to the Venetian level of lighting and coloring. It does have alternating levels of brightness, but they're all explained within the frame -- the light emanating from Jesus, brightening those who have nothing in their way with him, and the earthen mound blocking this light and casting some people in shadow. Not much varying brightness "into" the distance of the landscape either.<br /><br />Pre-Renaissance Florentines like Cimabue and Giotto also did not use chiaroscuro compositionally.<br /><br />Although I may be missing the odd work or two by other Florentines, it's clear that compositional chiaroscuro was not a recurring technique for any single artist or school or period in Florence and Central Italy generally. Not the way it was for Ansel Adams.<br /><br />As far as scenic-level variety in brightness, it's as if the Renaissance in Central Italy was still stuck in the Dark Ages -- or the Roman era, for that matter! Nobody had adopted it as a signature style at any point along the way.<br /><br />Rather, the main compositional innovation of the Florentines was linear perspective, i.e. how to arrange things within the frame in order to simulate 3D spatial reality. Everyone already knew, and applied the knowledge, that the further away something is, the smaller it appears to our eye, and close-up things appear larger. But working out the precise mathematics of these relationships, to the point of laying out a grid or fabric of space onto the canvas, only took off during the Florentine Renaissance. <br /><br />This goes along with their use of chiaroscuro primarily for sculptural purposes -- they really wanted the closest possible simulation of 3D reality within a 2D medium.<br /><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">* * *<br /></p><p><br />This brings us to their main rival during the Renaissance period -- Venice. Not only were they political-military rivals, they practiced opposing cultural movements. What was more important? -- autistically accurate simulation of 3D spatial reality, or the striking use of color and lighting to activate the neurons of the viewer?<br /><br />This was the war between Florentine "disegno" (drawing) and Venetian "colorito" (coloring, but in the full sense of combining hue, saturation, and brightness). <a href="https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/vefl/hd_vefl.htm">Here</a> is a brief overview, which in an uncanny coincidence, I linked to in an <a href="https://akinokure.blogspot.com/2013/12/tights-as-pants-not-revealing-when.html">old post</a> nearly 10 years ago to this day, about how girls should choose multicolored patterns for their "tights as pants," if they didn't want the 3D volume of their lower half to be fully rendered by a monochrome pair.<br /><br />And yet, still relevant -- although girls now wear baggy jeans or sweatpants that don't expose anything, their tops have gone skin-tight and micro-mini, like yoga pants for the torso. If she wants to not fully render the volume of her boobs and nipples, while still taking part in the crop-top and bra-less trends, she can choose one with multicolored patterns that will obscure the precise sculptural details of her figure. So far I've only seen girls with monochrome, usually white, crop-tops or "bras as tops" (similar to "tights as pants"). But if you want that funky-yet-wholesome vibe, go for a multicolored pattern!<br /><br />Anyway, back to Renaissance "Italy" -- there was no national unification back then, not since the collapse of the Roman Empire. There was a patchwork of rival city-states, some under foreign imperial occupation, but one of them was actually on an expansionist path -- not reaching the level of an empire, though an expanding Great Power nevertheless, akin to Sweden in the 17th C., or Japan in the 19th and early 20th C. That would be the Republic of Venice.<br /><br />Venetian ethnogenesis begins on the not-quite-so-meta-ethnic frontier between the native Italic peoples of the late Roman Empire, and the invading / migrating hordes of Germanic people during the middle of the 1st millennium. Although the Germanic people gained a foothold over almost all of Northern Italy, under the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_the_Lombards">Kingdom of the Lombards</a>, some Italic people fled to / remained in the inhospitable lagoon communities in Venice. The Lombards were coming from the west, and Venice is nestled right against the eastern coast of the peninsula, so that was the furthest frontier left between the Germanic invaders and the Italic natives.<br /><br />The difference was pronounced enough -- barbarian migrants vs. more civilized and settled natives, Germanic vs. Italic languages, although the Lombards were Christianized and even Catholicized by the time they took over Northern Italy. So, not quite as intense as if there'd been a major religious difference.<br /><br />At the same time, Venice had already been occupied by the Byzantine Empire, which used to control much of the Italian peninsula during the mid-1st millennium. They too were foreigners, speaking a different branch of Indo-European (Greek), and yet they were more sedentary and civilized and Mediterranean and in a sense the originators of Christianity as an institution or organized religion. So they were not so foreign to the Venetians, and the latter gladly accepted being a final outpost of the Byzantine sphere of influence, rather than get absorbed into the barbarian Germanic sphere.<br /><br />This also made them opposed to the Papal States, the rump state left after the Roman Empire collapsed. They were very similar ethnically to the Venetians, but they always pushed for Roman and Papal supremacy, in a sad LARP of their imperial heyday. So, Byzantine sponsorship didn't look too bad for Venice, compared to the alternatives.<br /><br />Gradually, the feeling of being encircled by the Germanic barbarian kingdoms made the Venetians cohere to such an extent, in common defense against their ethnic nemesis, that they could do some militaristic expanding of their own.<br /><br />Although not referring to Venetian military expansion, the Florentine Renaissance humanist Petrarch did note how cohesive, communitarian, and solidarity-driven the Venetians were: Venice was "solidly built on marble but standing more solid on a foundation of civil concord." Not the feuding, sniping social climate that would produce literal Machiavellians, like Florence. The guild system, akin to mid-20th-century labor unions, has always been strong in Venice, back to the High Middle Ages. Nothing like getting encircled by invading barbarians, and pinned against the sea-wall, to grow a little solidarity within the community!<br /><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">* * *<br /></p><p><br />First Venice became more independent from their Byzantine sponsors, as that empire got long in the tooth by the turn of the 2nd millennium. But then the Venetians organized large galleys into a navy that went on to control maritime territory from the nearby Dalmatian coast (across the Adriatic Sea), as far east as Cyprus. And not long after that, they turned toward the Italian mainland and reconquered Northeastern Italy and even parts of Lombardy itself.<br /><br />In their eastward expansion, they wound up fighting in the First Crusade in the Levant, where their elite must have gotten a further dose of higher asabiya from an even more intense meta-ethnic frontier -- the Seljuk Turks were Muslim, Turkic rather than Indo-European, were a mighty empire rather than a patchwork of fiefdoms like the Lombards, and were fighting to the death rather than leaving the Venetians alone in their little corner of land. At the same time, the Seljuks never came close to invading Venice, so this did not heighten their sense of needing to band together for collective self-defense like the Germanic invasion of Italy did.<br /><br />The main period of Venetian expansion, beyond the nearby Dalmatian coast -- that is, from 1200 to 1500 -- seems to coincide with a lull in the growth of empires in the region, or their decline and collapse. Although the Byzantines had been past their peak for centuries by then, the Fourth Crusade circa 1200 more or less finished them off, before the nascent Ottoman Empire dealt Constantinople the coup de grace a few centuries later. And Venice took a leading part in the sacking of Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade, carrying off immense wealth from their former sponsors.<br /><br />With the Byzantines effectively wiped out as a Mediterranean power, the Arab invasions also long gone, the Vikings long gone, the Frankish Empire long gone, who else was there to check the expansion of Venice? France was a growing empire, but was oriented more toward unifying France, then the Hundred Years War with England, and maybe getting a piece of Northwest Italy. But they weren't in Venice. The Spaniards, ditto. In 1200, the German Empire wouldn't even begin for another 300 years, nor was the Holy Roman Empire a bona fide empire yet, as it would become under the Austrian imperial era. The various Turkic and Mongol empires were stopped in Eastern Europe, before crossing the Alps down into Venice.<br /><br />And for much of this time, the Ottomans were only beginning to conquer Anatolia and Thrace, and some of that they were mired in their integrative civil war (Ottoman Interregnum). They did eventually unify and dominate the Eastern Mediterranean by the 1500s, and almost immediately the Venetian Republic went into stagnation, then decline, ultimately becoming absorbed into the Austrian Empire's sphere of influence circa 1800.<br /><br />This highlights what I've said earlier about Sweden in the 17th C, Japan around the turn of the 20th C, and Alexander the Great -- these bouts of insane expansion are mainly due to the sorry state of their neighbors at the time, who are mired in civil war, imperial collapse, etc.<br /><br />For Sweden, their neighbors were bogged down in the Thirty Years War, and the Reformation and wars of religion before that. After that was over, and once they met an enemy no longer mired in civil war -- Russia during the Great Northern War -- Sweden went away as a Great Power.<br /><br />For Japan, the Joseon Dynasty was collapsing in Korea, and the Qing Dynasty / Empire in China was also collapsing, not to mention the moribund Euro empires that had colonial holdings in East Asia. Once they ran into an expanding empire not mired in civil war -- America during the Midcentury -- it was over for their expansion.<br /><br />For Alexander, it was the collapse of the Persian Achaemenid Empire, and his "empire" did not last beyond his own death.<br /><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">* * *<br /></p><p><br />What did the Venetians do with their rising levels of cohesion, to match their geographic expansion, and sense that they were a special people? Why, cultural innovation! How else are they going to let themselves and others know that they're a new people, not just descendants of the Roman Empire, and not like other Italic peoples, e.g. those residing in Central or Northwest Italy (let alone the South).<br /><br />In music, they pioneered the Venetian polychoral style, where groups of musicians and singers were physically separated into different wings, and accordingly developed more of a "working-against" and alternating style, when multiple voices are present. This paved the way for the Baroque era, through the pioneering German composer Heinrich Schutz, who worked in Venice.<br /><br />In the dramatic arts, they invented the commedia dell'arte, where masked and sometimes dancing performers play stock character roles in performances that are partly scripted but also improvised.<br /><br />In architecture, they did not innovate very much, but kept going with their Venetian take on the Gothic trend (originally from France during the Capetian expansion). Notably, they did *not* take up the Ancient Roman or Greco LARP that their Florentine and Roman contemporaries did. Oddly enough, Palladio was a Venetian, but found very little success in his home city or region -- only abroad, especially in the British Empire and its later American off-shoot, both of whom were big-time into Roman LARP-ing as a way to legitimate their nascent empires (i.e., they were not upstarts or arrivistes, but inheritors of an ancient civilization).<br /><br />But more than anything else, Venice invented the use of compositional chiaroscuro. Not just "in the medium of painting" -- ancient and Medieval mosaics did not use it either. Nor did cave paintings. As a recurring stylistic feature, it was totally new! And it was the trademark of the Venetian school, which is usually known for their use of bold hues, vibrant saturation, and glowing brightness of colors.<br /><br />But just about every expanding empire loves its bold, rich, vibrant colors -- and every declining and collapsing empire turns toward a pastel, drained, and grayed-out palette. Once the cohesion leaves, so does the sense of special purpose -- and with that, the will to live a vibrant cultural life. Might as well go gray. So the Venetians were not unique in using bold, vibrant, glowing colors. Unique within Italy, perhaps, due to no other expanding states there. But not unique within Europe or the Near East of that period, where multiple empires were expanding and very fond of bold vibrant colors (back to Gothic stained glass for France and England).<br /><br />What did make them unique was compositional chiaroscuro, something that has been inherited into the American imperial visual style, from Ansel Adams landscapes to '70s Hollywood cinematography.<br /><br />The revolutionary Giovanni Bellini already began developing this style in his St. Jerome in the Desert, and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Giovanni_Bellini_-_Orazione_nell%27orto.jpg">Agony in the Garden</a> (1450s), a subject <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Andrea_Mantegna_036.jpg">also painted</a> by his brother-in-law Andrea Mantegna around the same time, also using chiaroscuro compositionally. It reached its height by the end of the century, in his <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Giovanni_Bellini_St_Francis_in_Ecstasy.jpg">St. Francis in Ecstasy</a> (1480) and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Giovanni_Bellini_o_Giambellino_-_Allegoria_sacra_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg">Holy Allegory</a> (1490s). The striking contrast of dark-bright all around the frame is self-evident in the latter, so let's explore its subtler use in the former.<br /><br />Of course there is sculptural use of chiaroscuro to render his facial features, the shape of individual boulders in the rockface, the branch posts, etc. But there are also shadows cast on the ground or other surface -- which do not render a 3D volume at all, but add to the contrast in bright vs. dark within the frame.<br /><br />Then there's the variation in brightness around the landscape -- dark at the near section of the rockface, then bright on the middle of the top row of stones, before darkening somewhat again on the left / far stone along the top, more muted levels where the donkey is, dark at the next level back where there's vegetation, then brighter where the small town is, darker going up the hill, before reaching a bright reversal on the castle at the top, and even the sky has a brighter lower half and darker upper half.<br /><br />Why does the brightness level change in this rhythmic way? No natural reason! Maybe there's a large building casting a huge shadow where it's dark, or a huge expanse of clouds. But it's not clearly motivated by the physics of the scene. It just looks too cool to do it any other way! Contrast, variety, stimulation, excitement, rhythm, dynamism -- that's what our brain wants, and he's giving it to us! Call it poetic, dramatic, stylistic, whatever -- but it's not coming from physics or mathematics like some other uses of shadow.<br /><br />This would become a Venetian trademark after Bellini. See Giorgione's <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_Adoration_of_the_Shepherds_-_Giorgione_-_1505_NG_Wash_DC.jpg">Adoration of the Shepherds</a> (1505), Titian's <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Titian_Bacchus_and_Ariadne.jpg">Bacchus and Ariadne</a> (1520), Bonifazio Veronese's <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Adoraci%C3%B3n_de_los_pastores_(Bonifazio_de%27_Pitati).jpg">Adoration of the Shepherds</a> (1520s), Palma Vecchio's <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Diana_and_Callisto_-_Palma_Vecchio.jpg">Diana and Callisto</a> (1520s), Paolo Veronese's <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Castelvecchio06q-Veronese.jpg">Deposition of Christ</a> (1540s), Jacopo Bassano's <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Jacopo_Bassano_(Jacopo_dal_Ponte)_-_The_Adoration_of_the_Kings_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg">Adoration of the Kings</a> (1540s), and Tintoretto's <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tintoretto,_Jacopo_-_Christ_at_the_Sea_of_Galilee.jpg">Christ at the Sea of Galilee</a> (1575).<br /><br />Compositional chiaroscuro would also become a fixture of other imperial styles, including Spanish (El Greco's View of Toledo ca. 1600), French (most Poussin landscapes, e.g. with Orpheus and Eurydice ca. 1650), and not to mention it too many times, American (Ansel Adams). Not so much in Russian painting, aside from some Neoclassical painters of the first half of the 1800s (this shows it is not an "Eastern" thing that Venice got from being more oriented toward the Byzantine Empire than the Papal States, once upon a time). But as a thriving, enduring aesthetic phenomenon, it all began in the Venetian Renaissance, as the most cohesive people in the Italian peninsula sought a way to distinguish themselves stylistically from their feuding and Ancient LARP-ing compatriots.<br /><br />This greater level of cohesion, as well as stylistic distinctiveness (at least, since the Ancient period), must be what makes Venice so much more romantic and sought-after and thought-about, compared to other places in Italy that are no slouches in the art-and-history department. Assuming you don't want to indulge in Caesar LARP-ing, Venice is the place for the most vibrant culture in the Italian peninsula after the Crisis of the Third Century. It may not even be right to call it the place for "Italian" culture, or the cultural leader of "Italy" -- it's Venetian culture, not "Italian". Most importantly, their Renaissance did not owe to economic factors like new riches, but ethnogenetic ones -- being encircled by strange barbarian invaders, as well as facing off against religious rivals from a mighty empire in the Holy Land.<br /><br /></p>agnostichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12967177967469961883noreply@blogger.com155tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19346366.post-33767989029982284882023-11-13T14:39:00.001-05:002023-11-13T14:39:34.072-05:00Thoughts on Hardcore (1979) by Schrader: Manic Pixie Dream Girls, thriller vs. action "rescue" movies, and complex / useful vs. simple / superfluous violence and nudity<p>I wrote another post in the comments section on an unrelated topic, which I'll copy-paste into a new post, because search engines don't see comments, only the main body of posts. In case someone is looking for insights into this movie.<br /><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">* * *<br /></p><p><br />Hardcore by Paul Schrader has a Manic Pixie Dream Girl in it. A quirky, corporeal, free spirit with an earthly guardian angel role to play vis-a-vis the protagonist, who is a down-on-his-luck sad sack (divorced dad of a daughter who's run away). They form an odd-couple partnership.<br /><br />She nurses him back to health, keeps him sane, guides him through hell, and keeps him on the right track to achieve his loftiest goals, including winning over or winning back a girl -- not the MPDG herself, who as usual does not end up with him in the end, nor even a romantic interest (i.e. his estranged ex-wife). But *does* help unite him with his daughter.<br /><br />The movie came out in 1979, during the restless phase of the 15-year excitement cycle ('75-'79 in this case), when the MPDG type proper comes out.<br /><br />The character, Niki, is played by an actress (Season Hubley) who was born in the manic phase of the cycle (1951, during the '50-'54 manic phase), like most other MPDGs. As shown in her topless scenes, she is a butt girl rather than a boob girl, just like most other MPDGs. Height varies a lot among the type, and she's 5'5 fwiw.<br /><br />I knew while watching the movie that she'd be born in a manic phase, and I was right!<br /><br />Sidebar: there's a "doomed MPDG" type in Frenzy by Hitchcock, recalling <a href="https://akinokure.blogspot.com/2021/11/doomed-manic-pixie-dream-girls-from.html">this post</a> about Michelle from Frantic by Polanski. That post also contains links to earlier entries in my MPDG series, which began in 2019, tying it into my series on the 15-year cultural excitement cycle, which I began in 2017 (and has its own category tag in the blog's sidebar, unlike MPDG's).<br /><br />Frenzy was made in '72, during the vulnerable phase of '70-'74, like Frantic ('88, during the '85-89 vulnerable phase). So she doesn't quite get to play the full guardian angel role for the down-on-his-luck sad-sack protag.<br /><br />In fact (spoilers), she winds up getting killed in the process of trying to help the protag realize his lofty goals.<br /><br />Still, I knew that like Emmanuelle Seigner, she must've been born during a manic phase -- at least that much of this type stays true to the proper MPDG role that comes out during a restless phase. And sure enough, the actress who plays Babs (Anna Massey) was born in 1937, during the '35-39 manic phase.<br /><br />Niki, the MPDG, is the stand-out character in Hardcore. Still thinking about her the day after viewing, she made a real impression, and without a theatrical or melodramatic performance either.<br /><br />George C. Scott's character, the father in search of his teenage runaway daughter, is too literally Puritan to give the audience much of an emotional opening to connect and empathize with. He bottles everything up for 99% of the time, and lets it explode during the other 1% -- but unless you're also a Dutch Calvinist Midwesterner, for whom this is normal and expected behavior, it can be hard to connect with.<br /><br />Contrast with Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver, written by Paul Schrader just a few years earlier. His extensive monologue voiceovers open up his mind to the audience, not to mention his more "tell it like it is, nothing held back, no BS" back-East behavior, which lets him pour his thoughts and feelings out even in the presence of other characters, whether socially appropriate or not. It may feel like wincingly tip-toe-ing through a seedy motel entrance, but it's still an opening for the audience to connect with his mind.<br /><br />That's where the MPDG comes to the rescue in Hardcore. This type is always on a rescue mission of some kind, but here it's not just within the narrative, helping him achieve his goals and rise out of the depths he's currently in -- it's to chip away at his Puritan exterior on behalf of the audience, who can finally see what's really going on inside and connect.<br /><br />Only the earthy prostitute and occasional porno actress can get him to drop his guard -- her sharing of her good-vibes hippie-dippie Venusian religion prompts him to explain the tenets of his Calvinist religion, in a way that he'd never opened up about before. He and his religion come off more sympathetically after this, since he's not thundering down a sermon to her, just matter-of-factly explaining it to her like he's a Sunday School teacher and she's a new student. She (and we) may not resonate with it, but it's not off-putting either.<br /><br />Her playful teasing gets him to use sexually profane slang ("sucking off"), contrary to his buttoned-up usual speech.<br /><br />But most of all, she's the only one whose attentive and nurturing behavior gets him to open up about where his wife is in the whole family picture. (Before he simply lied and said she was dead, not estranged / divorced and living in some God-forsaken place back East.) It's a nice small-scale cathartic moment for him, to have a sympathetic shoulder to lean on, so that he doesn't keep bottling everything up until it explodes in an aimless counter-productive rage.<br /><br />Nice spin on the typical MPDG formula of coaxing a wary sad sack out of his shell, to liven up his lifestyle. Usually it means the guy leads a boring ho-hum routine, but still in a relatable way and allowing us to empathize with him (the security of routine, can't get hurt if you don't risk much exposure, etc.). But in Hardcore, he's so bottled-up and seething that her coaxing him out of his shell is necessary to make him relatable to the audience.<br /><br />Great attention to detail in the costume design, too, where she's wearing a t-shirt that simply has the word "SniFF" printed on it. Believable as a novelty t-shirt, but emphasizing that she's an earthy / sensual type, not necessarily a smell fetishist (in which case the shirt would be a deep inhaling "SNIFFFFF") -- just curious and exploring the world through the corporeal senses, rather than intellect and reason and logic and argument. Sniff, sniff, sniff...<br /><br />Not something a Puritan would have printed on their shirt. The right small detail can go a long way toward cementing their odd-couple relationship, and her corporeality vs. his cerebral / spiritual approach.<br /><br />Season Hubley gives a nice physical performance in her poses as well. At first, she's shown as a typical stripper / prostitute, casually taking off her top and spreading her legs akimbo, high-heeled shoes kicking right up against the glass partition in the peep-show booth. Meant to be salacious and provocative, like anyone who sells sex for a living -- emotionally checked-out from the situation, not like a trusted confidante.<br /><br />But by the time they form their unlikely partnership and have bonded somewhat, her pose changes completely. Head bowed somewhat in humility, cocked to the side in curiosity, leg raised on one side while sitting down to convey an air of opened-up, informal relaxation -- the right tone for a confidante to create, if she wants the other side to let their guard down -- rather than stiff, stern judgement that he'd be used to in a setting where he's confessing about what's gone wrong in his life.<br /><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi18MvWByz4B6cOoQHe0RCK0MksByVfg91oaGiRq_0wHL2Fjm2D2UIZhRyuWV7puxsckxSZuiA39ejo-V6CJvFNmZatnUz4QRVqwOtCyIj7ct1YzTah8PWWnTYqjs41SL8hb6ev7j4Mln3Hm_H6u0XPgnhpKoFjFIObGCe7JzQnaykPLNcOF-r5cA/s1201/hardcoreniki.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="667" data-original-width="1201" height="314" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi18MvWByz4B6cOoQHe0RCK0MksByVfg91oaGiRq_0wHL2Fjm2D2UIZhRyuWV7puxsckxSZuiA39ejo-V6CJvFNmZatnUz4QRVqwOtCyIj7ct1YzTah8PWWnTYqjs41SL8hb6ev7j4Mln3Hm_H6u0XPgnhpKoFjFIObGCe7JzQnaykPLNcOF-r5cA/w563-h314/hardcoreniki.jpg" width="563" /></a></div><br />More images <a href="http://mooninthegutter.blogspot.com/2012/12/31-performances-ripe-for-rediscovery-6.html">here</a>.<br /><br />Reminder that in Taxi Driver, the MPDG is not Jodie Foster's character Iris -- she represents the lofty goal that the down-in-the-dumps protag is striving to reach (saving her from a life on the streets).<br /><br />And she's not born during a manic phase, but a restless phase, which produces the wild-child type (1962, during the '60-'64 restless phase). True to that type, she comes across as numb and glib about her wild-child teen runaway prostitute lifestyle. She does wear a boho costume, but that just shows that the MPDG is not about costume, but the role she plays in the narrative.<br /><br />She does provoke the ho-hum protag -- but more for the sake of provocation, shocking a square, to convince herself that she's cool and hip, unlike him. Not to chip away at his exterior, to get him to drop his guard, so she can nurture him and rescue him from the depths, so that he can achieve his goals in life.<br /><br />Rather, the MPDG is Betsy, played by Cybill Shepherd, who naturally enough was born during a manic phase (1950). She's not a wild-child who provokes for the fun of it all. She views him as an intriguing social-emotional rehab project for her to work on, nurture, and encourage, so that he can walk on his own again and accomplish greater things than what he's currently mired in.<br /><br />She's the one who the protag literally describes as an angel descending, the one who inspires him to let his guard down, take a chance on opening up and connecting to other people (including women), even if he takes that too far due to his rusty social skills from having been isolated and alienated for so long.<br /><br />But by the end of the movie, when she rides in his cab again, they clearly have no hard feelings, and in fact smile knowingly at each other, as though she were the one who started him off on his quest toward rescuing Iris and cleaning up the scum from the city in his own humble way. Very tender and endearing final moment, even if (as usual) the MPDG and the protag do not wind up as a couple. Her rehab project has turned out a success, and the guy who recuperated due to her intervention is grateful for her support and encouragement that began the process of rising out of the depths.<br /><br />And of course Taxi Driver came out during a restless phase, 1976.<br /><br />Last thought on Niki from Hardcore. Her getting the protag to drop his guard and open up serves a further narrative purpose -- turns out, the daughter ran away and joined the seedy porno world on her own, because she felt her father was too emotionally distant, cold, judgemental, and driving her friends away as potential bad influences. She ran away to find someone who would befriend her, however parasitically.<br /><br />When he finally tracks her down, she's reluctant to go back to the same family environment that repulsed her in the first place. So the father has to open up, be vulnerable, and show that he's at least aware that his bottled-up Puritan behavior was responsible, while still asking her to understand that he does love her but never felt comfortable showing it.<br /><br />He's been changed by the MPDG's rehab process, and he's now able to prove that to the girl that represents his lofty goals (rescuing his daughter from the streets at least, ideally bringing her back home). She wouldn't have believed him if he'd shown up thundering a Puritanical sermon against her, or coldly listing the consequences of her actions, etc. That would've been more of the same, and she wouldn't have decided there was anything worth returning to.<br /><br />But now able to open up, confess in a sympathetic way, ask for forgiveness again in a sympathetic way, showing a positive catharsis -- not merely on a blind revenge mission against the men she hooked up with -- he convinces her that life will be different, more socially and emotionally supportive, connected, and warm back home. So she decides to go back with him after all, thanks to the MPDG's decision to take him as an intriguing rehab project, acting as his earthly guardian angel when institutions (the church, the police, his own family) could not save him.<br /><br />Heh, Peter Boyle's character in Hardcore is similar to an MPDG, although from the male camaraderie angle, not the female nurturer angle.<br /><br />He's a bit boho and unconventional himself, earthy and sensory-based (as well as logical, being a P.I.). Opens up, holds nothing back, no-BS, hoping some of that attitude will rub off on the bottled-up Puritan protag, who he refers to as "pilgrim" -- not just referencing his Puritanical religion, but conveying his awareness that the protag is on a kind of quest or journey, and needing a guide such as himself.<br /><br />And he doesn't take on the father's case just for the money -- it's also to protect the protag, like a surrogate patriarch (whereas the MPDG is more maternal and nurturing). He guides him along the way to achieve his lofty goals, steering him through the hellish depths so he doesn't remain mired there forever.<br /><br />He plays a similar role toward Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, as the supportive, concerned, and advice-giving Wizard. Not as central in the narrative, nor as helpful, but still in the same mold.<br /><br />And sure enough, Peter Boyle was born during a manic phase (1935). The suite of traits that females pick up from imprinting on such a phase, are also picked up by their male cohorts -- they just get expressed in a more masculine instead of feminine manner. But still very similar to each other.<br /><br />Neat!<br /><br />Noirish thrillers like Hardcore and Frantic create more narrative tension than action-oriented takes on the "rescue a family member" story like Commando and Taken.<br /><br />In the action movies, the main theme is revenge, and we know from the outset that the family member will be rescued, in good health, and the rescuer will survive as well. The tension is not put into the narrative, but into the overcoming of various obstacles in the protag's way -- we know he's going to overcome them, but who specifically are they, what settings are they located in, how exactly does he eliminate one or the other threat, the precise way in which he's going to execute the main villain.<br /><br />In the thriller movies, we don't even know if he's going to find the family member, let alone will they be alive and in good health or want to return with him. We don't know whether their fate remains undisclosed, and if the protag is going to resign himself to losing her after an ultimately fruitless search, maybe taking revenge on the most likely culprits or maybe just calling it quits altogether in order to maintain some sanity. He's not an unstoppable juggernaut, which is more relatable to the audience, whereas the action revenge movies are more about a fantasy of power.<br /><br />Having to sift through masses of people, rather than quickly narrowing down who the abductors are, adds to the narrative tension, setting up a sense of hopelessness -- and that opens the door to the role of a guide for the protag, which is not really crucial in the action movies, where he's a one-man army. Maybe the guide is a surrogate patriarch, or an MPDG proper, or a doomed MPDG. But some kind of earthly guardian angel to guide the protag through the depths of hell, in order for him to rise above it and achieve his goals.<br /><br />So it's not just more tension in the plot, but also in the character dynamics, for the thrillers.<br /><br />Thrillers do feature violence, sex, action, and sometimes vindication or revenge -- but they all serve a purpose for the plot, sense of place, and characterization. Whereas in an action movie, we know roughly how it ends from the beginning, and they strike us as more superfluous and just giving us what we want to indulge in as a guilty pleasure.<br /><br />For example, there's a totally pointless T&A scene in Commando (it was the '80s), where the protag chases one of the bad guys into a motel, and in their struggle they break into the room of a nude couple that had been bumping uglies, unaware of the plot of the movie.<br /><br />In Taken, the kidnapped daughter is shown in her underwear and then topless, while she's on display in a white slavery market by the villains. That may anger the audience, but not the protag, who isn't witnessing any of it.<br /><br />In Hardcore, the porno that the daughter appears in is witnessed by the protag (after being tracked down by the P.I.), causing him to break down, and add to his determination to save his daughter. It makes the nude scene more poignant and gut-wrenching and anti-pornographic, rather than voyeuristic (which is how the scene in Taken comes off).<br /><br />There are seductive nude scenes in Hardcore, however, like when the protag first converses with Niki in the peep-show booth. Not the most erotic performance of all time, but still titillating and a bit sensual, rather than enraging or depressing and anti-pornographic. It adds to the complexity of tone in a thriller rather than a straightforward action movie.<br /><br />Hardcore also uses nudity in portraying the making of porno movies, whereby it all comes off as choreographed, orchestrated, mechanical, and therefore artificial, fake, and not sensual and seductive.<br /><br />It's not enraging or depressing like the ones where the runaway daughter is performing and being witnessed by the father after the fact. Nor is it titillating like Niki's bantering peep-show booth performance. Maybe not *anti*-pornographic -- merely not pornographic. Showing the behind-the-scenes process of shooting the scene, dispelling the fantasy, conveying a tone of hollowness or numbness.<br /><br />Complex tone.<br /><br /><p></p>agnostichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12967177967469961883noreply@blogger.com61tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19346366.post-59934236125911268272023-11-08T16:58:00.005-05:002023-11-08T17:14:07.214-05:00After non-Halloween October, skipping right to New Year's Eve, eliminating Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Christmas, as American imperial collapse wipes out its major holidays<p>It snowed a bit on Halloween (i.e. Oct 31, not "The Saturday Before Oct 31"), and the workers in the thrift store at the time broke out with "Are you kidding me???" and even a reference to it already being Christmas. I thought that was jumping the gun a bit -- don't we still have Thanksgiving and/or Black Friday in the way?<br /><br />But that proved to be symptomatic of a larger trend this year, in which people are paying no mind, and presumably no effort or activity, to Thanksgiving, Black Friday, or even the once-mighty Christmas. As far as they're concerned, after Halloween the next milestone holiday is New Year's Eve.<br /><br />I noticed both Mumei and Irys independently speaking this way during some of their recent streams, off-handedly mentioning "Wow, I can't believe the year is almost over / It's almost 2024". I assume others are as well, but these are two I tune into frequently enough to hear what's on their mind.<br /><br />So I used google to search reddit for the phrase "almost 2024," and indeed there are lots of comments to that effect, with the vast majority from October (and now into November). Curiously, they didn't all hit after The Saturday Before Halloween, when the energy for that holiday would've begun dissipating. There are plenty from earlier in the month, as though they were ignoring Halloween as well, and heading straight for New Year's Eve.<br /><br />Well, that ignoring of Halloween manifested all over the place this year, as I described in a series of comments to the last post, beginning <a href="https://akinokure.blogspot.com/2023/10/seven-1995-as-origin-of-puritanical.html?showComment=1698438673711#c3174652341848171284">here</a>. Halloween spirit was dead throughout the entire month, in radical contrast to just a few years ago when all the stuff would've gone up at the start of the month or earlier.<br /><br />Now that we've seen Halloween not-happen, we can also easily see that Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Christmas will not-happen this year either.<br /><br />Thanksgiving has become weakened and parasitized by Black Friday since the 2000s, to the point where Thanksgiving had become debased into Black Friday Eve, and the real excitement and emotional investment was for the anti-social shopping free-for-all on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. I covered that over the 2010s.<br /><br />I also commented in the past few years how even Black Friday has died. When you think of those videos or Drudge live-blogging the chaos, that was only from the late 2000s and 2010s. When the vulnerable phase of the 15-year excitement cycle had set in, from 2015-'19, it was already pretty tame compared to the previous manic phase, 2010-'14, when most of those intense Black Fridays occurred.<br /><br />But by now, the holiday is completely dead, and it is not restoring any energy back to Thanksgiving -- everything is being wiped out together.<br /><br />But surely Christmas will still stand! Nope. I remember how non-eventful it was last year, possibly the least emotional Christmas in world history. It will pass with even less activity this year, with a rising number of people ignoring it altogether to build up suspense for New Year's Eve instead.<br /><br />In a series of comments beginning <a href="https://akinokure.blogspot.com/2023/10/seven-1995-as-origin-of-puritanical.html?showComment=1698699435403#c2946154818132601083">here</a>, I explained the point behind celebrating holidays on fixed calendar days, rather than wimping out and celebrating them only on weekends. Weekends are expected times for cutting loose, whereas major holidays require turning over the usual order of things -- for a brief time -- and that includes celebrating them on weekdays, when people usually go to school or work.<br /><br />I noted that only New Year's Eve has a built-in defense against the Millennial anti-American culture-destroyers who canceled Halloween in favor of The Saturday Before Halloween. The suspense leading up to a holiday is even more relevant to New Year's Eve because there's a literal countdown on that night until the new calendar year begins.<br /><br />It's difficult to shift all that suspense and excitement to some night before New Year's Eve, since the contradiction is too glaring between celebrating a new year and everyone knowing the actual countdown is still days away.<br /><br />Likewise if they tried to shift it to some night after, the suspense will already have dissipated. So, its celebration is much more sticky to its calendar date, despite lamewad Millennials who would love nothing more than to celebrate it on The Saturday Before New Year's Eve.<br /><br />Labor Day and Memorial Day stopped being real holidays awhile ago. July Fourth keeps getting weaker and ho-hum. Easter might as well not exist, and ditto for Valentine's Day. With the elimination only beginning now of Halloween, Thanksgiving / Black Friday, and Christmas, that leaves New Year's Eve as the only holiday that Americans will celebrate as a major, big deal, FOMO kind of holiday.<br /><br />In no previous year did we start getting itchy to discuss the wrapping up of the year, the beginning of a new year, how crazy time flies, what we're going to resolve to do differently, etc. -- in October. That literally began in 2023.<br /><br />But it has all the hallmarks of the earlier destruction of holidays. Remember when Christmas stuff, energy, thoughts, feelings, etc., began happening before Thanksgiving / Black Friday, eventually going up at the start of November?<br /><br />Which is what happened this year as well, right after Oct 31, the Halloween candy got replaced -- and not by autumnal or harvest or Thanksgiving-related things like candy corn, caramel apples, or pumpkin-themed stuff (indeed, pumpkin spice latte coffee has already been dumped into the clearance section in the supermarkets). Rather, it got immediately replaced with Christmas candy.<br /><br />If only New Year's Eve had some sweets associated with it, *that* would have gone up on Nov 1 this year, bypassing Christmas candy entirely. But then, maybe that's the direction our moribund culture is headed toward, repurposing all sweets from Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas, which are scarcely celebrated anymore, into a New Year's Eve smorgasbord of sweets.<br /><br />The new rationale will be similar to Carnival / Mardi Gras -- one final binge on stuff that's bad for you, before purging and purifying and rebuilding in the new year, tying it into the existing tradition of New Year's resolutions (which is similar to giving things up for Lent -- and people adhere to them just as long).<br /><br />Maybe we will fold the trick-or-treating / masquerade tradition back into the New Year holiday, which is where it ultimately began, before American culture shifted it to Halloween, to distinguish ourselves from our European -- and even Indo-European -- relatives.<br /><br />Who can say what precise form these changes will take? All I know is our culture is evaporating right before our very eyes, as the social cohesion that upheld our mega-society has entered terminal decline, now that its raison d'etre -- uniting against a common meta-ethnic nemesis (mainly the Indians and later Mexicans) -- has unraveled.<br /><br /></p>agnostichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12967177967469961883noreply@blogger.com39tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19346366.post-28615015228694286782023-10-08T14:26:00.004-04:002023-10-08T14:33:50.205-04:00Seven (1995) as the origin of Puritanical torture porn, not Saw (2004)<p>Continuing on the theme of disgust vs. fear in horror, the origin is really Seven from 1995, not Saw from 2004. Maybe you'd say it's a bridge between two eras or styles, since it could be a noir-ish suspenseful crime thriller without the gross-out scenes. But so many of the defining torture porn tropes are already there:<br /><br />Disgusting rather than dangerous or violent scenes. Horror / thriller used to do the opposite -- depict the chase and violent act, but not show the disgusting gory result. Sometimes both were shown, but rarely only the gory result without the dangerous / violent / fear-inducing act.<br /><br />Only disgusting, not even potentially violent, scenes -- like cockroaches showing up where there's a dead body (which doesn't even need to have died in a violent manner to trigger cockroaches showing up).<br /><br />The main negative physiological reaction in the audience shifting from elevated / pounding heart-rate, sweating, etc., to the gag reflex.<br /><br />Degradation, corruption, debasement, and humiliation of victims, which does not need to accompany violence, danger, and fear. Deliberately spoiling and contaminating and staining their purity. Contaminated purity involves the emotion of disgust, not fear. So this reinforces or compounds the literal contaminated purity (i.e., the disfigured body) with figurative disgust (at the person's dignity being degraded in such a way).<br /><br />The shift toward sadism in the villain, rather than psychopathy (meaning, lack of empathy or remorse, and/or a psychic break with reality), revenge, anger, opportunism, etc., which could induce a person to violence -- but not toward the humiliating and debasing behavior they show toward victims.<br /><br />Villain is a self-appointed moral crusader who wants to shock the normies out of their complacency, and instigate a grand purification, which will put grand meaning back into our humdrum dull existence.<br /><br />Puritanical focus on vindictive punishment of sin, rather than on preventing it through cautionary tales about how seductive and tempting and sensorily pleasing sin can be. We never see the seductive side of pigging out on tasty food, of lazing around the house and procrastinating at work, of getting your brains fucked out by a hot lover, and so on and so forth.<br /><br />In fact, the Puritanism goes further in assigning a lustful motive to a prostitute, rather than a woman who is obviously having sex for money. It should have been a promiscuous / nymphomaniac party girl -- but to self-appointed moral crusaders, prostitutes are just having their cake and eating it too. Ditto for their view of girls who have sex on camera, even though they typically aren't that into it and are just faking it long enough to collect their easy money.<br /><br />Director David Fincher did a better job in The Game of just two years later, at creating the disturbing mood of being targeted by someone who's toying around with you in a probably malevolent way, potentially roping others into the job -- who you were first inclined to trust, all in order to shock a comfortable normie out of his complacency and security, to make him take bold actions that will provide Existentialist meaning to his otherwise humdrum life.<br /><br />And all without appealing to disgust, which would have gotten in the way of all the suspense, danger, violence, and fear.<br /><br /></p>agnostichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12967177967469961883noreply@blogger.com204tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19346366.post-7676767133992488002023-10-03T19:22:00.007-04:002023-10-03T19:45:28.918-04:00Why are puzzle video games most immune to the cult of ugliness & crappiness? And horror the most susceptible? And why are there puzzles in horror games?<p>There's a puzzle game that's trending among Japanese streamers, in the same rough family as Tetris, with very kawaii graphics (fruit pieces with emoji faces). It's currently only available in Japan, and was created there.<br /><br />(I can't easily find pictures of it because "suika game" and "watermelon game" bring up older unrelated games of the same name. But search YouTube for "suika game" and you'll find not only pictures, but videos of how it's played.)<br /><br />A cutesy-looking game being made and going viral in Japan is no surprise -- aside from the late '90s and early 2000s, they have largely been immune to the cult of ugliness and crappiness that is plaguing the West during the declining phase of the American Empire (torture porn movies of the 2000s, related video games of the 2010s, and so on).<br /><br />Mumei and Mori have streamed the game on the English-speaking side of Hololive, but we'll have to see if it catches on as popularly as it has in Japan.<br /><br />I was trying to think of an alternative game that *would* go viral in the empire-collapsing West, due to its ugly and crappy nature... but not only could I not think of anything recent, I don't think there is a single game in the entire history of the puzzle genre that is ugly, disgusting, off-putting, uncomfortable, debasing toward the player or toward a streamer's audience, deliberately made to look and play like crap.<br /><br />They all look nice -- some are on the cutesy side (like today's suika game), some have a more refined look (like the Japanese-made Columns from 1990), but none of them look bad, ugly, crappy, let alone on purpose as part of some self-aware meme appeal.<br /><br />The worst you can find is one that looks bland and clinical and bordering on a sensory-deprivation chamber, like Portal from 2007 (created in America). But it's still not ugly and crappily made. That game is not pure puzzle, though -- it's also in the "dark sci-fi" genre, and as we'll see, the closer to horror, the more susceptible it is to ugliness and crappiness.<br /><br />It's not just the visuals that are pleasant in puzzle games, though -- they also have pleasing, sometimes catchy background music and sound-effects. While the arcade release of Lode Runner in 1984 did have primitive background music, the ancestors of the trend for background music in puzzle games are both from 1989 -- Tetris on the Game Boy and the Nintendo (created in Russia), and the Adventures of Lolo series for the Nintendo (created in Japan). Both of those remain some of my favorite games, and I occasionally play them despite hardly playing games at all after my 20s.<br /><br />Speaking of the refined and glossy look of Columns, it reinforces this in its <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aRN2yj9qm0">soundtrack</a>, whose composer created not 1, not 2, but count 'em, 3 pieces to choose from, inspired by Baroque / Classical music.<br /><br />Pretty much every puzzle game has a soundtrack, including today's suika game, which is light, inoffensive elevator music. To be a great puzzle game, it would need a musical update with something catchy and melodic like Tetris or Columns.<br /><br />The only puzzle games without soundtracks were made for home computers, where the creators might have thought the user wouldn't have a sophisticated enough set-up to play melodic music, or not enough memory on the disk to hold a musical score (in the '80s). Or where the point was to create a mindless diversion -- respectful of office-space noise levels -- instead of a well-rounded aesthetic experience (like Minesweeper or Solitaire or Taipei / Mahjong from the '90s Windows days).<br /><br />The sound effects and audio levels in puzzle games are also pleasing, not an anti-aesthetic "ear rape" that is rampant in horror games. That term is very appropriate, since it highlights the reliance on disgust, debasement, and humiliation rather than fear, danger, and violence as the basic emotion and tone in the horror genre across all media since the 2000s.<br /><br />In fact, as many streams as I've seen from the series of Amnesia, Outlast, Dead by Daylight, and Phasmophobia, along with the lesser single-entry horror games of the 2010s and '20s, I can't remember the music at all. Their Wikipedia pages do list composers, but don't mention the music in the body of the article, unlike Tetris or Columns, which are games you can still remember from the music alone, without the graphics.<br /><br />Horror movies also used to have memorable soundtracks, even in the West -- before the decline and collapse of the American Empire. Halloween, A Nightmare on Elm Street, The Exorcist, The Omen, the Argento thrillers, you name it. <br /><br />Horror video games used to as well, whether Western ones like Doom / Doom II or Japanese ones like Clock Tower (the 1995 JP-only game).<br /><br />Portal is one of the few puzzle games without a true soundtrack, but vague non-musical atmospheric sounds instead, not very detectable at the time or memorable after. It has that dark sci-fi / horror influence, which resulted in the non-soundtrack that it has, compared to every other puzzle game.<br /><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">* * *<br /></p><p><br />So why are puzzle games so immune to the cult of ugliness? And why are horror and other dArK sPoOkY genres so susceptible to it? Puzzles appeal mostly to our sense of reason, not any of the various emotions.<br /><br />And since the cult of ugliness relies so heavily on disgust, an emotion, it is completely at odds with the puzzle genre, which doesn't allow any of the emotions to enter into it. Well, other than the occasional bout of anger, but that is incidental, not fundamental -- puzzle games are not designed to piss you off throughout the game and elevate your rage levels as a necessary part of the experience.<br /><br />Why horror among the non-puzzle genres? Because there is a natural entry-point for disgust in horror, namely gore. Horror is fundamentally about violence, danger, and fear, but the outcome of such threats may incidentally lead to gore and disgusting things. On the non-gory side are the thrillers, where disgust has little room to get its foot in the door. Thrillers can be slick, glamorous, seductive things, even if there is an occasional fleeting bit of gore, like the giallos from Italy in the '70s and '80s, or Basic Instinct from pre-collapse America.<br /><br />But when horror gets ugly, gory, and disgusting, it prevents itself from becoming slick, glamorous, or seductive. It will also not have a great soundtrack, if gore is the main point. It is choosing to wallow in debasing crappiness, across all aspects of its production.<br /><br />And if the horror genre becomes dominated by disgusting rather than frightening things, as it has since the 2000s, it will automatically become part of the cult of ugliness. Things that are dangerous and violent are not necessarily debasing, corrupting, and humiliating -- but things that are disgusting are. Ugly / crappy and disgusting / humiliating are a natural fit for each other.<br /><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">* * *<br /></p><p><br />There's a reason why horror is so over-represented among the B-movies, "worst movies ever made," etc., and why a more cerebral / rational genre like police-procedural or mystery are not. In fact, comedies and romances are not common among worst-ever movies either. They do have an emotional appeal, but it's to positive rather than negative emotions, so disgust has no way to worm its way into the work.<br /><br />I don't just mean "movies that fall flat," but as in crappy and shoddy production values and technical processes. Rom-coms are never made that terribly, whether naively or on purpose for brown-nosing points with the irony crew. Their makers want to make something uplifting, and the audience wants to be lifted up -- the opposite of tolerating or preferring to wallow in shoddy ugliness.<br /><br />I reject the claims by the cult of ugliness that one appeal of such garbage is feeling superior to the makers, the schadenfreude or point-and-laugh appeal. First of all, that would be admitting to being a midwit, having to punch down on a midget and thereby confessing to being tiny yourself. While some members of the cult may be midwits, others are not, and nobody would want to brag about being a midwit anyway.<br /><br />The main reason is all of the fall-flat rom-coms out there that they could point and laugh at. They could sneer at the sappiness, make fun of the corny dialog, point out how illogical some of the plot devices are that put these two in the same place at the same time, ridicule the implausible mismatch between the homely looks of the female protag and the wealthy / desirable status of the male love interest, and so on and so forth.<br /><br />Somehow, though, the cult of ugliness avoids the rom-com genre like the plague. It's because on a technical level, they're competently made, at worst bland and inoffensive. But they're never ugly, and never shoddily made.<br /><br />Therefore, it's the ugliness and the crappiness that the cult members truly fixate on and demand -- not a sense of aesthetic superiority. If they enjoy pointing and laughing at ugly crap, it can only be because they see themselves in that, they do not like themselves, and they are externalizing their self-loathing by pointing and laughing at someone else's ugly crap. They are kindred spirits with the makers of ugly crap, not hostile enemies or disdainful superiors.<br /><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">* * *<br /></p><p><br />One of the most bizarre developments in video games that I've noticed from watching streams is the intrusion of "puzzles" into horror games. Puzzles are cerebral, horror is visceral and emotional -- they contradict each other, right?<br /><br />Well, sometimes they can operate independently of each other, neither interfering with the other. This approach was used in Twin Peaks, where there is a standard by-the-book criminal investigation, along with a paralogical style like throwing rocks at bottles while reading out suspects' names or heeding the messages of characters from one's dreams. The two styles work in tandem, creating a richer and beyond-the-ordinary experience.<br /><br />But in horror video games, typically the cerebral component interferes with the emotional horror component, e.g. the player cannot progress away from the villain without solving a math problem first. Forget tripping over your shoelaces while fleeing through the woods, or trying to start a car engine that doesn't want to turn over -- the main obstacle in today's horror is a balancing an equation!<br /><br />This has been true at least since Amnesia: the Dark Descent in 2010, and the less influential Penumbra series by the same makers from 2007. It borrows directly from Myst (American, early '90s), but that was not supposed to be an emotional, let alone action or horror, kind of game, whose heart-racing pace a puzzle would have halted.<br /><br />Amnesia is a stain on Sweden's cultural record, which has so much going for it due to Minecraft of the same time, but maybe it's cuz the former creators are from the low-trust / non-standard-dialect region of the country, Malmo. There's a ton of garbage horror games from Montreal (like Outlast and Dead by Daylight), in the low-trust, non-standard-dialect region of Canada.<br /><br />Then there are the non-puzzle puzzles, which are really just arbitrary and cryptic passwords, which are not solved through reasoning of any kind. You need to use a certain item in a certain place, but discovering this match is done through trial-and-error, and finding the location of the item is also trial-and-error. Maybe another character tells you the info -- typically through a blogpost-long "note" that they conveniently left lying around for no reason other than to unknowingly help you out -- but finding this character / note is done through trial-and-error as well.<br /><br />These are more like clues used in a mystery -- they narrow down the number of branches in the decision tree, which does reduce some of the uncertainty about whodunnit and what to do next. But that still makes you roam around randomly until you chance upon the crucial person or location or item. Unlike clues in a mystery, however, you don't use reasoning to start your hunt -- as opposed to interviewing the close associates of a murder victim, rather than people from the city at random, or people on the other side of the world. You just roam around at random until you chance upon it.<br /><br />These cryptic, arbitrary, random searches do not counteract the emotional tone with a cerebral / rational tone, like the true puzzles do. But they still grind the action to a halt. If it were a thriller, such blind exploration could be used to build tension and instill fear in the player, if the killer could be waiting in the area you want to explore.<br /><br />But when the point is disgust, gore, and humiliation, you are never given a way to attack the villain. It's all about hide-and-seek, because humiliation and debasement and corruption require a power imbalance, as in hide-and-seek, rather than two peers squaring off against each other (as in a generic FPS or fighting game). If horror is about violence, danger, and fear, it could very well involve two closely matched rivals.<br /><br />When the gameplay becomes a hide-and-seek simulator, the tension comes from that power imbalance itself -- does the killer sense me nearby, is he already chasing me, can I manage to get away before he kills me? If he catches you, the tension ends when you're killed and have to re-start the level. If you escape his chase, the tension ends until the next time he senses you.<br /><br />So, the point of the cryptic random search for a "puzzle"-solving item, is not really to solve the puzzle itself, as far as building tension goes. It is to give you some flimsy reason to have to wander near the killer, so that he can sense you and start chasing you, which is where the tension actually comes from.<br /><br />This is why these games never feel realistic enough to be truly frightening -- in real life, you'd simply GTFO, and leave the killer behind. Why do you remain trapped in the same area as him? Because leaving the location requires an arbitrary item which is cryptically placed inside the location, so you can't just leave as usual. It's like a prison, and you need to find where the warden's office is, so you can get his keys or press a button or discover the password to open the gates, but there are enemies on the loose who can pick you off on your way to the warden's office.<br /><br />Outside of a literal prison, though, these security obstacles and their cryptic solutions are unmotivated. So what actually plausible scenario does this resemble -- being trapped in a building with someone who far outclasses you, and your only choice is to play hide-and-seek long enough until you miraculously get out, but more likely are going to get gruesomely and repeatedly killed along the way?<br /><br />It's really more like an ancient gladiator arena mixed with a Medieval torture dungeon. But in true humiliating fashion, you have no weapons -- not even David's slingshot. You have been placed there by the sadistic game creators, for their own warped amusement (and any viewing audience who identifies with them), and perhaps for your own warped enjoyment (or the part of the audience who identifies with you), if you masochisticly enjoy being humiliated and degraded by disgusting things with no way to stop it.<br /><br />There is always a pervasive tone of creepy molestation in these games, rather than just some maniac being on the loose and wanting to kill everyone in his path, like a rabid dog. A rabid dog doesn't want to humiliate and degrade its victims. This kind of horror is specifically about disgust, and barely disguised S&M fetishes (without seductive sexuality, of course -- that would offend the Puritanical morality of self-appointed inquisitors torturing their victims, so it's sublimated into sexless violence and corporal punishment instead).<br /><br />"Solving puzzles" in these games, then, is not like hunting for clues to solve a mystery, or using reasoning to solve a puzzle. It's like finding yourself in the torture dungeon, and your sadistic inquisitors telling you there's a safe-word you can use to get out -- but they won't tell you what it is, and you have to risk further degradation by groping around blindly for it, while an all-powerful disgusting monster lurks around the places it could be written down.<br /><br />This is the same amoral, empathy-lacking, remorseless psychopathic mind that enjoys torturing animals. But in true Buffalo Bill fashion, they probably treat animals better than people anyway, in a uniquely anti-social and people-hating way.<br /><br />It's no surprise that these "solve a cryptic puzzle or you'll be tortured to death by a sadistic inquisitor" elements began in the torture porn movies of the 2000s, beginning with Saw from 2004. Well, you need the key to escape, but you can't walk far enough to the key cuz your leg is shackled, but there's a hacksaw nearby you can use to cut off your foot and solve the puzzle! It's not cerebral or rational to solve, and it's not a "decipher the encryption" attack on passwords. It's just sadism and torture and disgusting humiliation.<br /><br />Cube, a horror movie from 1997, is also about being kidnapped and locked in a dangerous place, with puzzles to solve in order to escape. But the environment is not ugly and disgusting like a torture dungeon. It does not have gritty low-budget cinematography. And the puzzles are genuine reasoning puzzles, along with what we'd call platforming skills in video games. But not cryptic blind searches with disgusting rape-y monsters waiting for you.<br /><br />That movie never caught on like the torture porn movies did, because it naively thought "What if we took a nerdy approach to horror seriously?" Turns out, people don't want actual puzzles that are solved by reasoning, and tests of physical coordination to navigate. They just want to see sadists torture innocent people, and the puzzle thing is just window dressing. In the Cube movie, it was the "kidnapped by sadists" that was the window dressing.<br /><br /></p>agnostichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12967177967469961883noreply@blogger.com16tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19346366.post-31072646984986501572023-10-01T14:13:00.004-04:002023-10-01T14:13:50.872-04:00Portrayals of Hell: empathetic, seductive, cautious vs. callous, disgusting, vindictive (the Nether from Minecraft as an example)<p>Blogger's comment function is on the fritz again (for me anyway), so I'll start another new post for a topic I began exploring in the comments section of the previous post.<br /><br />Maybe the algorithm is trying to boost engagement by making me make new posts rather than add comments to existing posts, who knows?<br /><br />* * *<br /><br />The Nether in Minecraft is another great example of portraying a non-cutesy look-and-feel-and-sound, within an otherwise kawaii game. It looks like Hell! Not in a gritty and ugly way, but in a sublime and striking and dangerous way.<br /><br />"Waterfalls" and pools made of lava, dark caverns, undead monsters, striking chiaroscuro lighting from the lava / cavern environment... way cooler than most horror landscapes from the 2010s, in video games or movies and TV. More like a hellscape from British Romantic painter John Martin, in 8-bit pixelated form.<br /><br />Not to mention the danger of the lava -- one touch and you could not only die but lose all your items.<br /><br />Speaking of zombies being shoehorned into places they don't belong, this happened in Minecraft as well, with the Zombie and somewhat the Creeper enemies. It was from the early 2010s, at the peak of the zombie apocalypse trend, so zombies made their way into Minecraft of all places -- which is mostly about Medieval fantasy, ancient mythology, etc., like Zelda. They're out of place in such a world, but that's how strong the zombie revival was in the early 2010s.<br /><br />The aversion to Minecraft among the cult of ugliness is not only due to its kawaii side, but to its striking Hellish side as well -- because that is also a feast for the eyes. It's not sense-numbing, boring, or disgusting, so even the not-so-cute side of the game will not satisfy the crusaders for crappiness.<br /><br />In fact, the Nether is part of the tradition of making Hell seductive and cool, not to glorify it morally, but to convey how tempting it is, and the danger of falling for its appeal. If it were repulsive to the senses, it would not tempt anyone, and pose no threat to anyone.<br /><br />The warm yellow and orange tones of the lava, the rich chocolate-y browns of the rocks, the dim mood lighting -- with some warm glowing accent lighting -- it's like being wrapped up in a great big cozy '70s earth-tones afghan blanket!<br /><br />All sorts of nooks and crannies, as well as open spaces, pique your curiosity and make you want to explore like a tourist in a national cave park.<br /><br />There's no cold blue fluorescent lighting, no wide-open spaces with nowhere to hide, no desaturated grimy color palette -- in short, the opposite of the sensory-deprivation torture-chamber anti-aesthetics pushed by the cult of ugliness.<br /><br />That Puritanical approach to Hell is more concerned with moralism -- with punishing sinners through disgusting vile tortures, instead of showing some empathy by conveying how tempting and sumptuous Hell is, in order to caution people ahead of time, before they sin. Preventing, rather than punishing, sin.<br /><br />The Nether is part of the empathetic warning, not the callous punishment, tradition in the portrayal of Hell.<br /><br /></p>agnostichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12967177967469961883noreply@blogger.com16tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19346366.post-89439829899601220022023-09-23T15:56:00.005-04:002023-09-23T15:56:56.152-04:00Re: Minecraft skins, buggy video game releases<p>Blogger's comment function is temporarily down for me at least, so I'm putting this response to another comment in a standalone post, just to get it out for now. Will probably delete this post later when the comment can be put in the comments section as it's supposed to.<br /><br />* * *<br /><br />Minecraft offers re-skins, but you can't change the proportions. You can't make a lardass, an emaciated anorexic, someone with short stubby legs but looong torso, narrow shoulders and wide waist, etc.<br /><br />And because the resolution is so low and pixelated, it's hard to give the facial features a warped and unnatural proportion / arrangement.<br /><br />Minecraft skins amount to playing dress-up with clothing, not making them look like freaks of nature.<br /><br />As for buggy launches of American video games, that goes for everything these days.<br /><br />English-language streamers are famous for "EN scuff" or the "EN curse" -- delaying / canceling streams, game not installed at all or improperly while already going live, audio problems, etc. Some of it is on the streamer, some of it is on the Western ISP.<br /><br />That's not really cult of ugliness, more like negligence -- same for those buggy initial releases of video games. That's not deliberately to make it unpleasant for the audience, but part of negligence and lack of caring about what they do, so things fall into disrepair, instead of being deliberately made to be ugly or weird.</p>agnostichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12967177967469961883noreply@blogger.com33tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19346366.post-22461667662926457592023-07-17T18:18:00.002-04:002023-07-18T04:52:17.271-04:00Waterfalls as a uniquely American feature of geo-identity, including portrayals of paradise, here and abroad<p>In the comments starting <a href="https://akinokure.blogspot.com/2023/07/click-yes-mumeiet-by-we-simps.html?showComment=1689460376773#c2445477577338619725">here</a> I mentioned America's distinctive focus on illustration as its main static -- and later, animated -- visual portrayal medium, and then went on to look at how the portrayal of landscapes changes over the lifespan of an empire's culture. First it's Edenic, then much later as stagnation is nearing, that vision becomes problematized, and finally it just gets plain ol' drab and ugly and boring as imperial collapse approaches and arrives. There's a survey in the comments on the history of French imperial visual art, from the Late Medieval era up through the early 20th-C collapse of their empire.<br /><br />This all began in my search for the origins of the Edenic landscapes of the classical era of video games -- the '80s and most of the '90s, when they were 2D and took their cues from the history of illustration and cartoons, rather than trying to imitate photography or cinematography (with the fatal switch to 3D rendering).<br /><br />The blue skies, verdant vegetation, and warm colors on the ground -- yellow, orange, tan, beige, something other than just brown or gray -- are all part of the Edenic landscapes of earlier empires in other parts of the world, albeit when they were still expanding or plateau-ing, not yet in the final crisis and then collapse stages.<br /><br />And yet there's something uniquely American about our vision of paradise, aside from technical aspects of composition, line, lighting, and so on. Just on the level of content, what is being portrayed, we have a unique geomorphic feature that no one else does, as part of our defining collective identity -- waterfalls!<br /><br />I never really noticed it before, because it's hard to notice an absence of something. But surveying tons of Euro landscape paintings or miniature illustrations, there's nary a waterfall to be found. Whereas in the American cultural sphere, which later included some of our client states like Japan, it's hard to avoid the presence of waterfalls.<br /><br />The only major exceptions I found in European painting are those of Jacob van Ruisdael, the greatest landscape painter of the Dutch Golden Age (mid-1600s), such as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landscape_with_Waterfall">this one</a>. Still, his waterfalls are pretty small compared to those of the American tradition, usually under 10 feet in drop. And however much he influenced later painters, the inclusion (let alone ubiquity) of waterfalls did not make it into the Euro tradition.<br /><br />Then there is the single location, portrayed by numerous painters, of the cascades at Tivoli, near Rome. See <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Waterfalls_in_Tivoli_in_art">this gallery</a> of images. However, most of these painters are not Italian, let alone Roman -- they are mainly by French and Germans. So it does not contribute to their national identity, and they did not bring back their fascination with these particular waterfalls to their homeland, where they could have gone out trekking for local ones in order to bolster their Romantic nationalist sense of place. Also, they appear far too late in the imperial lifespan -- mainly from the mid-1700s to the mid-1800s -- to be fundamental to their nation's identities, which began forming in the Late Medieval and Renaissance eras, several centuries earlier.<br /><br />Also during that period, and also by a German traveling outside his homeland, Goethe wrote a poem where a waterfall is central to the symbolism, "Gesang der Geister uber den Wassern", inspired by a trip to Switzerland where he beheld the Staubbach Falls. Although it is an impressive waterfall, with a nearly 1,000-foot drop, he seems to be the only major figure to write about them, and does not seem to have started a trend for writing about waterfalls, either as part of a naturalistic portrayal of country settings or as a figurative symbol for the human condition. For some reason, waterfalls just cannot catch on within the broader group of creators or the audience, in the history of European empires.<br /><br />In fact, the Staubbach Falls were first <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bierstadt_Albert_Staubbach_Falls_Near_Lauterbrunnen_Switzerland.jpg">memorialized</a> in oil on canvas by an American painter, Albert Bierstadt of the Hudson River School, around 1865. (He was born in Germany, but moved to America at 1 year old, and spent almost his entire life in America.) He was the premier landscape painter of the American West in the mid-to-late 1800s, as American ethnogenesis began to really hit its stride, in the wake of our integrative civil war.<br /><br />He portrayed Nevada Falls, Multnomah Falls, Yellowstone Falls, the Falls of St. Anthony, Minnehaha Falls, Vernal Falls, a Rocky Mountain waterfall, Bridal Veil Falls in Yosemite, whose valley he referred to as the Garden of Eden... you get the idea (image search "albert bierstadt waterfall" for a longer list of examples). He must have painted every waterfall he came across during his westward trek across the frontier. More than any other single individual, he is responsible for placing the waterfall in our visual tradition of what the American landscape looks like, and for making waterfalls a necessary element of unspoiled paradise for Americans.<br /><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEit1QBm1FP0Vebss_wNG1koAnv5WWWdPFzfHe0cInDPQcm6zf1bMUPkeO-cSSeUby84qwHR6mZclRO7eYKbg_PL7sc7YBihGVCzqVOHktsT6I0q_x-SFhRCYpnEvJmc17GO90hF_ZvZDUujzLEk4D8zIKuDxvJ_9Tnqwr9neqzTIY3oXDo8bRpaxA/s1024/waterfalls-bierstadt-bridalveilyosemite-1872.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1024" data-original-width="736" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEit1QBm1FP0Vebss_wNG1koAnv5WWWdPFzfHe0cInDPQcm6zf1bMUPkeO-cSSeUby84qwHR6mZclRO7eYKbg_PL7sc7YBihGVCzqVOHktsT6I0q_x-SFhRCYpnEvJmc17GO90hF_ZvZDUujzLEk4D8zIKuDxvJ_9Tnqwr9neqzTIY3oXDo8bRpaxA/w288-h400/waterfalls-bierstadt-bridalveilyosemite-1872.jpg" width="288" /></a></div><br />As an aside, I avoid using terms like "Elysian" or "Arcadian" in the American context, as those are too specific to the Euro empires of the Early Modern era, as part of their imagined Ancient Greek origins. "Eden" and "paradise" are both Near / Middle Eastern, which America looks to more than Greece or Rome for its imagined origins. Using "Elysian" or "Arcadian" in America would be a fatal Euro-LARP, unmasking the not-so-American nature of back-Easterners.<br /><br />Here is another, later example from the Hudson River School, by Thomas Moran:<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEv1omuBC5aVAjQ8dXd4zM5cI-4ZGgvk3vrESwKI-Kiew-5nlyK1Yv1aYWubWDLgeKlf1L5Nem3eLLXbQxHSUmLfhEm_RN7k55DUG8rRQ2SsuZseXP2kyUGPOA9LX1ELOCkxiqQkM7HX2kmoEqGVdgj5zZSEnyEiH4bXXXwVoEZfA50FAWKaFRFA/s1024/waterfalls-moran-toltecgorge-1913.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1024" data-original-width="761" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEv1omuBC5aVAjQ8dXd4zM5cI-4ZGgvk3vrESwKI-Kiew-5nlyK1Yv1aYWubWDLgeKlf1L5Nem3eLLXbQxHSUmLfhEm_RN7k55DUG8rRQ2SsuZseXP2kyUGPOA9LX1ELOCkxiqQkM7HX2kmoEqGVdgj5zZSEnyEiH4bXXXwVoEZfA50FAWKaFRFA/w298-h400/waterfalls-moran-toltecgorge-1913.jpg" width="298" /></a></div><br />One of America's greatest illustrators, Maxfield Parrish, included a major waterfall in his famous 1930 work of the same name, and as part of a 1959 work during his landscape period.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgga7U8XpEpGh_3iRjKfXYsBT7xNcPtW21scKCz9UeKUR1DhJcOcGFnlblOdJ7v-lDwDWojnxcXMUzabqDcfwQnBXlfGCeeDSw52zKl6IIqPc6Xkwq5jrRi0oK_G1IJvG9yRdbhBgaET6FoBiuUvvjXw5aWpiOebPsf__K70jzN7hwSS8mlYbM-_g/s1200/waterfalls-parrish-waterfall-1930.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="857" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgga7U8XpEpGh_3iRjKfXYsBT7xNcPtW21scKCz9UeKUR1DhJcOcGFnlblOdJ7v-lDwDWojnxcXMUzabqDcfwQnBXlfGCeeDSw52zKl6IIqPc6Xkwq5jrRi0oK_G1IJvG9yRdbhBgaET6FoBiuUvvjXw5aWpiOebPsf__K70jzN7hwSS8mlYbM-_g/w286-h400/waterfalls-parrish-waterfall-1930.jpg" width="286" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCwlodO_ZwZPFh6uRiAXAQ_LxE1CNkP-1k-7cn_WJ7xlRa3H8QYojej-iYUQhPZzgMnAxpIcI0Jcoiql4Hi7LHoEbhhHmUvaozlu-RaTxx4eZ6_zcNgZIUUbiAk-MP4p59UFA6DTnuEWAvjY7z7z97n3325hcy9UDhq7VMn9Ce9pUkYZElhrGJAw/s500/waterfalls-parrish-cascades-1959.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="402" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCwlodO_ZwZPFh6uRiAXAQ_LxE1CNkP-1k-7cn_WJ7xlRa3H8QYojej-iYUQhPZzgMnAxpIcI0Jcoiql4Hi7LHoEbhhHmUvaozlu-RaTxx4eZ6_zcNgZIUUbiAk-MP4p59UFA6DTnuEWAvjY7z7z97n3325hcy9UDhq7VMn9Ce9pUkYZElhrGJAw/w321-h400/waterfalls-parrish-cascades-1959.jpg" width="321" /></a></div><br />On the popular painting side, Bob Ross painted a number of waterfalls over the years on The Joy of Painting, including <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGhXEPfp-W4">"Waterfall Wonder"</a> in 1988. Thomas Kinkade painted many as well, including <a href="https://thomaskinkadetx.com/art/mountain-paradise/">"Mountain Paradise"</a> in 2006.<br /><br />In television, the end of the opening credits for Twin Peaks (from the early 1990s) features an iconic aerial shot of the roaring Snoqualmie Falls, near Seattle, but standing in for the entire all-American landscape.<br /><br />Adding to the pre-historic Edenic feel of the landscape of Jurassic Park, which was filmed on location in Hawaii, are several shots of the Manawaiopuna Falls. Hiding behind a waterfall is a key plot point in Last of the Mohicans (set 100 years before the Hudson River School's vistas, but still placing waterfalls as part of America's original and defining landscape). Both of these movies are also from the early '90s.<br /><br />In the early talkie film era, Tarzan Finds a Son (1939) features waterfalls as part of its pre-historic present landscape. Perhaps earlier entries in the series include them as well, but this was the easiest example I found. The Disney portrayal from 1999 also has a major waterfall. Tarzan was created by the highly influential American myth-maker Edgar Rice Burroughs, also a major figure in the obsession with Mars and outer-space adventures.<br /><br />Although Tarzan is a British orphan growing up in Africa, he's more of a stand-in for America -- an off-shoot of the British Empire, finding its own way in a more primitive world, while still in the present day. And much like the vogue for the Tivoli cascades from 1750-1850, there was a vogue for the noble savage in Europe during that time, by the same crowd -- but they never created their own national alter ego out of one, like America did with Tarzan. By the time the Euros became enamored of noble savages, their national identities had already been constructed over several centuries, whereas American ethnogenesis was just getting kickstarted around the turn of the 20th century.<br /><br />In the medium of video games, waterfalls are so common in games of the classical period that it's easier to name those that do not have one somewhere. Even those that are not meant to evoke Eden or fantastical paradises, such as Contra and Double Dragon II, have prominent waterfall levels. Others set in fantasy worlds feature them as part of their landscape, such as Super Mario Bros. 2, Sonic the Hedgehog, Super Castlevania IV, Secret of Mana, and the pre-historic "dinosaurs and cavemen and volcanoes" world of Bonk's Adventure (a perfect example of the American genesis myth).<br /><br />In other games, the waterfall conceals a secret object or new location on the other side of it. See the video game section of <a href="https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CaveBehindTheFalls">this page</a> at TV Tropes. It began with the original Legend of Zelda, and has been used repeatedly throughout that series, as well as its latter-day imitators like Tunic from 2022.<br /><br />A Twitter account, @VGWaterfalls, has cataloged examples as well, although in typical fashion, he claims in <a href="https://www.polygon.com/2020/3/12/21177287/is-something-behind-the-waterfall-twitter-can-you-pet-the-dog-secrets-tristan-cooper">this article</a> that the trope goes back to Beowulf and Tolkien. I'll give him credit for at least not committing the gravest of LARP sins -- claiming Ancient Greek or Roman origins (which never materialize) -- but no, there is no waterfall, let alone one with a hidden secret on the other side of it, in Beowulf. Grendel's lair lies in a cavern deep beneath a lake -- and a lake is not the same as a waterfall. It's still, not flowing, horizontal, not vertical, expansive, not concentrated, low to the ground rather than high up in the air... they're not even close.<br /><br />I don't know what Tolkien reference he has in mind, but he was writing in the mid-20th C, when Britain had come under American cultural influence. There is no British or other European tradition of making waterfalls special and central and mythological. He did get inspiration for Rivendell after a 1911 trip to Switzerland -- the same location that inspired Goethe, in the Bernese Oberland. But by that point, waterfalls -- and the specific waterfall of Staubbach -- had already been memorialized by an American, namely Bierstadt. Let alone by the time he fleshed out that teenage inspiration into a mature work several decades later.<br /><br />Water slides are an outgrowth of our fondness for waterfalls, a stream of water rushing over a high ledge and plunging into a pool below. Maybe for safety reasons, we need a little solid course underneath us as we take that plunge, but still, it's hard not to see the comparison. Water slides and water parks are, naturally, an American invention from after our integrative civil war -- a topic I've been meaning to explore in-depth (along with amusement parks, carnivals, playgrounds, and other recreational spaces), but I'll just leave it there for now.<br /><br />The American preference for taking showers over baths is also an outgrowth of our waterfall culture. This practice began in the 1920s in America, and took decades to catch on in Europe, where taking baths is still more popular than in America. Naturally -- their visions of Arcadia, from Claude Lorrain to Henri Matisse, have always featured bathers. To fit our distinct national culture, Americans require our own private waterfall.<br /><br />A quick image search for "vintage ad waterfall" gives a range of examples from over the years: a 1970s campaign by Kool cigarettes, one from the 2000s by Gillette Venus Divine, another from the '50s by Early Times Kentucky Bourbon, another from the '40s by Coca-Cola, not to mention the tourism ads for Yosemite et al.<br /><br />International tourism among Americans is heavy on waterfalls as well, especially as we're more focused on the Pacific region, as the end-point of our westward expansion. By the turn of the 3rd millennium, the dream vacation for Americans was going to a tropical paradise like Bali, with its ubiquitous waterfalls -- or, if not internationally, at least to Hawaii, home to the same landscapes. I'm not sure when this craze for visiting foreign waterfalls began, perhaps during the Tiki / South Pacific craze of the 1930s and after.<br /><br />There are tons more examples within each of these areas of culture, I'm sure, but the point here is not to be comprehensive at that fine-grained level. It's to show how, in a very broad way, waterfalls are a distinct and unique feature of the American collective identity, in contrast to our European predecessors (and their contemporary descendants). Their physical world has falls of lesser and greater sizes, just like ours, but they never treated them in a special ethnos-defining way like we have.<br /><br />Indeed, Wikipedia's article on waterfalls notes that they have received little attention for study, especially among Europeans, and that most of the entries in the online catalog of global waterfalls are in North America (due to greater interest in them by North Americans, not because we are the only place to have them). Americans: the Waterfall People...<br /><br /><p></p>agnostichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12967177967469961883noreply@blogger.com261tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19346366.post-39940001611502785702023-07-05T17:05:00.003-04:002023-12-07T15:51:16.681-05:00"Click Yes Mumeiet" by We the Simps<p>Been a little while since I wrote a full song tribute to a Hololive gurrrrlll, and I've had Mumei's <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pm7UFWI9dzg">cover</a> of "Check Yes Juliet" by We the Kings stuck in my head since she sang it recently. I first had her pegged for a Great Lakes gal, due to her love of the harder and darker side of emo, but she has a decent Sun Belt emo side as well, the yearning and anxious side. Such a delightfully surprising mystery for the girl-next-door archetype...<br /><br />See this earlier <a href="https://akinokure.blogspot.com/2020/09/the-geography-of-emo-sun-belt-anxiety.html">post</a> on the geography of emo. ^_^<br /><br />Original lyrics <a href="https://genius.com/We-the-kings-check-yes-juliet-lyrics">here</a>.<br /><br />For those who don't watch vtubers, Mumei fits into the theme of the original by growing up in a confining environment, but can get over her second-guessing and hesitation with a good loving encouraging oomph from her community. It's not exaaaactly like bf + gf, as in the original, but friends and moral support and confidantes, with occasional playful flirtation. We're her outlet for socializing and sanity -- and silliness! :) We just have to navigate the opposing forces that want to keep us from relating to each other this way...<br /><br />Also, /vt/ is the vtuber board on 4chan, which she's more simpatico with, compared to other vtubers. I don't post there, or anywhere other than this blog, it's just where her most devoted fans hang out.<br /><br />Pronunciation guide: "save" in "savescumming" drawn out into two syllables, the first stressed ("SAY-ave-SCUM-ing" a la "TURN-ing BACK"). In the bridge, "your LI-mit-ers OFF / as we GET to KNOW". Every syllable stressed in the 3rd and 6th lines of the bridge, as in the original.<br /><br /><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/5CUyWJ7UINM" width="560"></iframe><br /><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">* * *<br /></p><p><br />Click yes Mumeiet, are ya winning?<br />Prechat's loading wheel keeps a-spinning<br />We won't go, until you press "go live"<br /><br />Click yes Mumeiet, drop the shitpost<br />We'll keep spamming hearts to your headphones<br />There's no savescumming our game tonight<br /><br />Open the 'Tube (owo owo)<br />Here's how we moom<br /><br />Fly owlgirl fly<br />Don't factory reset<br />They'll one-guy your heart<br />If you take all their meds (take all their meds)<br />Don't priv your art<br />Don't say we're only a meme<br />Fly owlgirl fly<br />Forever we'll be<br />Moom's /vt/<br /><br />Click yes Mumeiet, we'll be painting<br />Pining, posting, yours for the faving<br />Stream unannounced, and don't ask a poll's advice<br /><br />Click yes Mumeiet, here's the schedule:<br />Seven nights of zatsu with Red Bull<br />They can hide the vods, don't let them hide your smile<br /><br />Open the 'Tube (owo owo)<br />Here's how we moom<br /><br />Fly owlgirl fly<br />Don't factory reset<br />They'll one-guy your heart<br />If you take all their meds (take all their meds)<br />Don't priv your art<br />Don't say we're only a meme<br />Fly owlgirl fly<br />Forever we'll be<br />Moom's /vt/<br /><br />Connecting through the site<br />Connecting through the site<br />Endless timeline<br />Your limiters off<br />As we get to know<br />You byte by byte<br /><br />Fly owlgirl fly<br />Don't factory reset<br />They'll one-guy your heart<br />If you take all their meds (take all their meds)<br />Don't priv your art<br />Don't say we're only a meme<br />Fly owlgirl fly<br />Forever we'll be<br />Moom's /vt/<br />Moom's /vt/<br />Moom's /vt/<br /><br /></p>agnostichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12967177967469961883noreply@blogger.com27tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19346366.post-46784199816608208642023-06-29T02:09:00.008-04:002023-06-29T02:20:23.749-04:00Ancient aliens: America's divine intervention genesis myth about civilization and life itself<p>Having looked at the distinctly American genesis myth of our prehistory -- inhabiting the same land as dinosaurs and missing links, threatened by a volcanic rather than a diluvian apocalypse -- let's look at the other distinctly American genesis myth about our even deeper history. How did life itself ever come to be on Earth? It's actually the same myth regarding the birth of terrestrial civilizations, at a far later stage of our species' history -- being seeded by aliens!<br /><br />In contrast to the creation myths of most cultures throughout the world and over time, ours does not dwell on the creation of the Earth itself, the stars, sky, oceans, and so on and so forth. You can believe in the Abrahamic universe-creation myth of the Old World, the Big Bang, or whatever else. Those inanimate things are taken for granted. What we really want to know is, how did life begin and get to where we human beings are today? And for us compared to other animals, how did civilized societies begin and get to where they are today?<br /><br />The myth is not interested in evolution as much as the initial birth from apparent nothingness. Notice that the "cavemen and dinosaurs" myth doesn't say where primates came from -- they're just there, in media res of their drama. And the myth about the origins of life itself doesn't concern itself with any particular species that is present far later on, human or otherwise. Evolution is boring, while creation from nothing is interesting.<br /><br />This is another stark contrast with the Old World creation myths, where human beings are created in their more-or-less current form (e.g., Adam and Eve). Sometime in the distant past, a creation of some kind occurred -- whether it was creating life where there was none before, or primates where there were only non-primate animals before, or hominids where there were only apes before, or human-like cavemen where there were only missing links before.<br /><br />Somehow -- it doesn't matter how -- that initial creation led to us here today. We did evolve from earlier forms, but how that happened is irrelevant. How far back does the creation process go? And who if anyone was in charge of the initial creation?<br /><br />Notice that this creation myth accommodates the 19th-century debates on the evolution of human beings. Not being an Old World culture, we never felt very threatened by the idea that homo sapiens evolved from earlier primate forms, rather than being created as we are now, back in the Garden of Eden, according to Abrahamic myth which took root in Europe during the Middle Ages via Christianization.<br /><br />We have never had a national church, de jure or de facto (although during the mid-20th C., the United Methodist Church came the closest). Nor, therefore, any hierarchy of national church officials who could enculturate Americans in the Genesis creation myth. And no, contrary to clever-sillies, nothing is a "church" outside of Christianity. Academia is not a church, and the two most popular creation myths held by the general public -- Genesis for Christians, ancient aliens for non-Christians -- have taken deep root *in spite of* constant pressure by the hierarchical officials in the schooling sector to kill them off.<br /><br />Nor is civic philosophy and dogma a "religion", let alone a "church". Church refers to a Christian institution, in contrast to mosques for Muslims, temples for Buddhists, etc. And all stripes of American civic philosophy and dogma are entirely silent about creation -- of the Earth, of life, of homo sapiens, etc. There's no primeval narrative of how things began, let alone one bringing supernatural or at least more-than-human actors and supervisors into the cast of characters.<br /><br />And so, because we're not committed to where contemporary human beings came from, we can avoid the whole controversy arising from Darwin, who only says how things evolve once life-forms have existed, not whether or not there is a first created form of life and how that came into being. That controversy vexed all Old World religions, but not ours -- we're so new, we could just build in an agnostic stance regarding evolution at the beginning!<br /><br />The Mormons -- America's global religion -- are also famously equivocating on evolution, with high officials officially saying don't ask, don't tell, it doesn't matter. What matters is the creation of life, the creation of god-like beings, the creation of civilizations in the New World, the appearance of Jesus in the New World, and so on and so forth. Don't worry about whether or how today's human beings descended from earlier primates.<br /><br />Our creation myth also avoided the controversy about the Big Bang vs. static universe from the early 20th C., right as our myth was starting to take shape. Ours is not about cosmogenesis, unlike many other major religions and folk cultures, including Christianity. We could already sense that controversy as it was developing, so we built in an agnosticism about it from the outset. Only focus on the creation of life, humans, civilizations -- not the universe itself, stars, planets, and all that other inanimate and non-societal stuff.<br /><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">* * *<br /></p><p><br />The ancient aliens myth only began -- when else? -- during the 1890s, after our integrative civil war was wrapped up, and our ethnogenesis could get going for real, as in the lifespan of every empire. And where else could it have been born but out West? -- Flagstaff, Arizona, to be exact. Although hailing from a Boston Brahmin family, Percival Lowell used his wealth to build a world-class observatory in Arizona, where viewing conditions would be superior than back East -- but also because it would be more Romantically American to explore the next frontier of outer space, from our defining meta-ethnic frontier out West (against the Indians and later Mexicans).<br /><br />Although later famous as the site that discovered the ninth planet Pluto, whose existence was predicted by Lowell, it was initially dedicated to the study of Mars -- specifically, what Lowell thought to be its canals. The overview of his vision of Mars can be skimmed in the <a href="https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Mars_(Lowell)/Conclusion#Conclusion">Conclusion</a> section of his book Mars (1895).<br /><br />The canal structures suggested that not only was there water on Mars, there was life, it was intelligent, and it was advanced enough technologically, and organized in a socially complex way, as to complete irrigation projects.<br /><br />If anything, he thought they were more advanced than anything on Earth -- inventing and using technology far beyond our own, and rising above petty partisan politics, to undertake such a planetwide project. He says that human beings are not even the highest of the mammals, putting us in our lower place relative to Martians. And he says Martians and their civilizations are far older than ours, Mars being an older and dying planet. These elements of the narrative are all necessary for the next step, where they intervene in Earthly matters.<br /><br />He does explicitly state that life on Mars will likely have evolved into different forms from life on Earth, owing to the different environments they're adapting to. But that doesn't contradict a belief that they could have visited us in the past, seeded our civilizations, or even seeded life itself on Earth. It only requires them to have a somewhat different superficial form, and that we were not made entirely in their own image -- rather, at the abstract level of "life-form" or "intelligent life-form" or "civilizational being".<br /><br />Although Lowell didn't go that far in his non-fiction work, a contemporary of his -- also a popularizing astronomer -- did in an early work of science-fiction, Garrett Serviss' novel Edison's Conquest of Mars (1898). Here, Martians are hostile to Earth, engaged in a War of the Worlds kind of battle with it. During one of their missions to capture slaves from Earth, 9000 years ago, they built the Great Pyramids and the Great Sphinx of Egypt (the Sphinx being made in the image of their leader).<br /><br />While the Earth-battling Martians hardly resemble the benevolent steward / supervisor gods of later versions of the myth, this is still the beginning of the myth of ancient aliens directly intervening in the course of events on Earth, seeding a major civilization.<br /><br />And true to our Europe-obscuring identity, Serviss located the ancient alien intervention in Egypt, not even an Indo-European culture like the Greeks, Romans, Celts, etc. That would have been too much of a Euro-LARP, so if it has to be set in the Old World, it must be within the Saharo-Arabian sphere (Egypt, Israel, Mesopotamia, etc.). This was decades before the Egyptian craze of the 1920s -- it's simply the most obvious solution to "Old World civilizational ancestor of America that is not related to Europe". The only others would be from the Far East, and that's too much of a stretch of the imagination, compared to the Fertile Crescent.<br /><br />If you're an American, and want to learn a dead language to study our civilizational ancestors in the Old World, you want to learn hieroglyphics, cuneiform, or maybe Biblical Hebrew / Aramaic -- not Greek and Latin (back-East Euro-LARP). I'm sure the Saharo-Arabians find this imagined heritage of ours comical -- "you Faranji people come from Europe!" But we are American, and Americans are fundamentally not European, so no, we do not come from Europe. Where else could we have derived from in the civilized Old World? -- China? C'mon, the Fertile Crescent is far more believable than China...<br /><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">* * *<br /></p><p><br />After the European empires, aside from Russia, bit the dust after WWI, and became occupied by America after WWII, the American myth of ancient aliens began to take root in Europe as well. This process reached maturity by the late '60s, when Erich von Daeniken wrote Chariots of the Gods? It was soon made into a feature-length documentary movie, whose English dub you can watch on YouTube <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guPG2DlhBdI">here</a>.<br /><br />This is far and away the best audio-visual telling of the narrative, with amazing photography, ethnographic portraits, voiceover, and conveying the sublime nature of the archaeological record. It's superior to the more plodding, meandering, and less artistic renditions associated with Rod Serling from the same time period (In Search of Ancient Astronauts, In Search of Ancient Mysteries, and The Outer Space Connection, all available on YouTube as well, but you can stick to the last one, which incorporates the first two).<br /><br />I think von Daeniken being Swiss was important, since he was not part of a collapsed empire, and was not subject to the hangover effect that had wiped out native cultural innovation in the collapsed Euro empires. Similar to Le Corbusier in architecture, who was a footnote to the American pioneer Frank Lloyd Wright of many decades earlier, yet still more original and influential than the Bauhaus people from Germany and Austria (like Mies van der Rohe and Marcel Breuer).<br /><br />You can tell how well the Europeans had incorporated the American framework by their avoidance of their own European ancestors. The focus is on ancient Egypt, Israel, Mesopotamia, and New World cultures like the Maya, Tiwanaku, Easter Islanders, and so on. Nothing about China, nothing about Greece or Rome. The book, but not the movie, does include Stonehenge among its examples. Indeed, in the movie there's only a single passing mention of any Indo-European culture -- purported descriptions of ancient astronauts in the Ramayana of the Indo-Aryans.<br /><br />From the ancient aliens narrative, you'd hardly know that there were people and civilizations in Europe during ancient and Medieval times! But that's unsurprising given its American origin.<br /><br />Some local adaptations did work in their own history, such as the British movie Quatermass and the Pit (1967), in which contemporary people discover a Martian spaceship in the London Underground from millions of years ago, along with skeletons of primate ancestors just as old, the preserved remains of the insectoid Martians, and the revelation of Martian intervention in the evolution of the hominid lineage on Earth. That could be totally American, but the story also uses this Martian spaceship's effects to explain historical accounts of the devil, spectral phenomena, and other witchy goings-on -- within England, during the Medieval and Early Modern periods.<br /><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">* * *<br /></p><p><br />How about further back, to the creation of life itself on Earth? This view, strangely titled "directed panspermia", goes back to an American and Soviet collaboration (as in many other areas of 20th-C. culture, the only two empires left standing coincided, both sharing outsider status vis-a-vis the Early Modern Euro empires that defined high culture up until then). Namely, the astronomers Carl Sagan and Iosif Shklovsky, whose 1966 book Intelligent Life in the Universe raised the possibility that extraterrestrial life-forms could have purposefully delivered life to Earth.<br /><br />Where *those* life-forms are supposed to come from, who knows? And who cares? The genesis myth is only meant to account for the ancestry of us, the story-tellers, and perhaps our fellow animals. Just as we are not interested in cosmogenesis, we aren't interested in whether the alien race that seeded life on Earth was itself seeded by a third alien race, and if there was a prime mover alien race, and so on and so forth.<br /><br />Likewise, American culture is not really concerned with the other direction of panspermia, whereby we would seed life on other planets. That is about our future, whereas this concept is really to account for our distant past.<br /><br />For my money, the best telling of this myth is the 1993 episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, "The Chase" (from the amazing season 6). It's not just a high-concept "what if?" story, but brings to life the excitement of high-stakes archaeological fieldwork, collecting clues, solving puzzles, and trying to stay one step ahead of your competitors in the race to the finish. This version is about the spread of humanoid life, not life in general, but that is to keep the focus on the ultimate subject of narrative interest -- us, not plants or viruses or whatever. If aliens could seed humanoid life, certainly they could send mold spores to other planets as well.<br /><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">* * *<br /></p><p><br />Redditards, Wiki-brains, and other midwits love to deride the ancient aliens creation myth -- creation of life itself, of humanoids, or of civilization -- as a "pseudoscientific hypothesis" or "conspiracy theory," terms that they never use for Adam & Eve, Noah / the Flood, the World Tree, Persephone and the harvesting cycle, and so on. By now, so many Americans believe, or are at least open to the possibility, of the ancient aliens story, that it cannot be a hypothesis -- common people don't know what a hypothesis is, how to test it, how to analyze results, weigh in on counter-arguments, etc. It's a story that you believe or don't, and science has nothing to do with it.<br /><br />None of the most popular entries in the genre present the concepts in the manner of a scientific method, experiment, etc. On the surface level, they're trying to make sense of seemingly unbelievable phenomena, while on a deeper level they're trying to connect us with our distant ancestors through narrative, myth, and storytelling. And as such, there's little that "science" can do to push or pull anyone.<br /><br />Very few people have "beliefs," let alone a system of beliefs. It's not about belief, in the sense of a theory. It's about whether the story gives meaning to that person, not individually, but as part of something larger than themselves -- to their distant ancestors, the chain of transmission up to the present, and the universe beyond our own world. It's more about emotional and social and cultural satisfaction, which nerdy arguments, "data", etc. cannot move one way or the other.<br /><br />Exactly like Adam & Eve, Noah and the Flood, and other such myths from the Old World. It's just that, as with most clueless back-East academics and media-ites, they deny that America is a different culture from anything in the Old World. But just cuz we're a young civilization, doesn't mean we aren't distinctive, and these various origin myths -- Cavemen and Dinosaurs and Volcanos, Ancient Aliens, and the Book of Mormon -- are all a testament to that. They're as American as burgers and blocky buildings.<br /><br />The rAtiOnAL SkEPtiCs who think they're smart or insightful for trying to deboonk origin stories involving aliens, are the same who labor fruitlessly to convince Americans that cavemen and dinosaurs never lived at the same time (somebody's never watched the Flintstones), that there was not a worldwide flood that destroyed all life except for Noah's Ark, etc.<br /><br />The haters' arguments require no math, problem-solving, pattern recognition, specialized knowledge, breadth of knowledge, or anything like that. Any idiot can make them -- and plenty of total numbskulls and ignoramuses do.<br /><br />What they are is autistic, not able to empathize with normal human beings, who have a deep need for the social / cultural / emotional satisfaction of belonging to something beyond their individual personal private self, across both time and space. Autists have a broken social lobe in their brain, and being incapable of empathy, they project their broken social lobe onto everyone else as well.<br /><br />"Why would anyone want to feel connected to others across space and time? Nah, they must be making scientific-method claims subject to experimental testing..."<br /><br />There's a heavy overlap between know-nothing rational skeptics and libertarians, both highly autistic and clueless. Libertarian morality is only about "avoiding harm and fraud", excluding matters of purity, sanctity, and taboo (Jonathan Haidt, The Moral Mind). So when they see a sacred narrative, they don't mind pissing all over it -- not as a vindication for their side of a debate, since there is no debate. They're cluelessly assuming the other side is involved in scientific claim-making, rather than cultural bonding through narrative and myth.<br /><br />This is why no one regards them as smartypants or intellectuals, who happen to use their big brains for sacrilegious purposes -- they're just clueless midwits or dum-dums. It takes no IQ to piss on something sacred, it's entirely a matter of attitude.<br /><br />And like typical self-centered semi-children, they pat themselves on the back for how clever they are, when it's only a matter of their attitude, not brainpower or knowledge, which are middling and spoonfed from some online midwit clearinghouse / group chat like Reddit, Wikipedia, etc.<br /><br />Normal-brained Americans will keep alive the stories of "When dinosaurs towered over cavemen," "When Martians visited ancient Egypt," and the like.<br /><br /></p>agnostichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12967177967469961883noreply@blogger.com49tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19346366.post-8657487336344005602023-06-19T03:40:00.004-04:002023-06-19T03:54:09.978-04:00Dinosaurs, cavemen, and volcanic disaster: America's prehistoric genesis myth<p>The root problem in American ethnogenesis is that we just got here, and where we came from was host to rival empires with their own already elaborated cultures. The solution has been to push into the background the period of time when those empires grew. So, ignore the Early Modern and most of the Medieval periods, and a good amount of the Ancient world as well.<br /><br />As I've detailed earlier, American culture does allow some exceptions -- provided they avoid our European lineage. Mainly, this means drawing on our imagined connections to the Saharo-Arabian sphere rather than the Indo-European one. Ancient Egypt and Israel / Judah are more fundamental to American identity than Ancient Rome or Greece, and not because we're all Christian fundamentalists -- none of the Egyptian part of our culture is from Greco-Roman times or later, it's from the times of the pyramids, mummies, death masks, scarab beetles, hieroglyphics, etc.<br /><br />But even Ancient Egypt falls within the historical record -- where did we come from before then? What is our prehistoric genesis myth?<br /><br />Not in the Garden of Eden, not Adam and Eve, or anything else that is distinctly Old World-oriented, let alone from an existing Old World genesis myth (from the Old Testament). That would contradict our New World identity. Sure, maybe we ultimately came from the Old World, but our origins back there must somehow feel as though they were also right here. More lush and tropical, more beachy. And so far back in time that it trumps the Old World vs. New World population split -- perhaps so far back that the continents were all one big Pangaean landmass anyway, where the Old vs. New World distinction doesn't even exist.<br /><br />But in any case, a stylized imaginary location much like the Garden of Eden, which does not come with a latitude & longitude measurement to pinpoint it for the audience. Shrouded in the mysteries of prehistory, but clear enough to be seen in its outlines.<br /><br />In the American genesis myth, the land is lush and tropical, along with rocky mountainous areas, ringed by beaches, with no seafaring technology to take anyone far off into the ocean. Crucially, there is a volcano somewhere, whether it is prominent in the landscape or its downstream effects are (like cooled & hardened lava making up the rocky terrain).<br /><br />Our primitive caveman ancestors do not inhabit this island alone -- an endless variety of dinosaurs tower over us, mainly as apex predators who prey on the cavemen (and lesser dinosaur species). Our caveman ancestors didn't have very advanced technology, for defense or offense, so they / we were always underdogs, unlikely Davids against the terrifying Goliaths.<br /><br />In fact, there were other human-like primates there as well -- depending on the telling, some far more primitive and ape-like than our caveman ancestors, some a bit more advanced. But not human, in either case -- a rival hominid species.<br /><br />As though there were not enough drama from the negotiations and battles among caveman tribes, and cavemen woo-ing cavewomen, and the struggle for survival against the dinosaurs -- when a climactic, apocalyptic event is called for, it is not water-related like the flood of the Old Testament, and there is no water-related vessel like an ark to navigate it.<br /><br />Rather, it is fire-based -- a massive volcanic eruption, with lava flowing freely, fireballs raining down from the sky, the earth splitting apart to open fiery pits below, and depending on how long the event is followed, ash and smoke clouding the sky, depriving the lush vegetation of sunlight, and wreaking havoc on the landscape long after the initial explosion. In this large-scale destruction, the lumbering dinosaurs are left with nowhere to hide and sadly go extinct, while the nimble and clever cavemen -- some fortunate subset of them, anyway, who lend a helping hand to each other -- eke out an existence in the aftermath, ultimately to populate the entire world with human beings. (Likewise the other cute and clever mammals, though little attention is given to their fate.)<br /><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">* * *<br /></p><p><br />There is no single author or work that provides the outline for this genesis myth, but legends rarely do trace back to a single author. Similar stories are told, they catch on, are reworked, and nobody remembers exactly where they came from, or who they came from.<br /><br />But in the interest of scholarly documentation, this genesis myth comes -- when else? -- after the integrative civil war in American imperial expansion, when our ethnogenesis really gets started. The earliest example I can find is D.W. Griffith's short film "Primitive Man" (AKA Brute Force), from 1914, following up on his dinosaur-free short film "Man's Genesis" from 1912. In a comical vein, there was also the 1915 short, "The Dinosaur and the Missing Link: A Prehistoric Tragedy". Later animated shorts include "Felix the Cat Trifles with Time" from 1925, and "Daffy Duck and the Dinosaur" from 1939.<br /><br />The myth would not be fleshed out in feature-length form until 1940, in the American movie One Million B.C., which was later remade in 1966 in American-occupied Britain, as One Million Years B.C., with Raquel Welch and Martine Beswick (now that'll get the ol' caveman nature a-goin'). The Brits, still under American influence after their own empire and culture bit the dust after WWI, followed up on their remake with a new example of their own, 1970's When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (starring recent Playboy Playmate of the Year, Victoria Vetri).<br /><br />In between then, from 1960 to '66, the iconic TV series The Flintstones standardized the key element of dinosaurs and homo sapiens co-existing.<br /><br />By the time of the 1983 Iron Maiden song "Quest for Fire", about primitive man, it had become obligatory to introduce the story with, "In a time when dinosaurs walked the earth..."<br /><br />In later media, Japanese video games series of the 1990s like Bonk's Adventure and Joe & Mac depict cavemen and dinosaurs side-by-side, with dinosaurs as predators upon cavemen, and prominent volcanic landscapes (Bonk's transformation animation shows his head exploding like a volcano, too).<br /><br />By now, this myth is so widespread and taken for granted that Wikipedia editors feel the need to "correct the record" -- to no avail -- by stating that it's an anachronism to depict hominids and dinosaurs living in the same time period. So clueless -- in American cultural works, it is *required* to show dinosaurs and cavemen side-by-side! They are fiction, legends, myths, not claiming to be pedantic documentaries or audio-visual textbooks. And so, the "dinos and grugs" image remains.<br /><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">* * *<br /></p><p><br />The stark differences between the American genesis myth and all others from our closest historical relatives (actual, not imagined) are obvious. That includes the Garden of Eden, the World Tree, or the Titans (dinosaurs only bearing a weak resemblance to them, due to their sheer size and ferocity, not in being proto-gods or super-humans).<br /><br />But it also differs crucially from other European stories about dinosaurs and hominids found together, such as Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864-'7) or Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World (1912).<br /><br />For one thing, those stories never spawned an endless chain of development within Europe. Instead, they took root and multiplied in America, beginning with Edgar Rice Burroughs, author of Tarzan (*not* a dino-centric series), who developed them in his Pellucidar series and Caspak series of pulp novels during the 1910s. He also pioneered the other side of our primitive-futurist cultural identity, in his Barsoom series, also from the 1910s, about life and adventure on Mars (including dinosaur-esque prehistoric beasts).<br /><br />The main difference, though, is that the Europeans were not writing genesis myths -- they were set in the contemporary world, albeit in some undiscovered part of it, where prehistoric creatures had managed to survive into the present day. Perhaps far under the Earth's crust, perhaps some remote island -- but still, today. The American works I mentioned in the last section are all set in the very distant past, as part of an origin story. Lost world vs. prehistoric genesis.<br /><br />Why didn't Jules Verne or other Europeans hit on the genesis approach? Because they already had secure genesis myths, from the Garden of Eden, the Roman Empire, Medieval chivalry, Early Modern gunpowder, global exploration, etc. They had no need to set their origin story 1 million years ago.<br /><br />But Americans, needing to obscure our European and even Indo-European lineage, had to set our genesis myth in the very distant past, when dinosaurs walked the earth, alongside our caveman ancestors, with that volcano always looming in the background.<br /><br />It also played up our out-West cultural origins, following the meta-ethnic frontier between us and the Indians, and later the Mexicans in the Southwest. There are no volcanoes back East, but there are closer to the Pacific Ring of Fire, Yellowstone, etc. Crucially, there are no active volcanoes in Europe proper, only in some Mediterranean islands. There are hardly any inactive volcanoes in Europe, for that matter. Western America is also where the dinosaur bone beds are. Not to mention earlier stages of human culture and civilization, among the Indians. Whether or not a given Indian tribe is hunter-gatherers, it's a hell of a lot closer to "primitive man" than any group of people in former European empires.<br /><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">* * *<br /></p><p><br />The centrality of these elements in our conception of who we are and where we came from, is shown by what questions we start asking about the Christian genesis myth, which itself is borrowed from the Second Temple Judaic myth.<br /><br />What does the Bible have to say about dinosaurs, huh? Or "the fossil record" -- which means "dinosaur bones," not fossils of intermediate stages in evolution. Adam sure doesn't seem like a caveman -- are you *sure* this is the first human being? And what's all this about a catastrophic flood -- everyone knows the dinosaurs were wiped out by a meteor impact and/or volcanic eruptions.<br /><br />This is not a midwit attempt to defeat mythology with empirical facts, evidence, science, reason, etc. -- it is one myth vs. another myth. Skeptics and atheists foolishly thought that Americans not buying into the Garden of Eden or Great Flood myths meant that they were fellow reddit-brains, when it really meant Americans had developed their own genesis myth that was sharply at odds with the Old World one. That's why we ignore the Wikipedia nerds complaining about the aNaCHroNiStIC depiction of cavemen and dinosaurs in the Stone Age!<br /><br />Mormonism, the distinct American religion, still relies on the Garden of Eden myth, although being a young religion, perhaps they have enough time to issue "clarifications" or addenda to work the "cavemen and dinosaurs and/or other hominids" into their canon. They are much more neutral about evolution and missing links and our relationship with primates, and do not have many Young Earth types. So they could probably work dinosaurs and cavemen into their mythology better than Christians could.<br /><br />Instead of Lucifer tempting Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, he's influencing one tribe or another among the population of One Million Years B.C., to act in evil ways to benefit themselves while harming others, acting in defiance of God's will in order to get a leg up in the competition against other tribes... perhaps killing too many dinosaurs, without being able to eat their meat, use their bones for construction, and so on. Irresponsible relationship with animals, especially if God had told them the dinos were sacred and not to be messed around with unnecessarily.<br /><br />And by this point, dinosaurs *are* sacred animals in American culture, not only from our genesis myth, but lost world stories from King Kong to Jurassic Park, not to mention other icons like Godzilla (imported from Japan, who understands us more than any other foreign nation does), Barney, Yoshi (another one from Japan), the all-American '90s family sit-com Dinosaurs, "rawr means 'I love you' in dinosaur," and even the Dino Gura costume for the most famous vtuber (rivaling her shark theme in popularity).<br /><br />Not too long ago, kids' snacks were made to resemble zoo animals -- but by now, they have to be dino nuggets, dino chips, dino egg candies, and so on and so forth. All part of enculturating our future generations into respect for the dinosaurs.<br /><br />More than the bald eagle -- our nominal national mascot -- it is the dinosaurs who are our spirit animals. No one else had claimed them, since they had only recently been understood, as of the late 19th century, especially during the American "bone wars" between rival paleontologists (a term that still refers to "dinosaur bones" in common speech). Just the right opportunity for a young nation that wants to mythologize its prehistoric origins!<br /><br /></p>agnostichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12967177967469961883noreply@blogger.com36tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19346366.post-75728691792355971172023-06-17T15:26:00.005-04:002023-06-17T16:34:20.612-04:00The Midcentury tiki / caveman origins of the iconic low "mansard" roof for McDonald's, Pizza Hut, etc.<p>The recent posts about Googie and tiki styles co-existing, as well as the primitive style of the Polynesian Village Resort at the founding of Disney World, got me thinking about American roof styles.<br /><br />There's a group of small office buildings I drive by that are only 1 story -- and a low story at that -- but have tall roofs, like an extra 1 1/2 stories, that dominate the height of the building. However, they don't have windows in the roof, and they don't appear to be used as a second floor. The total height is still low, so it looks more like a primitive hut or longhouse -- prominent but low roof, squat main floor. The roofs are pitched and clad in shingles, not metal or slate or terra cotta tiles or whatever else.<br /><br />That's when it hit me -- those iconic "mansard" roofs that distinguished every McDonald's, Burger King, Pizza Hut, etc., were not really mansard! They were tiki! It was a carry-over or evolution of the tropical longhouse-inspired roof from the Polynesian craze, after the overtly Polynesian elements had outgrown the fashion cycle, for the time being, before future tiki revivals (tiki statues & torches, leighs, hula dancing, ukuleles, and so on).<br /><br />First, for examples of these "mansard" roofs in American popular architecture, see <a href="http://www.retailwatchers.com/viewtopic.php?p=32798&sid=f94e648bfe056f3c7418d567d32e178a#p32798">this discussion</a> in general, and <a href="https://blog.pizzahut.com/tbt-the-story-of-pizza-huts-red-roof/">this history</a> from Pizza Hut. McDonald's and Pizza Hut independently pioneered this style in 1969 (both in the Midwest-to-West, following our meta-ethnic frontier against Indians and later Mexicans), and it became ubiquitous during the '70s and '80s.<br /><br />Really only the McDonald's and Pizza Hut have a noticeable change in the angle between the central part (steep) and the outer part (shallow). Wendy's had a changing angle, from steep to shallow from center to edge, but it was smooth and curved, not quite as striking. And Burger King and KFC had a single large "outer" part with a constant slope, and a short vertical perimeter around the "center" -- not really that noticeable of an angle change.<br /><br />Now contrast with <a href="https://www.homedit.com/mansard-roof/">examples</a> of actual mansard roofs -- and crucially, the rest of the building that they are a part of.<br /><br />These roofs consist mostly of the steep vertical central part, with the outer more horizontal edge being almost a flourish or afterthought. The American roofs are more about that outer edge, less about the vertical central part. Mansard roofs have windows (dormers), whereas the American roofs do not. The cladding is sophisticated stone, usually slate tile, whereas the American roofs do not use stone and do not even try to imitate it -- it looks more like primitive wooden tiles (shake), even if it's technically asphalt. (Later revisions made the American roofs metal, too sleek compared to the original style.)<br /><br />And most importantly, mansard roofs do not dominate the height of the building. Especially where they came from, in Early Modern French chateaus, there are two stories below -- with very high European ceilings on each floor. The roof is still prominent, but not dominating. The dormer windows show that the top floor was either a full floor unto itself, or at least an attic with high ceilings (for an attic) and lots of light coming in.<br /><br />The American roofs dominate the height of the entire building, there is only one story below, and even that main floor has low ceilings, as is typical of Midcentury buildings (like ranch homes in the residential sector). They are not grand imposing hulks of mass -- that would be Brutalist buildings of the same time period -- but short squat huts, tapping more into the primitive than the futurist side of the American style of architecture.<br /><br />And unlike the buildings with real mansard roofs, the American buildings are fairly open around their main story. Sometimes a wall-o'-windows straight out of Googie, though more often broken up by columns or piers, still opening up the main space on three sides (the back one closed off for the drive-thru).<br /><br />Therefore, the American buildings read more as open outdoor structures like a primitive hut or a beach tent, without proper sturdy walls to enclose the interior (materially or visually). The columns or piers are just the supports for the deeply overhanging roof -- much like the porch-area columns holding up the roof of a Craftsman bungalow. In fact, the columns on the Pizza Hut buildings have the same shape as Craftsman bungalow columns -- wide at the base and tapering toward the top. Very distinctly American all around -- but what else would you expect from Pizza Hut?!<br /><br />Although the pseudo-walls are windowed, from the outside and inside alike there is no feeling of the "light and airy" environment of Early Modern Euro imperial styles, such as a French chateau. Low ceilings, dark-tinted windows, no dormer windows or skylights in the massive roof, all contribute to the cozy caveman hut environment that Americans crave. We are part caveman, part spaceman -- and nothing in between (that's the Europeans, who we are not).<br /><br />See <a href="https://www.roadarch.com/tiki2.html">this gallery</a> for tiki architecture of the Midcentury, just before the mass adoption of the not-mansard roof style in commercial American buildings. (There are 3 other galleries on tiki, at the bottom of the page, but this one shows off the dominant roofs.) Looks pretty familiar, eh?<br /><br />However, perhaps these roofs did not emerge directly from tiki, but from the broader caveman developments to our collective identity during the early and mid-20th C. It's too bad the Flintstones had homes that were like Midcentury ranch homes, with comparatively flat roofs that do not dominate the height. True Stone Age roofs would cover most of the height (and be thatched, not stone slabs), sometimes reaching all the way to the ground, so that the hut is really just one great big roof (ditto for an igloo).<br /><br />In either case, these Pizza Hut type roofs derive from the primitive theme that came from within American cultural evolution, not from importing or copying a European style. How anyone can look at a 1970s McDonald's and see a French chateau, rather than a caveman hut, is beyond me -- why the use of the term "mansard", then? Probably just status-striver branding, I dunno.<br /><br />McDonald's itself began with an iconic Googie design -- as did many restaurants and coffee shops of the time -- tapping more into the futuristic side of American culture, before eventually changing over to the primitive hut style. But in both cases, it was distinctly American, not European. A little more Jetsons at the start, then more Flintstones later.<br /><br />Googie already had a heavy primitive theme, with its flagstone walls and tropical vegetation inside and outside. Very few vernacular styles of the supposedly more optimistic '50s and '60s were purely futuristic -- and so the shift to more earthy primitive hut styles in the '70s and '80s does not represent a turn toward the pessimistic or dystopian regarding the future and technology. Brutalism was still in full force, and it would dominate commercial architecture in the '70s and '80s -- in the grand scale buildings, with malls, not with the smaller detached hamburger stands.<br /><br />When you think about it, a hi-tech space-rocket style for a burger joint is a little out of place. That should be for a grander scale, like the airport terminals and later the malls -- symbols of our growing societal complexity and industrial / technological progress. A standalone pizza parlor, which is not even connected to other stores as in a strip center, is too small-scale to merit the Universe of Tomorrow treatment. So just go with the cozy caveman theme instead -- just like detached homes, which never got the Brutalist treatment but the cozy caveman treatment (ranch homes).<br /><br />Some new McDonald's are getting the retro Googie look, which is also fine -- at least it's part of American culture, albeit still a little out of place for a burger joint. But I'd rather have one of those than, well...<br /><br />I don't want to dwell too much on the desecration of American architecture during the neoliberal era. But in this case, it was not a sudden explosion during the woketard iconoclasm of the 2010s, although it certainly got exponentially worse during that decade as well. The main change in the 2010s was to paint everything dull gray, as shown in <a href="https://architectureandbranding.wordpress.com/2012/02/15/architecture-branding-mcdonalds-disowns-the-roof-and-serves-up-a-new-image/">this overview</a> from 2012, right as that wave of desecration had begun.<br /><br />But earlier in 2006, McDonald's got rid of its caveman hut roofs, and radically shifted to a more Euro look overall -- sophisticated stone facades, bland agoraphobic light-and-airy interiors, etc. And sometime before that (the '90s?) they began replacing the primitive-themed brown shingles with sleek metal roofs that were ketchup red. At least they left the caveman hut proportions mostly intact, though.<br /><br />The later styles removed the roof nearly entirely, made the facades more filled-in and, well, facade-like instead of the wraparound wall-o'-windows broken up only by columns (not proper walls). They appear too tall, not like the cozy squat huts dominated by a massive roof like an extra-heavy blanket.<br /><br />"But aren't you OK with them being blocky and boxy with sturdy walls? Isn't that the American style?" In those two senses, they still do look American, but they don't do the proportions right. They don't use a variety of scales a la the Prairie School or Art Deco or Mormon temples. And they don't use massive scale, imposing heights, and repeated geometric motifs, like Brutalism did to create a sublime rather than beautiful atmosphere. And none of those iconic American styles are literally just a dull gray box!<br /><br />That is way more in the vein of Bauhaus -- utilitarian with throwaway gestures at sophistication through stone materials. We beat Bauhaus to the punch on post-Euro imperial architecture, beginning with Frank Lloyd Wright and the original Chicago School. And once Bauhaus did exist, we managed to prevent infection of it into America (other than Cesca chairs, with their use of wood and reed, atypical for Bauhaus materials). These dull gray functional boxes only sprang up during the neoliberal era, pretty late in the era for that matter -- the late 2000s for McDonald's.<br /><br />But then, we have rapidly approached the stage in the imperial lifespan that Bauhaus came out of. Our neolib era was one of stagnation and plateau-ing, and only since 2020 have we entered the full-on collapse stage. Euro empires reached stagnation by the late 19th C, and only began collapsing during the 1910s. So, the closer that we come to their social and political environments, the more our cultural output will resemble theirs -- including god-awful utilitarian bores.<br /><br />Once America's current civil breakdown has reached its nadir, and reconstruction begins -- not a new wave of imperial expansion, LOL, those days are over -- the first architectural task is to restore the American styles to American buildings. No more pseudo-Bauhaus burger joints or any restaurant -- we're going right back to cozy caveman huts!<br /><br /></p>agnostichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12967177967469961883noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19346366.post-21913105611182358442023-06-07T18:28:00.000-04:002023-06-07T18:28:27.155-04:00Disney World's Brutalist and primitive futurist origins<p>Although discussion of Brutalist architecture in America, where it was born, focuses only on its more elevated settings -- civic buildings, libraries, universities, research labs, and so on -- it was just as widespread of a style in suburban office buildings and malls. Before getting there, though, let's take a quick look at another mass-market, working and middle-class, all-American, consumer-driven setting, to establish how popular and populist it was -- not at all an elitist style reserved for ivory tower eggheads.<br /><br />Disney World itself was founded on Brutalism in 1971, in the form of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disney%27s_Contemporary_Resort">Contemporary Resort</a>, which was offered along with the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disney%27s_Polynesian_Village_Resort">Polynesian Village Resort</a> in order to hit both the primitive and futuristic themes that define American cultural identity. Notice the continuation of the Midcentury tiki / Googie theme of Polynesia in particular to stand in for "New World primitive" as opposed to various Old World primitive environments.<br /><br />And yet, even the Contemporary has a pyramid-esque shape -- albeit stepped only side-to-side, not also front-to-back like the later Luxor in Vegas -- to evoke New World ancient civilizations like the Maya. This continued another enduring theme in American culture, using the Maya instead of Rome or Athens to represent the RETVRN to ancient times. The gigantic mosaic inside the Contemporary also depicts New World native cultures, to reinforce the combined theme of "ancient and futuristic, entirely within the New World".<br /><br />These were the only two places to stay, and set the tone for the entire amusement park. For extensive picture galleries, along with verbal histories that you can skip if you just want the overall impression, see <a href="http://passport2dreams.blogspot.com/2015/09/the-contemporary-resort-in-1970s.html">here</a> and <a href="https://www.dizavenue.com/2014/08/making-of-disneys-contemporary-resort.html">here</a> for what it was like during its New Deal utopian heyday (and <a href="http://passport2dreams.blogspot.com/2015/09/the-contemporary-resort-through-1990s.html">here</a> for how it has evolved since then). Then there's <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GDTp8P_h4Y">this</a> old promo, which showcases both resorts until the 4-minute mark, and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLK6HjLHEys">this</a> old home movie from the same time.<br /><br />There are shots of the exterior, interior atrium, leisure spaces, the Midcentury Modern rooms, and the Top of the World Lounge -- we'd usually associate being on top of the world with an unstable equilibrium, a delicate balance, not a place for a carefree lounge. But this was the Midcentury American utopia, so nothing sounded more natural than lounging around at the summit of existence. Just like the SkyCity restaurant, calmly revolving at 500 feet up the Space Needle tower in Seattle, built less than a decade earlier.<br /><br />Much of the finer details of the original Contemporary atmosphere have been steadily adulterated during the neoliberal era, but we cannot judge Brutalism for what it was corrupted into later -- only by what it was.<br /><br />If you never got to experience such a place during the good ol' days, including those that kept going even during the neoliberal era, nothing can prepare you for it. The warm color palette, the plush carpeting, the simple-not-busy geometric lines and arrangements of elements, the dark cozy intimate lighting, the lush vegetation and water elements, not to mention the futuristic atmosphere -- nothing could make us feel so welcomed, integrated, and belonging to a singular utopian American culture.<br /><br />Notwithstanding the mixture of primitive and futuristic within the Contemporary, and the park as a whole with the Polynesian as well, it was the monorail transportation system, that decisively tilted the balance in favor of the futuristic and Brutalist theme. Its concrete supports, sleek cars with streamline profiles, dark tinted glass windows, with simple bands of warm colors on the shell to make this futuristic mode of transport feel lively and exciting rather than cold and utilitarian.<br /><br />Integrating the monorail system so that it traveled right into the main concourse / atrium of the resort, only heightened the futuristic feel -- who ever saw a train pull right up to the base of your residence, so you don't have to hike, hop a cab, or drive to the station? It was not merely a matter of convenience and efficiency -- it proclaimed that this is a utopia, where there are no trade-offs from a single rail system having to service a wide network of residential areas. Everybody was staying at the Contemporary compound, so there was no need to build a station between it and dozens of other neighborhoods, towns, and cities. The resort was so removed from competing residential sites that the public transit could almost pull right up to your front door!<br /><br />Nobody among the blinkered Bauhaus blackpillers could've dreamed up such a visionary utopian thing.<br /><br />In fact, the Contemporary was designed by prolific architect Welton Becket, who was at the time participating in the Brutalist movement (Xerox Tower and the Gulf Life Tower, just a few years earlier). It was only natural for Disney World's inspiring foundational resort to be built at monumental scale, out of concrete, shaped as though it were a single large sculpture, casting an imposing and sublime presence from the outside, while filling the interior with a warm, lush, sophisticated, and dynamic atmosphere.<br /><br />This was standard practice for Brutalism, and all complaints about how cold and alienating it is come from people who have never explored the interior of these buildings that are austere fortresses on the outside, but soothing and even sultry social happening-spaces on the inside. Perhaps they are not quite so seductive nowadays, after decades of neglect and outright desecration, but then it's your responsibility to see what it was actually like when it was created.<br /><br />Haters of Brutalism never show the "before" pictures or the interior pictures, because that would blow up their arguments for why these structures must be demolished and replaced with fishbowl flex-spaces instead (barf-o-rama). That's why I linked to those other sites with extensive galleries -- to set the record incontrovertibly straight.<br /><br />Steadily over the course of the neoliberal era, Disney World has headed toward making every attraction, resort, etc., a branding opportunity for pop culture figures. But Disneyland and Disney World, when they were under Walt Disney's New Deal vision, hardly included Disney characters or other characters from outside the park at all, only as an afterthought.<br /><br />These parks were built to celebrate America's past, present, and future as a unique and special civilization and culture, and the rides and resorts reflected that purpose. Be sure to watch the entire promo video linked earlier, "The Magic of Walt Disney World" from the early '70s, to see what all it encompassed -- and what it did not include even remotely.<br /><br />There is nothing more all-American than Disney World, and the fact that a Brutalist style was chosen for its foundational resort reflects the sense of marvel and wonder that Americans felt in the presence of buildings in that style. It was not an unwanted oppressive style foisted on them by PhD's -- it was a style that resonated with their desire for a monumental expression of the utopian zeitgeist of the Midcentury, as the American Empire had reached its all-time peak, or perhaps plateau.<br /><br />And they did not have to travel to Ivy League campuses to enjoy it -- it was built for them in their own neighborhoods, and at affordable mass-market tourist destinations. There was nothing stuffy or elitist about it -- it was enshrined at literal Disney World!<br /><br /></p>agnostichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12967177967469961883noreply@blogger.com51tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19346366.post-28582904917803361682023-06-05T21:11:00.007-04:002023-06-05T22:04:33.094-04:00Googie architecture: primitive futurism, with upswept roofs from Frank Lloyd Wright<p style="text-align: left;">No exploration of American culture's distinctive "primitive futurism" would be complete without a look at <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googie_architecture">Googie</a> architecture of the Midcentury period -- usually defined by its Space Age and other futuristic elements. Off-kilter angles, cantilevered upswept roofs, Industrial Age materials of glass and steel and neon lights, shapes and motifs (like starbursts) suggesting rockets or spaceships or space stations, and an overall busy frenetic energy level.<br /><br />And yet it just wouldn't be American without pronounced primitive elements as well. Rarely does the discussion about this Midcentury style emphasize them, and their seeming contradiction with the Space Age elements.<br /><br />Googie came from the same time and place -- the Midcentury, out West -- as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiki_culture">tiki culture</a>, which was purely primitivist, an attempt to root our still-developing identity in the ancient times of the New World, including Polynesia, rather than the Old World (just as the Mayan revival style of the '20s had done, or the ahead-of-its-time Book of Mormon's genesis narrative had done circa 1830). Googie fused this primitive / tropical theme with the also contemporaneous Space Age / Industrial Age / Streamline theme.<br /><br />In the Penguin coffee shop below (built in 1959), the dramatic upswept roof (being cantilevered, and so appearing to defy gravity and take flight), wall-o'-windows, neon lights on the sign, and the busily off-center placement of items on the sign, give this building a futuristic feel that could not have even been imagined 100 years earlier.<br /><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-NP1OEI6NvaiC906DIOthK8lDz4ixCTQ5IGAeok8hhwQQINjNxO2tj9EfxCF63uGB5lOvFCzTbphf5OIoHWLLnsXa8F8nxgOp_bkCmxH6Rm-v2zDXuAI0jybIuzh_hzFTK8hiYbLdZK7BiSFgZu1XDMEmzTqNGoVwZt74oF37h1lo005ooyo/s500/googiepenguin.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="299" data-original-width="500" height="239" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-NP1OEI6NvaiC906DIOthK8lDz4ixCTQ5IGAeok8hhwQQINjNxO2tj9EfxCF63uGB5lOvFCzTbphf5OIoHWLLnsXa8F8nxgOp_bkCmxH6Rm-v2zDXuAI0jybIuzh_hzFTK8hiYbLdZK7BiSFgZu1XDMEmzTqNGoVwZt74oF37h1lo005ooyo/w400-h239/googiepenguin.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />However, Americans have never defined ourselves as strictly futuristic, progressive, etc., hence the need for the ancient and primitive elements -- tropical vegetation, and massive piers faced in flagstone to support the roof. The stones are not finely cut into rectangular prisms and then laid in regular courses like advanced stonework -- they appear to be used as they were found, with human ingenuity only playing a role in fitting them together like puzzle pieces.<br /><br />This is not the masonry of an advanced civilization of several thousand years ago -- let alone one capable of splitting the atom and sending rockets to escape Earth's orbit. This far cruder form of assembling the stones together leavens the head-spinning futurism of the other elements. Crude and raw -- yet also advanced and sophisticated -- in its construction. That's what American identity is all about.<br /><br />In fact, from some angles, these Googie buildings primarily consist of primitive elements and crude techniques, not so Space Age-y after all:<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEia9fHZ8GeW8TsKAorpF32nzdaiHg6_2HrcP_XxiISouLRNQ4BKTDnyPU3IpVpLMXEHIy2y-tos28SQJ9Dr0zSDegF567vIGSS0lnU1_r16UYBX2nh8uXytZ_UJJH_d-OHKiCgoJNHUUVKWtBpiXCR8ghzu7pcGWzl3SlBj0P2glXC22ntuNtU/s500/googie-panns.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="342" data-original-width="500" height="274" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEia9fHZ8GeW8TsKAorpF32nzdaiHg6_2HrcP_XxiISouLRNQ4BKTDnyPU3IpVpLMXEHIy2y-tos28SQJ9Dr0zSDegF567vIGSS0lnU1_r16UYBX2nh8uXytZ_UJJH_d-OHKiCgoJNHUUVKWtBpiXCR8ghzu7pcGWzl3SlBj0P2glXC22ntuNtU/w400-h274/googie-panns.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />This combination of primitive with futuristic continued on the inside, where large expanses of flagstone walls gave a familiar cozy feel to the starkly-angled interior space, with rough natural textures and earthy colors balancing the smooth and dyed-any-color synthetic materials. Just as the woodgrain tabletops balanced the gleaming stainless steel / chrome pedestal supports.<br /><br /><p></p><p style="text-align: center;">* * *<br /></p><p style="text-align: left;"><br />I was glad to find one quote to this effect already out there: "these were places where George Jetson and Fred Flintstone could meet over a cup of coffee" (Alan Hess, Googie: Fifties Coffee Shop Architecture, quoted <a href="https://www.laconservancy.org/locations/panns-coffee-shop">here</a>). The Jetsons and the Flintstones were both highly popular TV shows, and helped define American identity of the time and ever since. Their co-existence is no accident: Americans are part caveman, part spaceman, with no stage of material cultural development in between -- that would be Europeans, and because we are not European, we have had to define ourselves as belonging to the time periods outside of the heyday of European empires.<br /><br />There were never mighty empires and advanced civilizations where Americans landed and settled, and we have always had to wrestle with the absence of counterparts to Ancient Greek temples, Medieval castles, and Early Modern cathedrals in our newly settled land. Part of our response was to borrow from those civilizations in the New World that did build monumental architecture that was still easily visible and tangible, like the Maya of Central America or the later Easter Islanders off the Pacific coast of South America.<br /><br />But mainly our response was to go with the obvious theme, that we were bringing an advanced civilization to a mostly primitive environment. Not necessarily like taming a desert environment to make it suitable for agriculture. We didn't build spaceships out of the primitive environment we found on arrival -- it's more like the advanced technology appeared to have been dropped from the sky by some civilizational stork.<br /><br />Americans project that founding myth back onto other civilizations, when we assume that the Ancient Egyptians must have had their advanced tech for pyramid-building dropped upon them by ancient aliens. It may sound silly, but it makes sense when you consider our historical path, and the absence of intermediate stages of material development between the primitive and industrial in America. We just assume that every civilization in history has been dropped from the sky, mostly pre-fabricated, like ours was.<br /><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">* * *<br /></p><p style="text-align: left;"><br />Finally, where *did* all of these dramatically upswept roofs, heavily cantilevered, come from -- if not aliens? You should already know the answer by now, given his all-encompassing influence on American architecture, but -- that's right -- they were invented by Frank Lloyd Wright himself, back in the Midwest. As far as I can tell, anyway, from searching around for "upswept roofs", and I'm happy to be corrected.<br /><br />I don't know from my limited study of Googie examples which one was the first to employ the upswept roof, but Wright had all of them beat anyway -- the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_and_Rae_Levin_House">Robert and Rae Levin House</a> from 1949, in Kalamazoo, Michigan. While most of the roof is flat, as was his style, a pronounced section of it soars up toward one of the edges, is not supported vertically at the outer edge, and contains a wall-o'-windows underneath, exactly as would become the norm with Googie in the next decade.<br /><br />Even more Googie than that is the <a href="http://theelamhouse.com/">Elam House</a> from only one year later, 1950, in Austin, Minnesota. This one has the doubly upswept roof, rising toward opposite edges and having a low-point in the middle of the roof, which is off-center / asymmetric. It's also cantilevered, supported by massive stone piers -- the only difference from Googie being their finer level of cutting and dressing, instead of being used as they were found, in the cruder Googie fashion, and so not looking quite as primitive. (But then, this is only the Midwest, not the Pacific coast, where the tropical primitive environment is more evident.) It has a wall-o'-windows underneath as well.<br /><br />In 1952, at the <a href="https://storage.googleapis.com/clio-images/3224_Reisley%20Carport%20new%20scanA.jpeg">Reisley House</a> in Pleasantville, New York, he added a bit of functionality to the upswept roof, turning it into the cover for a carport. (He also changed the material to be cypress wood panels, adding to the primitive side of the balance.) The pier supporting the cantilevered roof is again stone, though more Googie-esque in using stones of uneven size, albeit still in rectangular outlines. It really did take the Googie movement to make them look unaltered and crudely assembled at varying angles.<br /><br />I couldn't easily find other examples throughout the '50s, perhaps because he had seen it evolve into Googie -- and then elevated Modernist airport terminals from Eero Saarinen, like Dulles and the TWA Flight Center at JFK -- and figured his pioneering work was done. However, he was still at it circa 1960, when he built the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_M_Stromquist_House">Don Stromquist House</a> in Bountiful, Utah. One corner of the roof rises toward the edge, is cantilevered, and contains a wall-o'-windows underneath.<br /><br />California Googie architect John Lautner had apprenticed under Wright in the '30s, though I don't know if he was still keeping tabs on what his mentor was up to circa 1950 with three out of dozens of Usonian homes. It's possible that the moment for upswept roofs had come, and Wright was simply an early pioneer, while it came to others later but independently as part of a general zeitgeist. But there is a potential direct channel from Wright to Googie-style roofs that is worth looking into (for someone else).<br /><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">* * *<br /></p><p style="text-align: left;"><br />And we must remember to hit on the other big-picture lesson from my survey of modern architecture -- the non-existent role played by the Europeans, whether affiliated with Bauhaus or otherwise. Clueless and embarrassed-to-be-American East Coast academics may hear "upswept roof" and "Modern architecture," and think of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notre-Dame_du_Haut">Notre-Dame du Haut</a> by Le Corbusier. But that was built in 1955 -- half a decade after Wright pioneered the look in the American Midwest with multiple examples, as usual. It's also not as cantilevered as Wright's proto-Googie buildings, being supported at the outer corner.<br /><br />For that matter, the supposed avant-garde of Bauhaus had been beaten to the punch by literal McDonald's, whose 1953 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldest_McDonald%27s_restaurant">oldest building</a> in Downey, California employed an upward-sloping roof -- along with prominent parabolas over a decade before Saarinen's Gateway Arch was built.<br /><br />Civilization-shaping cultural creativity comes from expanding empires, and by the 20th century, the Euro empires had all bitten the dust, except for Russia, which didn't start its collapse until the final decade of that century. America was still rising, expanding, and innovating. If something cool or inventive happened, just assume that we did it (or maybe a Russian counterpart), not the collapsed empires with no gas left in the tank. Their heyday was several centuries earlier.<br /><br />Whether trad or mod, Europeans simply had nothing to invent during the 20th C., although if they came under American aegis post-WWII, they could jump on our bandwagon and contribute that way -- which many of them did, enthusiastically, since our cultural scene was the only game in town, aside from Russia's.<br /><br />We can't get too triumphalist, though, since our empire has begun collapsing as well. We aren't going to invent anything else ever again. That means our job is to preserve what has already been built in our national distinctive style, such as Googie (or Brutalism, Art Deco, Streamline, Prairie School, Mission, etc.). And if anything new needs to be built, then produce new examples of those established styles. That's how the Mormons are treating their temples -- old and new alike -- and that's how we should treat our buildings as an entire nation.<br /><br />Fortunately in the case of Googie, it was most prolific in Southern California, which is the most preservationist region of the country, to their envy-making credit. If there's even a rumor about someone taking down the giant donut from what used to be a roadside vernacular diner, City Council will block them. And they have probably already made a preemptive move by getting the building legally protected as a landmark, making it sacrosanct, untouchable, and inviolable.<br /><br />Nowhere else in the country conserves its American culture like L.A., which is why Brutalism is being systematically razed all along the East Coast, while UC Irvine will always look like it's from the Planet of the Apes, primitive yet futuristic at the same time -- and for all time.<br /><br /></p>agnostichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12967177967469961883noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19346366.post-37922908700900848632023-05-30T20:31:00.007-04:002023-05-31T12:23:12.921-04:00Exposed concrete: the American architectural style's defining material, from Frank Lloyd Wright through Brutalism and beyond<p>I had no idea how backwards the history of architecture & design from the 20th C. and after has been, until I began researching American ethnogenesis and its cultural reflections. This has led me to an <a href="https://akinokure.blogspot.com/2023/05/prelude-to-americanist-defense-of.html">Americanist defense</a> of Brutalism, which will be an ongoing series.<br /><br />The standard cluelessness from back-East academics (and their media-ite confreres), who are trapped in the least American region of the country, is that there is no such thing as a distinctive American culture, and that we inherited or imported everything from the Old World, primarily the Early Modern empires of Western Europe -- including in their degenerate collapsing stages, such as Cubist paintings and Bauhaus architecture and design.<br /><br />The reality is that American pioneers beat the stultified Europeans to the punch, usually by several decades, and that Americans developed the superior standard of that form, whereas the Europeans could only manage an inferior copy of it, or didn't adopt it at all.<br /><br />That's not a knock against European culture -- they just had their ethnogenetic heyday centuries before we did, so they already developed their own impressive standard forms. And as we see now, as the American Empire enters its degenerate collapsing stage of life, we too will become stultified non-creators having to either preserve / revive our previous foundational styles, or try to imitate others around the world if they are dynamic.<br /><br />However, there are no other ascendant empires in the near future, undergoing an intense ethnogenesis, so there is in fact no one else for us to copy, as the Europeans finally managed to do with Midcentury Modern design (imported from America during the Pax Americana). So that leaves Americans with the task of preserving, reviving, canonizing, and celebrating what we have already made, and to limit any degenerate and warped extensions of it during our collapsing-empire stage of life.<br /><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">* * *<br /></p><p><br />One major example of the backwards thinking about 20th-C. architecture & design is the nature of Brutalism, which the received cluelessness of back-East cerebrals holds to be European. They may bicker over whether its parent is Swiss (Corbusier) or British (the Smithsons), but it's definitely -- and distinctly -- European, in their view. And they place the birth in the post-WWII 1950s time period.<br /><br />They never overtly argue against an American origin, and not for cynical reasons -- like, they would have to give up their silly initial views -- but because "American culture" is simply a non-force in their model of historical dynamics. Because America has no culture of its own, it could not have influenced anyone else, let alone the Europeans, whose combined forces exceed everything else out there. So why even bother exploring that hypothesis?<br /><br />As far as the time period of its birth, they might allow an earlier "influential" stage -- as long as it were European, e.g. Bauhaus practitioner Mies van der Rohe in the late 1920s (Barcelona Pavilion). They would never entertain the possibility of an American influence in that decade, let alone earlier -- earlier, in fact, than any other European contemporary in a Modern style.<br /><br />But just cuz back-East ignoramuses wear these ideological blinders, doesn't mean we have to. We owe no allegiance to a sector of society whose raison d'etre is supposedly "figuring things out," yet who not only come up with the wrong answer, but sanctify it into unarguable dogma. Nor do we owe cultural deference to anyone from back East, the black hole of culture in America. They simply do not get American culture, and perhaps have never been exposed to it in their lives, outside of movie portrayals -- or a visit to Disney World, but that's the topic of another post on primitive futurism in American design, and Brutalism specifically.<br /><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">* * *<br /></p><p><br />While the exact criteria for Brutalism may vary somewhat, most people from any background agree on the central role played by the materials used -- and in particular, concrete, especially if it is exposed, i.e. not clad behind marble, ceramic tiles, brickwork, stucco, heavy coats of paint, or other materials that would disguise what the building is mainly made out of. It also cannot be assembled in such a way as to suggest it's not concrete -- e.g., if concrete is poured into individual blocks the size of traditional stone blocks, and those blocks are laid as in traditional masonry. That would be concrete imitating or disguising itself as masonry.<br /><br />That is what this post will focus on, not other aspects of the style -- but those are distinctly American in origin as well, which contrast with European traditions, and which were pioneered in America long before they caught on among the avant-garde in Europe who were trying to rebel against their own centuries-old traditions (which we were not encumbered by in America, being a young nation undergoing ethnogenesis). For example, the blocky assemblage of masses, the rectilinear nature of lines, the relative sparseness of superficial ornamentation, the rough-hewn nature of shaping mass rather than delicate finesse -- these all go back to Chicago in the 1890s, not Berlin in the 1920s.<br /><br />And so it is with the use of exposed concrete as not simply a utilitarian building material, which could be hidden by other ornamental materials, but as a surface-level one contributing to the aesthetic value on its own.<br /><br />We'll start our exploration by exploding two related myths from the clueless back-Easterners -- from both the fanboys and the haters of the style. One, that Brutalism was an elitist style that only college graduates appreciated, or that was confined to their everyday territory. And two, more importantly, that it was pioneered by Europeans in the 1950s.<br /><br />If you went to any park anywhere in America over Memorial Day weekend, you likely saw one of these, a drinking fountain made of concrete with its aggregate exposed, and whose metal parts are given a gleaming chrome finish, making it a textbook example of primitive futurism, something that looks like it's partly from the Stone Age and partly from the Industrial or Space Age:<br /><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgk8fQ_b_8pZXaF8vZIr5fbtdq8Scxm77cMwRm_eyddaKF8BNL5Caq43-_QiL_9UsVZ8KpSeBP0nBz-E9NELaBhf7ysT-sRVjmDSQJkUg5irhCQ5HajeSsoj0C0iYvRZ2OfbyC3uGSifj1n70pYyGy9smf4ILmyFvAUy96VX5_dlqHfqkqWxVE/s1024/concrete-fountain.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1024" data-original-width="1024" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgk8fQ_b_8pZXaF8vZIr5fbtdq8Scxm77cMwRm_eyddaKF8BNL5Caq43-_QiL_9UsVZ8KpSeBP0nBz-E9NELaBhf7ysT-sRVjmDSQJkUg5irhCQ5HajeSsoj0C0iYvRZ2OfbyC3uGSifj1n70pYyGy9smf4ILmyFvAUy96VX5_dlqHfqkqWxVE/w400-h400/concrete-fountain.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />It does not resemble European drinking fountains at all. They use metal (stone if fancy), and work it into fine-level shapes. The American style requires a more blocky, pure simple geometric volume, and the avoidance of European materials -- because we are not European, and had to create a new material for our new culture in our new empire.<br /><br />Technically, the Romans created concrete 2000 years before we did -- and they did leave it exposed as an architectural / aesthetic element, and they even used it in a lattice of repeated simple geometric shapes (the coffered ceiling in the dome of the Pantheon, which the vaults of the Brutalist DC Metro stations perfectly resemble). But they did not expose the aggregate -- theirs looks like fairly smooth concrete, while ours has all those small pebbles adorning its surface.<br /><br />Concrete is somewhat like masonry, where a large number of solid stones are held together by a connective network of binding material (cement for concrete, mortar for masonry). The main differences are the scale of the stones -- pebbles you can pinch between your fingertips, vs. stones hefty enough that you can only hold one in your hand.<br /><br />And the assembly is totally different -- masonry lays down the stones (with or without mortar) in a planned, calculated, deliberate fashion. They don't have to be of uniform size and laid in a simple pattern (like rows of uniform height), but their placement is deliberate as each stone is set into the whole assembly. Whether you're looking at a brickwork facade of a house, or the impenetrable walls of Macchu Pichu, you can tell that the arrangement of individual stones into the whole was decided by human actors the whole way through.<br /><br />The placement of individual stones within concrete is the opposite -- not even a single one was deliberately placed where it is, after deliberating about the others around it in the existing whole and where future ones would be placed after it. Rather, the stones are mixed up like balls in a hopper during the mixing process, and as the whole composite mass is poured (or sprayed or whatever else), the arrangement of stones does its own thing before settling into its hardened final state. Workers are not intervening to move this stone here, that stone over there, before the whole thing hardens. They wind up wherever they wind up.<br /><br />And so, although the whole thing was made from human civilized technology, it has the look and feel and impression of a natural rock like sedimentary conglomerate. It doesn't look artificial because it is not artificial -- we introduced natural randomness during the mixing process, and did not intervene during the pouring and hardening process. It's somehow natural and the output of human technology at the same time -- maybe geological husbandry, like animal husbandry, not designing animals in a laboratory or factory.<br /><br />At any rate, when the aggregate (the small gravel stones) in concrete is exposed, it looks like a Stone Age material, not an Industrial Age material -- not even a Metal Age material. It looks just as prehistoric in age, natural in formation, and organic in shape and texture, as traditional rocky materials like marble, granite, etc. But it's actually new, created by America -- not even the Romans exposed the aggregate like we do. We needed an ancient material to establish our primeval connection to this land, so we invented one that did just the job!<br /><br /><p></p><p style="text-align: center;">* * *<br /></p><p><br />These days, you can't go to any public space in America without seeing at least one example of exposed aggregate concrete -- drinking fountain, trash can, cigarette ash receptacle, wall / column support, bench, sidewalk / pavers, curb, etc.<br /><br />And you *won't* find those things in Europe or anywhere else in Ye Olde Worlde. Theirs are made out of metal or stone.<br /><br />This material is not only distinctly American, it is ubiquitous in America. We take it for granted that any random strip center in any ol' American suburb will have a trash can made from this material, and that the drinking fountains in the same suburb will be made from it as well. No material is more all-American than exposed aggregate concrete.<br /><br />This also shows how populist and popular the material is -- it is not restricted to elite university environments, appreciated only by eggheads, or expensive to use. It's very affordable, suitable for mass use.<br /><br />In fact, as I mentioned earlier, the desecration of the American architectural traditions and standards, especially the anti-Brutalist iconoclasm, has been a crusade led by the professional class for the professional class, in blue states and blue cities, by government bureaucrats and academics and pharma research labs, and by women rather than men. It's every conceivable demographic that lives in order to carry out the will of the neoliberal Democrat party.<br /><br />The only wrinkle is the meta-ethnic frontier one -- West Coast Democrats are far more conservationist of American culture than East Coast Democrats (Boston / Massachusetts being ground zero for Brutalist demolition). They're closer to the historical, defining frontier against the Indians, while the back-Easterners were never shaped into Americans by that frontier, so why would they want to preserve its cultural output? They're pseudo-European, and they want their culture to be that way, and stay that way.<br /><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">* * *<br /></p><p><br />However, we can't say that these ubiquitous concrete drinking fountains owe their existence to Brutalism -- that was just one stage within American architectural ethnogenesis. It goes farther back -- back to Frank Lloyd Wright himself! It's amazing, I don't plan to discover his foundational influence in everything I look into (like the swivel chair and cantilever chairs generally), but he really was America's first-mover genius. American architecture & design is just footnotes to Frank Lloyd Wright -- and that includes all areas absorbed into our empire over the 20th C., like Europe and Japan.<br /><br />The work in question is the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horse_Show_Fountain">Horse Show Fountain</a> from -- where else? -- Chicago, dating back to -- when else? -- 1909. Not Berlin, not London -- and not New York, for that matter. Not 1919 or 1929 or 1939 or 1949. Both the original and the current replica (made in 1969) are made from reinforced concrete, which is not clad behind any other material. It's a drinking fountain, for people and originally horses too.<br /><br />Although the Wiki article claims that only the current replica has the grainy exposed aggregate surface (ubiquitous by the '60s), a <a href="https://www.steinerag.com/flw/Artifact%20Pages/Scoville.htm">gallery</a> of images of the original, both photographic and illustrated, make it look about as aggregate-y as the later replica. Maybe in some areas more than others, like around the edge of the basin, where there are square indentations, but still, it doesn't look radically different and perfectly smooth.<br /><br />And in fact, Wright used the exposed aggregate finish in the same year of 1909 in the same city of Chicago, for the Unity Temple. So, hardly a stretch of the imagination to believe the original fountain had some exposed aggregate as well.<br /><br />Before getting to the Unity Temple, though, we have to consider earlier structures built elsewhere in America and Europe that claim to be the "first concrete / reinforced concrete buildings".<br /><br />In 1853 in Denis, France, Francois Coignet built a reinforced concrete <a href="https://www.amusingplanet.com/2019/06/francois-coignets-reinforced-concrete.html">house</a> -- but it was not exposed as an architectural element. Looks like it was covered by plaster (now peeling off in sheets), which was then painted. Because it did not take the material in a bold new direction, it spawned no imitators or movement within France. If you wanted painted plaster on the facade, you didn't have to use concrete underneath it -- any material from the French tradition would do.<br /><br />Then in 1873, using a process designed by Coignet, the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_and_Long_Island_Coignet_Stone_Company_Building">Coignet Stone Company Building</a> in Brooklyn, New York used concrete blocks without any cladding. However, by casting them into blocks meant to resemble the cut stones of traditional masonry, and then either laid into place in arrangements also from traditional masonry -- or poured into molds meant to mimic that arrangement -- the concrete doesn't really show itself. If you didn't know beforehand, the viewer would probably think it was any ol' stone building. This is apart from the overall style being a Euro-LARP-ing style rather than a new American style. The raw material itself, and its assembly into the whole -- whatever style it is -- does not look new or different from European stonework.<br /><br />The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_E._Ward_House">William E. Ward House</a> of the same time period and metro area, has the same problems with it being the "first" in an ethnogenetic sense. It is made of reinforced concrete, which is not clad behind another material, but the material has either been cut and laid into place, or poured into a mold meant to resemble, the processes of traditional masonry. On the lower two stories, the corners where walls meet have simulated quoins, the most glaring example of trying to disguise its concrete nature as traditional masonry. Again, this is apart from the matter of the overall style being a Euro LARP.<br /><br />The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highland_Cottage">Highland Cottage</a> from the same time and place has the same problems, and then some. Aside from simulating traditional masonry, the concrete is faced in stucco. Unlike the Ward House, this one is not reinforced concrete. The Coignet Stone Company Building has a reinforced basement, but not above that level. Wright's fountain and Unity Temple are reinforced. However, I don't think reinforcement is central to the development of a new American style and material vocabulary. It's not visible, and is only relevant on the utilitarian level -- allowing greater-scale structures to be built.<br /><br />Aside from being in the wrong place for American ethnogenesis (back East), these three New York buildings are also from the wrong time -- still mired in the integrative civil war phase of imperial growth, which included the Reconstruction era. It wasn't until the 1890s that the winner of the civil war -- the industrial Midwest -- could hit the ground running with its creation and dissemination of a new national culture, after internal divisions had been sewn up. This would spread westward along with the meta-ethnic frontier, although places back East ended up adopting it to some extent as well. But it wouldn't last as long back East since they have always been reluctant participants in American culture.<br /><br />In the right place at the right time -- Chicago in the first decade of the 1900s -- Wright built the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unity_Temple">Unity Temple</a>. It was not only a new overall architectural style -- American Block Symphony, not Gothic, Baroque, etc. -- it used a new material, concrete with the aggregate exposed. The volumes do not resemble traditional blocks from masonry, are not laid into place in masonic ways, and do not simulate or mimic them via the molds into which the concrete is poured. Just monolithic slabs of concrete, of varying size, with more or less ornamentation built into the mold's shape. Not hidden behind anything else.<br /><br />In addition to not hiding the concrete, and not mimicking masonry, the exposure of the aggregate within the concrete is a milestone in the history of American architecture. Now the material looked more like granite or marble or some other Stone Age material with patterns and textures within it -- not requiring their addition through mosaic techniques. It no longer looked so smooth and uniform and monolithic.<br /><br />The techniques used to expose the aggregate are not relevant to its final state, but in this case the workers used wire brushes to gently grind away the outermost layers of the cement binder, like using a fork to flake away the outermost layer of a fruitcake to expose the individual globs of fruit suspended in the flour-y binder.<br /><br />Like the Horse Show Fountain, the original Unity Temple showed signs of wear by circa 1970, and it was restored (not replicated) with an exposed aggregate finish (and then another major restoration in the 2010s, still using the exposed aggregate finish). But the original back in the 1900s had an exposed aggregate finish as well, as shown by contemporaneous pictures and Wright's own words (likening the appearance to granite). This makes me believe the original Horse Show Fountain also had a similar degree of exposed aggregate finish as its later replica.<br /><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">* * *<br /></p><p><br />By the time of a 1986 <a href="https://www.concreteconstruction.net/_view-object?id=00000153-8ba8-dbf3-a177-9fb9b7da0000">article</a> from Concrete Construction Magazine, "Unity Temple: the Cube That Made Concrete History," the neoliberal backlash against the Progressive and New Deal eras had begun, as well as its cultural expression in the perversion, slandering, or outright demolition of America's distinctive culture. The central target for neoliberals was Brutalism -- too American instead of whatever Olde Worlde LARP / pastiche they preferred, too populist instead of elitist (affordable concrete vs. expensive masonry), too ubiquitous instead of confined to the bi-coastal top zip codes.<br /><br />In that context, the authors cannot use the term Brutalism or refer directly to the 1960s and '70s as the extension of the history begun by the Unity Temple. The reader is left to fill in the blanks, but that's what they're getting at -- American Block Symphony styles, using exposed aggregate concrete, trace back to Frank Lloyd Wright, in Chicago, at the turn of the century.<br /><br />They also do not overtly state what this means for other boneheaded theories -- like the myth that Brutalism as a camp, or the use of unhidden concrete, or blocky assemblages of volumes, grew out of Europe somewhere between the '20s and the '50s. Nope -- it's as American as apple pie, from the Midwest (and later, further out West), from the turn of the 20th century, from the American architectural Plato himself, Frank Lloyd Wright.<br /><br />Europeans were simply a non-entity in endogenous cultural creation after their 18th and 19th-century plateau. They descended into chaos in the early 20th C, along with their empires collapsing in WWI, limping through the interwar period before the remaining fragments were then scooped up by the American Empire -- both politically and culturally. If they wanted to join the American camp, they were more than welcome, and by the Midcentury Modern moment, they were all aboard Team America.<br /><br />Blaming Bauhaus for anything outside of Europe in the interwar period is just a cope -- and if you're American, a cope to hide your thinly veiled anti-American attitude toward our culture. "Wah, I identify as an 18th-C. Euro aristocrat / ancient Roman villa-owner" -- too bad you're just some American suburban-raised schlub from the 20th and 21st centuries. You're no more of a Baroque aristocrat than a man is a woman. Remember, if you're outside of Europe:<br /><br />>ywn be European<br /><br />And here in America, we have nothing to apologize for or feel embarrassed about. I do feel sorry for some parts of Europe, in Britain and Germany mainly, where "Brutalism" was de facto Bauhaus eking out another few decades of comatose existence, while wearing a concrete disguise in order to blend in with the new American style that was anything but Bauhaus-y.<br /><br />But charmingly Stone Age meets futuristic chrome drinking fountains adorning and providing a public good at parks all over America? Sublimely primitivist yet futuristic buildings that connect us with the primeval grounded past, while somehow simultaneously enticing us through a portal to the optimistic utopian future? No, that is to our *credit* as Americans, with our own cool badass culture. There is no "blame" to go around in the first place.<br /><br />If you hate on Brutalism, you hate on the entire American tradition, from Frank Lloyd Wright to public parks to our ultimate architectural activity-place -- the malls. Oh yeah, I'm just getting started on this crusade to vindicate Brutalism. All you faggy mall-haters better pack up and leave now. But just as a preview: both malls and Brutalism proper were derided and demolished during the same time period, by the same camp of people, with the same complaints, whereas the appreciation / celebration / nostalgia came from a similar group of people (opposed to the first camp).<br /><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">* * *<br /></p><p><br />To conclude this exploration into the origins of exposed concrete as America's defining building material, let's take a whirlwind tour through some major milestones along the way, between the Unity Temple and Brutalism in the '60s and '70s. To not stray too far from the main topic, and because he really was the one who organized everything into its major channels, we'll stick with good ol' Frank Lloyd Wright.<br /><br />In the 1920s, he put in a stint in Los Angeles, where he built several houses using concrete blocks that were cast on site, but not in a recognizable Euro / Roman / Olde Worlde form. Rather, their rectilinear geometric impressions were inspired by Mayan temples and other New World civilizations.<br /><br />The blocks were then arranged into place like usual masonry, in horizontal courses or stacked into columns, all contributing to the synthesis of Mayan step-pyramids and his own American Block Symphony styles. But they were clearly made from concrete, not stone that had been cut and carved, and not bricks. The designs are intricate and are used in a large number of blocks -- clearly telling us that they were all cast from a single, intricately shaped mold, not intricately carved each time. The latter would've taken so much labor, it could only be built by a legion of slaves for a monument for an imperial ruler -- not a house for a typical affluent American household.<br /><br />You can watch a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3juSckHif90">documentary</a> on this episode of his career for free on YouTube. These buildings are the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storer_House_(Los_Angeles)">Storer House</a>, the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millard_House">Millard House</a>, the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Freeman_House">Samuel Freeman House</a>, and most famously the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ennis_House">Ennis House</a>.<br /><br />These blocks were later reincarnated, still in California but spreading elsewhere, in the decorative breeze blocks of Midcentury architecture. See <a href="https://la.curbed.com/2018/2/13/16936656/palm-springs-midcentury-breeze-blocks-photos">here</a> for an overview of the breeze block phenomenon -- one of the most identifiably American decorative elements, something unseen in Europe, but are everywhere out West (and somewhat back East), down to the most lowly apartment buildings, not restricted to elite circles. As you can see from the close-ups <a href="https://beloose.com/profiles/blogs/frank-lloyd-wright-on-drawing-part-two">here</a>, already in the '20s Wright used versions of his blocks that were perforated to allow light and wind to pass through, in addition to the totally solid versions.<br /><br />In the 1930s, his <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallingwater">Fallingwater</a> house used massive horizontal cantilevered slabs of concrete, which although it has a slight sandy pigment to it, is still recognizable as concrete -- not clad in stucco, not employing or mimicking masonry, etc. The entire building is not made from concrete, but these slabs are its defining features.<br /><br />Finally, and most important to establish the link to Brutalism, is the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomon_R._Guggenheim_Museum">Guggenheim Museum</a>, which was planned & revised during the late '40s and early '50s, and was built between '56 and '59. It is made from concrete that was poured -- or rather, sprayed from a gun -- in place, not cast into individual blocks used for masonry. It is not clad in any other material, nor was it hidden under heavy paint (although it did receive a light beige coat at first, which was later changed to white).<br /><br />In fact, the paint is thin enough that you can still see with the naked eye the woodgrain impressions left by the boards that acted as the boundary or container ("formwork"), onto which the concrete was sprayed from the inside. See <a href="https://www.guggenheim.org/blogs/checklist/what-we-can-learn-from-the-guggenheims-facade">this post</a> for the details. At first Wright wanted a smoother surface, but the head of construction argued that it was not only impossible, but that the impressions showed off the material better -- it's not stone, it's not going to look like stone.<br /><br />Leaving the impressions of the formwork became a staple of Brutalism, and as far as I can tell, it all started (as always) with Frank Lloyd Wright, well into his senior career. Indeed, when first built the Unity Temple showed a kind of horizontal banding left by the various stages ("lifts") in which the concrete was poured from lower to upper heights (for the photo, see p.3 of the Concrete Construction Magazine article linked earlier).<br /><br />Small-scale impressions of woodgrain, up to seams between successive lifts in the pouring process, are just like the natural imperfections in animal skins or quarried stone, and courses of masonry that are not perfectly level all the way across. It gives the concrete a primitive Stone Age feel, not a lab-perfected ultra-modern material with no variation of any kind or any seams.<br /><br />So, Brutalism's "openness" about its construction process traces back to Wright, in the first decade of the 1900s -- not to Mies van der Rohe, who used no concrete at all in the Barcelona Pavilion several decades later, nor to any other Bauhaus-adjacent boogeyman / hero (depending on whether the clueless academic is a hater or lover of Bauhaus).<br /><br />And not only did Wright pioneer the openness of the concrete construction process in the Guggenheim Museum, he also made the building a large-scale sculpture out of a few pure geometric volumes, and they're arranged into an asymmetric grouping to make for some movement of attention and off-kilter dynamism -- without warping the fabric of space, using distorted points-of-view, or fragmentation of the components, as would happen during the neoliberal era, most notably by Frank Gehry in another Guggenheim Museum (the one in Bilbao).<br /><br />These defining traits of Brutalism were all there in the late '50s in America, but not in the '50s apartment blocks by Corbusier or the Smithsons, which are utilitarian Bauhaus boxes that use concrete instead of some other material. BFD -- it's still Bauhaus, not the style pioneered in America and later called Brutalism.<br /><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">* * *<br /></p><p><br />To reflect on where we started with exposed aggregate concrete, that not only became a staple in those ubiquitous drinking fountains, trash cans, benches, columns for shopping center covered walkways, etc. Exposed aggregate running in vertical corduroy bands was a staple in Paul Rudolph's buildings, e.g. the Yale Art & Architecture Building from the early '60s and the Boston Government Service Center from the early '70s. Much of the facade of the Xerox Tower (by Brutalist superstar Welton Becket from the late '60s) is exposed aggregate.<br /><br />There is no such thing as the "good Brutalism" that was for a popular audience, and had the charming familiar exposed aggregate, vs. the "bad Brutalism" that was for elites and had clinically smooth texture and perfectionistically uniform color. The latter-day American Stone Age material, with aggregate exposed, adorns so many of the structures that the clueless haters never bother to look at, and just assume that because it's concrete, it looks like dried cement.<br /><br />Nope, it has lots of texture, pattern, and color from all the various stones revealing their faces. They may not come in neon or jewel tones, but there's plenty of earthy yellows, reds, oranges, browns, blacks / grays, sometimes shading into blue tones. And that's the type of "color" that the haters have in mind anyway -- a brick facade, marble, etc. If it counts as colorful for standard red brick and marble, it counts for exposed aggregate concrete.<br /><br />Why don't they know what these buildings look like? Because they've never experienced them. If they've been up close to one IRL, their senses are too weak to perceive what is right in front of their faces. But mainly they are into hating on Brutalism as one part of their Olde Worlde LARP, and because Brutalism is distinctly American, that's a ripe target. It doesn't matter if its facades are as colorful as brick and marble facades -- just tell a lie that it's uniform gray, and don't bother to look closely at pictures to tell for yourself, and trust that everyone else in the LARP will do likewise.<br /><br />The "why no color?" complaint is really rich, given that another complaint from the clueless haters is that Brutalism ignored the desires and wills of those who actually utilized the buildings, and only pleased the distant cultural elite who viewed them through photographs in slick magazines.<br /><br />Actually, it's the haters who only look at these buildings in far-away-shot photos over the internet! Any close-up photo would show the texture, color, variety of stones, etc. But they image searched the building, got a zillion copies of the same shitty stock photo shot from a million miles away, and that's all they need -- close-up shots might contradict their preconceived hate, so please, anything but close-ups! And definitely no IRL visits to see it unmediated -- it would contradict your beliefs, and put you so physically close to a contaminating heretical substance -- Americanism! Why, all that American stuff might just melt away years of effort to cultivate your Olde Worlde LARP -- can't risk the exposure!<br /><br />But as I said before, most Americans don't hate Brutalism, concrete, or its exposed aggregate form. We take it for granted, as the physical stuff itself as well as its creation of a primitive-futurist environment that we as Americans find irresistible. That mood makes us comfy and familiar, because it's so deeply ingrained into our culture by this point.<br /><br />It's only managerial-professional-class Euro LARP-ers who get incensed over these defining traits of our culture, for obvious reasons of status insecurity when they belong to a non-European culture. Sadly for our heritage, though, they do wield disproportionate decision-making influence, so they can and already have begun a campaign of anti-American desecration and demolition, particularly on the East Coast.<br /><br />That is as good as any predictor for the boundaries of the future states of the post-collapse American Empire. Where they're demolishing the distinctive architecture of our nation / empire, they're clearly seceding. Where they're neither fighting to demolish it, nor pro-actively guarding it, is a border region. Where they're conserving it long in advance, will be part of the core of the new American state, post-empire.<br /><br />Concretely, as it were, that means the whole back East region will secede, with central-southern Florida being a wild card that could become a somewhat reduced nation of Florida unto itself, or a non-contiguous piece of America, while the north of Florida joins the secession. The Midwest will mostly stay, although Ohio could be a wild card that would join the secession. Not surprisingly, Florida and Ohio are both the two constant swing states in presidential elections.<br /><br />Obviously California will stay and become the new political core (it's already been the main cultural core for most of our ethnogenetic growth period, after Reconstruction). But other parts of the Southwest will stay, too, for the same reasons -- Vegas (AKA Nevada), Arizona, all of Mormonland, Texas, all of it.<br /><br />In fact, Mormonland provides the most intense counter-signal to the back-East demolishers of American Block Symphony buildings. Mormons have <a href="https://akinokure.blogspot.com/2023/02/distinctly-american-religious.html">standardized</a> Block Symphony as the style for their temples, the most important building type for them (not the weekly meeting houses, but the ones where weddings, initiations, and so on, take place).<br /><br />Mormon elites did eliminate the Midcentury / Space Age (not Brutalist) design of the Ogden and Provo temples (in 2014 and early 2020s), but they replaced them with Block Symphony designs from the American Modern period and geographic origin. Not glass-and-steel fishbowl flexspace abominations like the East Coasters have done post-demolition, nor an Olde Worlde LARP that the trad haters of Brutalism would want (but would never actually get, and would settle for getting cucked by a glass-and-steel Silicon Valley kindergarten instead, because they hate the New Deal politics and culture even more).<br /><br />The last group in the world to make the contradictory concept of "Greco-Roman" architecture their standard would be the Mormons, whereas it would be the go-to for many East Coasters. That tells you all you need to know about who is gonna make it into the post-imperial-collapse nation of America, and who will be inhabiting small breakaway states riven by mutual mistrust, bitterness, and sinking deeper into the cultural black hole that they've always been.<br /><br /></p>agnostichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12967177967469961883noreply@blogger.com43tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19346366.post-57375579266576321692023-05-22T19:54:00.007-04:002023-05-23T00:28:11.864-04:00Imperial competition fuels ornamental complexity arms race, unipolarity keeps things simple<p>The more I look at the history of American architecture, the more striking the parallels to Romanesque become -- beyond the obvious level, where we had a full-blown Romanesque revival here. Our own distinctive American style resembles Romanesque in many ways, whereas both are unlike the lineage of Gothic / Baroque / Rococo in the Late Medieval / Early Modern Euro empires.<br /><br />Most notably in the stark transitional areas between major volumes, e.g. where columns or wall supports join with the roof, or the walls of two volumes meet up. Romanesque and American architecture leaves these joints fairly free of intermediate-sized volumes to soften or break up the transition, whereas Gothic etc. employ lots of volumes at various intermediate sizes to cover up the seam. That gives lots of ornamentation to Gothic etc., while Romanesque and American buildings are relatively less adorned.<br /><br />That will be the focus of case studies around the world and over time, soon. For now, I just want to lay out the broad theoretical idea, with a quick review of several different cultural domains.<br /><br />Our musical styles aren't as intricate in polyphony and counterpoint as the Gothic / Renaissance / Baroque / Classical lineage in Europe, which again makes us resemble the Frankish Empire and early French Empire (back when they were still carrying over the Frankish traditions, before their integrative civil war concluded circa 1200 and set them off on a whole new ethnogenetic journey with Gothic). Compared to 18th-C. German and Austrian imperial music, we've returned to monophonic Gregorian chant of the Frankish / early French era (again, beyond the obvious level where there was a full-blown popular revival of Gregorian chant during the '90s, in the American imperial sphere of influence).<br /><br />And our literature is far less intricate, developed, and adorned compared to anything from the Gothic era of the 13th C onward in the Euro empires. Whether it's our poetry, novels, screenplays, stage plays -- it's far more naturalistic, less stylized, and therefore without as much ornamentation as our Late Medieval / Early Modern predecessors. But very much like our Scandinavian and Russian peers of the late 19th and especially 20th centuries, as reviewed <a href="https://akinokure.blogspot.com/2023/01/realism-in-drama-as-cultural-specialty.html">here</a>. And see <a href="https://akinokure.blogspot.com/2023/01/imperial-european-ornateness-vs-block.html">here</a> for the same comparison in architecture.<br /><br />Russia is an even better example of the theory, since they used to have a much more ornamented literary output -- and more ornamented architectural style -- back when they were just one of many empires competing against each other. They only changed to the simplified styles in literature and architecture during the 20th C., when they suddenly had no imperial competitors after those competitors collapsed in WWI (except for America -- on the other side of the world, and so, not a real threat).<br /><br />In this way we have yet again returned to the Frankish era, where despite recent attempts to rebrand their culture as a "Carolingian Renaissance," no one claims that their writers produced a Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe, etc. The closest that the Romanesque world got to such a work was the Song of Roland (about an episode from Frankish history), written in the 11th C, while the nascent French Empire was still thinking of itself as Frankish in nature. Most of those Late Medieval chansons and romances, however, were written as the French Empire's integrative civil war was wrapping up, in the late 12th C (e.g. Chretien de Troyes), and afterward -- along with the radical shift to Gothic architecture.<br /><br />In the unrelated domains of architecture, music, and literature, American imperial culture resembles that of the Frankish Empire, while both are alien to the imperial cultures of Europe from the 13th to 19th centuries.<br /><br />What other large-scale set of forces were similar for the Franks and the Americans, but the opposite for the French, British, Spanish, Germans, Austrians, Lithuanians, Ottomans, and Russians (for awhile)? Well, that's just it -- the jam-packed arena of rival empires in the latter group. The Franks were pretty much the only empire of their era. There was a foreign empire confined to Iberia (the Moors), and the Byzantines in the southeast of Europe, but the Franks were based in the northwest (which was still a huge amount of territory, including modern France, Germany, and northern Italy).<br /><br />Likewise, from our early days, Americans have been mostly the sole imperial power, at least locally, and then globally. The French were not much of a bother in North America, we defeated our British overlords, and the Spanish were confined to Central and South America (and the Spanish colonies collapsed in the early 1800s anyway). Then after WWI, we had no European rivals either, whether geopolitically or culturally. Europe was over... aside from Russia, but that's too far removed to really count in the American mind (again, geopolitically or culturally).<br /><br />China's most recent empire had collapsed at that time, too, India and Iran's empires had collapsed fairly recently, no empire emerged from the Ottoman territories -- except for the Saudi Empire, which began in the late 1700s, defeated the Ottomans in the Middle East, and kept going strong through most of the 20th C. But they're too far away from America to pose a serious threat to us, geopolitically or culturally.<br /><br />All around the world, there was only America, Russia, and the much smaller-scale Saudi empires. What a relief!<br /><br />Just cuz there wasn't literally one (1) empire in the entire world, doesn't mean it was a multipolar environment -- it was very far toward that end of the spectrum. Also close to the unipolar end was the Byzantine heyday, as well as the early Arabian / Muslim conquests (e.g. the Umayyad Caliphate). Also, the Maurya, Delhi Sultanate, and Mughal empires of India.<br /><br />At the other end was Europe between 1300 and 1900, where multiple empires emerged and jockeyed for position, fighting countless wars with each other for supremacy, but never attaining it. Also at that multipolar end of the spectrum was much of North Africa and the Middle East, circa 1000 to 1300 AD (until the arrival of a unipolar Pax Mongolica). Also, the Gupta and Pala empires of India.<br /><br />Needless to say, the very first empires like the Egyptians and Akkadians were on the unipolar side -- not enough time for multiple rival empires to emerge and arrive at their borders.<br /><br />(I'll try to focus on East Asia some other time, since I haven't studied their architectural history very much.)<br /><br />I'll do the architectural case studies later, but suffice it to say for now, the theory is that unipolar environments favor simple ornamentation, while multipolar ones favor elaborate ornamentation.<br /><br />Why? Well, when you have multiple imperial rivals, you're not only competing over the military control of territory, or the economic trade networks, but also cultural influence. You think you can do intricate tracery? Ha! We'll make ours *even more* intricate! You can't compete over simplicity, because it has a hard boundary -- you can't get more minimal than minimal, but you can get orders of magnitude more maximalist.<br /><br />This imperial cultural rivalry sparks an ornamental arms race among the competitors, as each struggles to keep up and out-do the others. In this way it is similar to runaway / Fisherian selection from evolutionary biology (e.g. the peacock's tail, from a polygynous species with intense competition among males for female mates, vs. the more drab robins who are at least monogamous within the breeding season).<br /><br />Empires in a unipolar environment don't feel such a strong pressure to keep up with others, or out-do others, so why over-do it? Keep it simple. Make it impressive, monumental, awing, etc. -- sure, but without getting sucked into a ratchet of escalating complexity. This peacefulness of cultural forms reflects the peacefulness of geopolitics when there's only one empire in the neighborhood. That doesn't mean it's free from conflict -- it expands by conquering others, but these others are not also empires in their own right always trading territory back and forth.<br /><br />Egyptian pyramids and obelisks, Akkadian ziggurats, Frankish / Romanesque and Byzantine churches, Umayyad mosques, Mauryan stupas, American Block Symphony -- all very simple groupings of volumes with minimal volumes of intermediate size to fill in the transition zones, leaving clearly visible seams. Relatively unadorned.<br /><br />Gothic cathedrals, muqarnas-marked mosques, Gupta temples -- far more encrusted with ornamentation at the highest scale (filling transition zones between volumes).<br /><br />But we'll see the details in another post. The important point for now is the dynamics underlying the emergence of these ornamental arms races, and why they only appear in certain times and places. It's worth emphasizing that there is no unilinear trend over history toward either greater or less complexity, nor is there a regular rhythmic cycle between the two ends of the spectrum. Periods of complexity do alternate with periods of simplicity, but it's not a regular repeating loop like a pendulum swinging, or weather seasons repeating.<br /><br />And so, people who complain about the relative lack of ornamentation in 20th-century and later architecture, compared to Gothic through Rococo architecture, are correct on one level -- namely, noticing and describing the facts.<br /><br />But they're wrong about there being a timeless Paradise that came before this current Fall -- go back to only 1100 AD in Europe, and you're right back to where you started in 20th-century America. Go back even further, in fact -- it was still Frankish and Byzantine. Even Roman architecture is not that heavily ornamented, owing to its unipolar environment (only serious imperial rival was Parthian Iran, leaving a zone of contest in the Levant and Armenia, but still very far removed from the age of Early Modern Euro empires).<br /><br />And the ornament-likers are also wrong about our ability to intervene and alter the course of history. They complain that the less-adorned buildings come from crazed utopians who deliberately engineer the lack of ornament -- but they don't do that at all. Lack of ornament in 20th-C America, and its sphere of influence, comes from our unipolar environment. We can't will our entire creative class into producing heavy ornamentation in their output. They're subject to societal and geopolitical forces beyond anyone's control.<br /><br />Rather, it is the would-be builders of latter-day Gothic cathedrals and Miltonian epic verse who are the delusional utopians trying to force a square peg through a round hole. Our environment doesn't support those forms any more than the Frankish and Romanesque environments did.<br /><br />You can seethe forever about the relatively simpler styles we have, or you can learn to embrace our neo-Romanesque culture, if you require a trad LARP angle to your lifestyle choices.<br /><br /></p>agnostichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12967177967469961883noreply@blogger.com39tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19346366.post-18673634590785857852023-05-20T15:15:00.004-04:002023-05-20T15:33:44.207-04:00Ethnogenesis shocks and disturbs with new cultural forms, until it reaches maturity, and becomes the accepted standard forever after<p>Before moving on to the review of Brutalism's place in the history of definitive American architecture, I'm going to take a detour through European history in order to address a major issue about new styles being shocking, abandoning their roots, etc.<br /><br />By the time America is flourishing, the European architectural expression of ethnogenesis had already run its course, reaching its last stage with Art Nouveau (whatever it was called in various countries) in the early 20th C. This was an attempt to reinvigorate their culture with a bold new modern approach, but it still fell back into styles pioneered in the Early Modern period, when these nations were truly beginning to construct new collective identities. The lightness of mass, thin wispy lines, curvilinear, employing natural motifs (vegetable, human, and animal), elaborately ornamented, playful and romantic -- none of that would have been out of place in Rococo.<br /><br />That's not to denigrate the style on an aesthetic level, just to establish that it was not revolutionary, as it was back in the late Medieval and Early Modern period, as European empires began defining themselves as post-Frankish politically, and therefore post-Romanesque architecturally. No more huge hulking slabs of mass, no more clean exteriors with simple lines, no more imposing windowless fortress facades, no more dark intimate cave-like interiors, no more haphazard grouping of differently shaped volumes, no more sober and quietly reflective mood, where the energy was potential rather than kinetic, no more restraint on the libido.<br /><br />The first of these developments -- Gothic -- came from the ascendant French Empire in the late 12th C., just as it was concluding its integrative civil war -- the conquest of western and southern France by the northeast, pitting the House of Capet in Paris (especially under Philip Augustus) against the House of Anjou / Plantagenet in the west. Although the French Empire was founded circa 1000 by Hugh Capet, in its early stages it was still culturally very Frankish, and held onto the Romanesque style of architecture of that earlier empire.<br /><br />That was just like the Romans still borrowing heavily from Greek architecture until the end of the 1st century BC, after their integrative civil war, when they revolutionized their new style through the use of concrete, arches, vaults, and domes, amphitheaters, triumphal arches, and so on and so forth.<br /><br />Or in the same way that architecture in America before the late 1800s (wrapping up our Civil War & Reconstruction period) was still mostly a local copy of styles from the British and French empires (including the vogue in those Euro empires for Neoclassical and Roman styles).<br /><br />Or in the same way that early Ottoman architecture (1300s and early 1400s) still resembles Seljuk styles, where they had come from before invading Anatolia. Their integrative civil war lasted for the first half of the 15th C., and pitted the Ottomans proper, centered in the northwest of Anatolia, against the elites of other Turkic principalities (beyliks) in the south and east. Only after that civil war was concluded did they revolutionize an entirely new style for themselves. They began borrowing (not copying) from Byzantine styles, rather than recreate Seljuk styles, just as Americans began borrowing (not copying) New World influences, rather than recreate the styles of our Euro imperial ancestors or peers, after our Civil War & Reconstruction were over.<br /><br />This serves as a reminder that intense bouts of ethnogenesis, accompanying the rise of new empires, always lead to radically new cultures, and the shedding of past identities. They have been forged into a new people, by having to combat their meta-ethnic nemesis, lying on the other side of a meta-ethnic frontier. This banding together for self-defense, and then expansion in their own right, makes them feel like they're no longer who they used to be. Then it's only a matter of which We will define the new identity, and that is determined in the integrative civil war -- the side closest to the original meta-ethnic frontier, not those safely removed from it.<br /><br />These radically new styles always strike a certain share of the population as disturbing, shocking, too much too fast, betrayal of their roots and traditions, and so on and so forth. From the kaleidoscope of light stimulation created by stained-glass windows, to the orgiastic chorus of polyphony in church chanting, to the thin wispy flying buttresses set off by harsh diagonals, the new French identity expressed by the Gothic zeitgeist was anything but a familiar comforting evolution of traditional styles.<br /><br />But once the process had been going for long enough, it became second nature, taken for granted that the people of France were no longer Frankish, that Gothic -- not Romanesque -- was their defining style, and that they wouldn't have it any other way. So some trads were shocked early on -- big deal. As the French empire starts to cohere, its people wouldn't even regard those earlier trads as truly French anyway, but as people LARP-ing as Franks (or Romans, or Gauls, or whoever else), even as the earlier polity and culture was being thoroughly replaced by that of Capetian France.<br /><br />This is not a futuristic, progressivist, airy-fairy speculative concept, to embrace a new identity just cuz it's wild and new. It is to acknowledge the cold hard material reality that We are no longer Franks, who were defined by their meta-ethnic nemesis of the Roman Empire, whereas We French have been defined by our meta-ethnic nemesis of the Vikings (and later the English). We are fundamentally defined by our relations with others, and the French of circa 1000 had no historical or current contact with the Roman Empire, but they did with the Vikings.<br /><br />Likewise, Americans had no historical or current antagonism with the French, as the British did way back when their ethnogenesis began. We were shaped by relations with the Indians (and later the Mexicans). That intense and enduring exposure to a new meta-ethnic Other changed who We were, and the natural outcome is a new culture to express this new reality.<br /><br />If it's shocking at first, it's shocking at first. Over time future generations will come to accept it as the standard, taken for granted. And contra the feverish delusions of libtards and conservatards, this process is not a never-ending ratchet that repeatedly replaces the old with the new and becomes accepted as a new standard.<br /><br />Rather, the initial revolution becomes fossilized and canonized, hardening into place, unable to be altered afterward, similar to the brain development of an individual as they grow up. A person imprints on what is going on during a sensitive developmental window, and then that's it for the rest of their days. The sensitive window for an entire culture is the aftermath of its integrative civil war.<br /><br />The inhabitants of Italy during the Renaissance still recognized the culture of their 1st and 2nd-century ancestors as the Roman standard, not whatever was created during and after the Crisis of the Third Century. Likewise we still recognize Block Symphony as our architectural standard, not the glass & steel fishbowl flexspace that the iconoclasts have tried to replace it with for 40 years now -- nor any other attempt at Euro LARP-ing (since the Silicon Valley style is just a variation on Bauhaus).<br /><br />At any rate, the growing pains phase of our cultural development is over -- we went through metamorphosis during the early 20th C. We are now a mature culture that cannot be artificially sent back through puberty in order to imprint on a different environment while still plastic, and develop into something else in a would-be second adulthood. There is only one adulthood, and we've already gotten there.<br /><br />Americans are who we changed into during our 20th-century heyday, whether you like it or not. At this point, further development is marginal or non-existent, so rather than innovation, we move into a period of conservation and canonization, which has been under way for several decades now.<br /><br /></p>agnostichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12967177967469961883noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19346366.post-71003765843235630332023-05-19T00:34:00.008-04:002023-05-19T01:02:57.311-04:00Prelude to an Americanist defense of Brutalist architecture<p>In the comments section to another post (beginning <a href="https://akinokure.blogspot.com/2023/04/woodgrain-and-chrome-primitive-futurist.html?showComment=1682975317984#c6000005924386114066">here</a> and lasting several comments), I detailed how pointless and ridiculous the Trump executive order on federal architecture was.<br /><br />Democrat partisans I'm sure took issue with it, but not from a nationalist or Americanist stance. They wouldn't even be able to point out the incoherence of the term "Greco-Roman" for architecture, since they deny the relation between the political and the cultural -- namely, that cohesive nations and outright empires produce the great, lasting, high culture around the world, from the beginning of civilization.<br /><br />Rather, they see artists as existing in their own domain of society, perhaps having to humbly beg for funding from politically connected agents, but otherwise doing their own thing. The only time they allow art to express politics is when whining about Euro empires depicting The Other, defining themselves in relation to an Other, etc. -- and only then when the Other is not also a European! They don't care about the British and French defining themselves against each other, launching centuries of warfare against each other, colonizing and then getting decolonized from the Other's lands, and so on and so forth.<br /><br />But Ancient Greece and the Roman Empire were not the same polity, did not share a language, did not worship the same gods -- crucially, the Greeks of several centuries earlier did not worship the head of the Roman government. More to the point, they were not defined by the same meta-ethnic nemesis -- Ancient Greece never did get to that stage, although the Achaemenid Empire pressing against them from the east came close. And even so, Rome was not forced into cohesive status to withstand the Persians -- but the Gauls from the northwest, as well as Carthagenians from the southwest.<br /><br />Once Roman ethnogenesis hit its stride -- in the wake of its integrative civil war of the 1st century BC -- its architecture no longer resembled Ancient Greek at all. The Greeks did not use arches, vaults, or domes -- precisely the defining elements of the Roman style. Greek columns climbed strictly vertically toward the flat base of the roof of a temple, which may have been pitched toward the center, but had no curvilinear elements (other than the cross-section of the columns).<br /><br />This process of radically distinguishing themselves from their earlier cultural (if not political) overlords from the East went so far as devising an entirely new building material, for their entirely new style, for their status as an entirely new ethnos. This new stuff -- concrete -- supported the Roman Architectural Revolution, including all those monumental civic projects like aqueducts, as well as religious + civic structures like the Pantheon, which still boasts the largest unreinforced concrete dome on Earth, 2000 years later.<br /><br />A striking pair of images on the Wiki entry for <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffer">coffer</a> shows the dome of the Pantheon, along with the ceiling of the underground DC Metro stations. Both are exposed concrete -- not clad in some other material -- and both are not even trying to imitate some other material while actually using concrete -- it's clearly concrete poured into a mold, not bricks, not stone that's been quarried and cut and laid into rows, etc. And both make use of a repeated simple geometric motif -- square-like cells expanded into a rectangular matrix (albeit bent into an arch or dome).<br /><br />No one (at least today) derides the dome of the Pantheon as a drab, soulless, alienating insect hive -- but they very well could have, if they were Greco LARP-ers from ancient Italy, especially from the part that never wanted to be Roman, in the south, proud of their Greek cultural influence. But those possible complaints would have fallen on deaf ears.<br /><br />Some day -- perhaps already -- people will come to the same conclusion about the Brutalist ceiling of the DC Metro. Lord knows I occasionally found it insectoid when I lived in the area, and the opposite of a breath of fresh air after heading home from work. But the other times, I found it futurist, space-age, and just plain old cool.<br /><br />And by now, I can appreciate its uniquely American status -- more so than the New York Subway, which relies mostly on European-style tilework, along with the ugly side of the industrial aesthetic -- those metal I-beams-as-columns along the platform. If they were gleaming chrome, that'd be beautiful industrial, but they're just I-beams with a coat of paint. Plus, the Subway doesn't have the dark intimate mood lighting as the Metro, let alone the row of lights along the platform edge that start blinking when the train is approaching. It's from the future! (No, it's just from America.)<br /><br />The Metro used to be completely a product of the warm '70s color palette of its birth -- cream, orange, brown, with some chrome trim. But now both are headed toward neoliberal hell with only the futuristic side, not the primitive side, and with cold rather than warm colors, and harsh bright lighting instead of warm lighting. The reason you actually went to a Metro station -- riding a train -- was a pretty warm and cozy aesthetic experience, whether or not you liked the stations themselves.<br /><br />And at any rate, the stations' floors are paved with red-brown ceramic tiles, in a hexagonal honeycomb arrangement -- without looking like an insect hive. That provides some warmth to the color palette as well as variety in the materials present.<br /><br />But now I'm getting a bit too carried away -- a future post will document the warm, cozy interiors of Brutalist spaces. Next in the pipeline, though, is a review of the American style's use of exposed concrete, from our founding father Frank Lloyd Wright and afterward.<br /><br />The point for now is that Brutalism has the most undeserved bum rap of all architectural styles. The cultural conservatives who wrote that Trump executive order were not only late in putting it out during the transition to the Biden admin, rather than at the outset of Trump's term, but 40 years after the style had already been not only abandoned but derided as something to contradict going forward.<br /><br />So we see yet another example of the Trump admin being disjunctive -- trying to redefine its party's overarching program, but falling back into its old habits that got it where it is today, at the end of the road. Brutalism was a New Deal-era style, and once the neoliberal revolution took off during the Reagan realignment of the '80s, it was dead as a doornail.<br /><br />For awhile it was merely derided, ignored, left unkempt, and contradicted when new buildings were erected. But it was not until the neoliberal apex of the woketard 2010s that American elites began actively and systematically demolishing examples of the style.<br /><br />This anti-Brutalist iconoclasm has run most rampant among blue institutions like government bureaucracies, universities, and pharma research institutes, in blue cities like Boston, in blue states like Massachusetts. It seems to be worst on the East Coast, and less intense as you move west, since the back-East region is the least American region, having little role in being defined by our empire's meta-ethnic nemeses (mainly the Indians on the frontier, along with the Mexicans later on).<br /><br />The total demolition and erection of new buildings was financed by another blue patron -- the finance sector, who divvied out to their political allies the output of the Central Bank's multi-trillion-dollar money-printing bonanza ("quantitative easing"). This is taking place under blue presidents, Obama and Biden, as well as under Trump (though not W. Bush -- too early for woketard iconoclasm).<br /><br />So, Trump and his cultural conservative supporters who hate on Brutalism are birds of a feather with Obama-era woketards from the government and corporate bureaucracies. They may have contrasting rationalizations for why Brutalist buildings must be destroyed, catering to their different constituencies, but that's just branding and marketing. Functionally they are on the same team, a good cop and a bad cop (Our cop and Their cop).<br /><br />And yet the outcomes have primarily favored the blue team's preferences -- not a RETVRN to Roman, Gothic, etc., but fishbowls of glass and steel on the outside, and Silicon Valley daycare center on the inside. It's Bauhaus for babies. And therefore, anti-American, as Bauhaus had minimal influence in America and its broader sphere of influence, and was a competing dead-end movement from moribund rival empires (German in that case, though many Austrian Empire refugees were there too).<br /><br />Then again, maybe the cultural conservatives who lobbied for that executive order also prefer the fishbowl flexspace aesthetic that's beloved by their fellow urbanite over-produced elites from knowledge sectors of society. In fact, I'll bet they live and work in the Swamp itself, or its suburbs. Nobody who hates that heavily on Brutalism can deny that they're just whining about their personal experience of having to take the DC Metro to and from work every day. Tourists may find it futuristic and cool -- but that wears off after months and years of commuting that way.<br /><br />They're not living in rural areas of red states working in agriculture, energy, the military, or manufacturing. That is the core of the GOP coalition. And they may never see an example of Brutalism in their entire lives, other than having to trek into town to fill out some paperwork at their municipal building that was built in the '60s. They're certainly not surrounded by it, and they are not the ones seething about it, let alone demolishing it.<br /><br />But at least on the surface of their claims, the right-wingers want a more trad-looking building to replace the demolished Brutalist one, and on that level, they have been completely exploited and defeated by their no-honor-among-theives allies from the blue camp of neoliberalism. That extends to the iconoclasm against historical statues -- they could be Confederate or Yankee, it doesn't matter. The point is, woketards removed or demolished trad-coded statues, while their fellow Brutalist-haters from the right wing stood by and cried but did nothing.<br /><br />Applying what we've seen from both sides over the past 10 years, we can see that efforts to conserve our distinctly American culture will -- for the short term, anyway -- not be helped by cultural conservatives from the GOP. They're too neoliberal, and bound to hate on at least half of what defines American culture -- that of the New Deal (they might not mind that of the Progressive Era, though). More than that, they lack any power, and just stand by while shit hits the fan.<br /><br />Sadly, that means conservation efforts will come from a civil war within the Democrat coalition, between the woketards who only want to keep destroying the past and replacing it with new crap, and the vintage / thrift store / antiques crowd who want to preserve, enjoy, and celebrate all the totally awesome stuff we've created.<br /><br />Isn't that a trad crowd? Not really -- trad means never change, only accept the past. The vintage / thrift store / antiques crowd doesn't really care about the culture of this land before the late 1800s, because it wasn't very American back then, and was based on European imperial models. But we're not Europe, and can't compete with them on their own cultural turf. Still, who made better movies, with better cinematography, built better buildings, furnished them with cooler designed objects, and developed a new aesthetic of primitive futurism?<br /><br />So the attitude is more of curating, cataloging, and canonizing what came before, aware that our heyday is long over and nothing new can ever top what was created at our peak. Forming a consensus on the standards of American culture, and then spreading awareness about them, celebrating them, enjoying them, viewing them, and so on.<br /><br />We can't conserve & preserve cultures that we did not create, and that we have no geographic or temporal link to. It's up to the Italians to preserve Roman culture -- or Spaniards to preserve what the Romans brought to their land. But Romans never landed in North America, so there is nothing of theirs for us to preserve. Certain aspects that can be copied and mediated, like their language and literature, we can preserve. We could even preserve images of their visual art and architecture. But most of that stuff is in Italy, not America, so we can't help them as much as they could help themselves.<br /><br />We could help directly by occupying them, as we have since WWII, to protect buildings and otherwise ensure the stability of their Roman heritage. However, our occupation has served mainly to absorb them into our cultural orbit -- and if that conflicts with centuries of preserving Roman heritage, what America says, goes. That was the whole point of the post-war Vatican II Council -- submitting the Roman Church to the American Empire. Cuius regio, eius religio. So don't count on foreigners to preserve your own heritage.<br /><br />To the extent that we managed to preserve some of what was created in other empires, that owed to our status as a new ascending empire in our own right. The Abbasid Caliphate during its heyday could preserve parts of Ancient Greek or Roman culture, but after their empire collapsed, they were in no position to be the repository of global knowledge, and so today's House of Wisdom is no longer in Baghdad. That will be no less true for America's status as global knowledge repository, as our empire collapses.<br /><br />This is another reason why the kind of cultural conservatives who lobbied for that Trump executive order, or gave it a virtual high-five through a Silicon Valley platform, will generally not be helpful. Their idea of conservation is defending something like "Western Civ" -- most of which unfolded on another continent, hundreds or thousands of years ago. We can play no big role in defending Christianity, although we could in defending Mormonism or Pentecostalism. We can't protect castles or cathedrals, perspective paintings, flamenco or fugues.<br /><br />We can only defend Block Symphony buildings, primitive futurist objects, rock and jazz music, movies, cars, etc. -- but that leaves plenty of work to keep canonizers and conservationists busy forever. Just don't count on much help from performative haters of Brutalism, who were late to that iconoclastic crusade anyway.<br /><br /></p>agnostichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12967177967469961883noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19346366.post-35620231218235685732023-05-09T00:43:00.002-04:002023-05-09T17:27:33.328-04:00Cantilevers pioneered by the American style of architecture & design<p>Looking back through some old family photos, I was reminded of how Midcentury Modern everybody's homes used to be -- not through deliberate, cultivated effort, nor as a trendoid striver affectation, but just because it is the American style, and we're Americans. So what else would our homes look like?<br /><br />We may have been joined in this style by the Scandinavians (especially Denmark), Switzerland, and the Russians -- those who were outside the haute art world of the Western Euro empires that began in the Early Modern period. But we largely pioneered this style ourselves, independent of similar trends in Russia / USSR, with the Scandis and Swiss jumping on board after we got it started.<br /><br />In our home was a pair of <a href="https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/vintage-classic-la-boy-rocker-1974283418">these</a> La-Z-Boy recliners with prominent bentwood arms, much like the original Midcentury <a href="https://offerup.com/item/detail/1041933531">type</a> that my grandparents had in their home, in the middle of nowhere, Appalachia. (Ours were in different colors / patterns from the links.)<br /><br />Although bentwood as a fabrication process is an invention of the Austrian Empire (by Thonet), its lines in Austria were very typically European -- curvilinear, slender, airy, nothing that would have offended Rococo sensibilities. Bentwood in America took on the typical American Block Symphony approach -- mostly a right angle, with the intersection rounded off, thicker / wider pieces of wood, feeling more solid and massive, even though they're only an outline rather than a filled-in slab. This traces back to the Waterfall style of furniture from the Streamline Moderne period beginning in the '30s, and those pieces were not just skeletal outlines but Romanesque hunks of sheer volume.<br /><br />Our dining table was <a href="https://www.furnishmevintage.com/vintage-danish-teak-dining-table-draw-leaf-expanding-top/">this one</a> by Ansager Mobler from Denmark, part of the '90s Scandinavian craze (when making a pilgrimage to Ikea became a rite of passage for the aspiring middle class). It's a contempo production, not a Midcentury original, but is fairly faithful -- only the color gives it away a bit, being more orange a la the yellow and orange tones of '80s woods (mainly oak), whereas the Midcentury would've had a bit more red in the mix. But it is teak, squared-off everywhere, clean lines, and so on and so forth.<br /><br />And what other choice was there for seating at such a table than some good ol' cantilever chairs? The way the seat is only supported from below in one place (the front) makes the balancing act impressive, especially when a person's body weight is being supported, not just the seat itself. It looks like a marvel of modern engineering.<br /><br />I'm pretty sure they were by Chromcraft, the major American manufacturer of cantilever dining chairs, since they also made upholstery an option, rather than only putting caning on the seat and the back. Similar to <a href="https://www.chairish.com/product/948200/chromcraft-cesca-chairs-set-of-3">these</a>, but with a speckled neutral earth tones fabric on both the seat and back, inside of an orange-brown wood frame, but of course with the gleaming chrome unaltered.<br /><br />Chromcraft was adapting the popular <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cesca_chair">Cesca chair</a> by Bauhaus designer Marcel Breuer (Austrian) from the late '20s. It's one of only a handful of Bauhaus creations that did go on to influence America, and through America the rest of the world. Usually Bauhaus was a dead-end, the last futile gasp of moribund Euro imperial cultures -- but because these chairs used both wood frames and reed caning, they did not strike such a sterile, alienating, purely futuristic / industrial note in the audience.<br /><br />America invented this overall aesthetic, primitive futurism, but if a decadent Euro movement coincided with it in a particular case, we were not going to deny them influence. Breuer's chair has fairly uniform-looking wood, in a blond color, not very primitive as the American versions would be (like the Chromcraft ones we had, in an orange-brown oak). But it's more natural than 99% of Bauhaus' output.<br /><br />Fellow Bauhauser, Mies Van Der Rohe (German), designed a cantilever chair as well in the late '20s, though because it was sleek black leather and chrome, without wood / reed / etc., it did not influence America, and therefore did not influence the rest of the world. Both Breuer and Mies Van Der Rohe used cantilevers in their architecture as well around this time.<br /><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">* * *<br /></p><p><br />That would seem to be the origin of cantilevered furniture, but as usual, the hype about Bauhaus proves to be overblown, one of the undying myths that status-insecure East Coast academics tell each other, and through their East Coast media pals, the rest of the country and world. That's true for the haters of Bauhaus, too -- they make it out to be a Great Satan that ushered in a latter-day fall from grace. They need it to be influential, in order to hate on it so fervently. But the haters are just as clueless.<br /><br />And it traces back to the same cause -- the back-East region of America is hardly American, which has always been defined by the frontier with the Indians, beginning in the Old Northwest (Chicago) and extending out to the West Coast. East Coasters have a minimal understanding of American culture, whether they were to like it or hate it -- they just don't know what it is. How can they? They're still half-pretending to be British, rounding their low/back vowels instead of speaking like an American (unrounding them).<br /><br />If it doesn't resemble some European culture, East Coasters simply cannot process it -- to them, it doesn't count as design, architecture, music, etc. Hence they over-emphasize the role that a Euro movement like Bauhaus played in America, and via America the rest of the world during the Midcentury. Most of American Modernism was native, and does not resemble Bauhaus, and therefore very little of the so-called International Style -- really, the Pax Americana style -- looks like Bauhaus either, unless the Euros had more local influence than did the Americans.<br /><br />For example, South America, and Brazil in particular, had more Euro LARP-ing influence than emulation of America. We never conquered Brazil, our parent empire did not colonize Brazil, tons of elite Euros fled to Brazil after their empires' final death of WWII, and we have never controlled Brazil as a puppet regime. (Nor did we control Argentina or Chile -- those military coups may have been supported by the CIA, but were entirely endogenous affairs that would've happened and succeeded without our help.) And sure enough, there are some pretty nasty Bauhaus-y buildings in Brasilia.<br /><br />But Japan bet the farm on American rather than Euro culture well before WWII, having been missionized by Frank Lloyd Wright personally. Then even more so once they were occupied by us after, their aesthetic quickly came to resemble the dominant American / Scandinavian / Soviet style, not the decadent Bauhaus / Euro style. Hardly any of their space-age electronics from the '60s and '70s came without some kind of real or simulated woodgrain, exactly in line with American primitive futurism. And when learning English, they want to know the standard American accent, not British.<br /><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">* * *<br /></p><p><br />Decades before Breuer and Mies Van Der Rohe employed cantilevers in their architecture and furniture, the American Frank Lloyd Wright had already pioneered the use of dramatic cantilevered roofs in his Prairie School buildings (e.g., the Robie House from 1909). These roofs are cantilevered since they're only supported by the wall of the building, having no columns or other supports closer to the roof's edge. How do those roofs stretch out so far without falling over? They're balanced by having even more of them on top of the walled part of the home, and/or more weight attached to them in the core and less weight in the periphery.<br /><br />Modern architects love showing off their engineering wizardry by using sweeping cantilevers, but it all goes back to the American Midwest around the turn of the 20th century -- not Bauhaus in the collapsed German Empire of the 1920s.<br /><br />The American origin of dramatic cantilevers in whole buildings is pretty well understood. But what has so far gone unnoticed is that Americans also invented cantilevered furniture as well, including chairs.<br /><br />It's true that the Bauhausers were the first to make a chair with the seat supported in the front by two "legs" (that may or may not connect into a single piece along the ground), which travel down, then back underneath the seat. This turns the support under the seat into a kind of spring, where the person's body weight pushes down on the upper horizontal plane of the support, but the horizontal part of the support along the ground resists and pushes back. The material has to have enough tension to withstand this attempt at squeezing the spring, but stainless steel has no problem with that. And so, as if by magic, the heavy person remains seemingly suspended in mid-air.<br /><br />Incidentally, Knoll's website says these types are thought to be derivatives of 19th-C. rocking chairs, but none of the rocking chairs were cantilevered. Some had the usual four legs at the corners of the seat, with rocking gliders connecting the legs on each side of the seat. And the Thonet model actually has three points of contact on each side with the seat bottom -- the four corners, plus another in the middle of the side. They're anything but seemingly gravity-defying.<br /><br />However, there is a whole 'nother type of chair that also uses a cantilevered support -- and in just one point, not in two points as in the Bauhaus style chair. That is the so-called swivel chair, the ancestor to nearly all office chairs today.<br /><br />In a swivel chair, the vertical support column is only attached at one point to its horizontal upper support piece, which in turn is attached to the seat itself. One vertical support element, not two separate ones. It's attached near the center when viewed in profile, although closer to the back, since more body weight rests there than at the front part. The chair has to balance those two sections, a heavier back and lighter front -- and accommodate any shift in weight, like when the person leans back to rest or leans forward to hunch over their desk.<br /><br />To do that, the horizontal part of the support along the ground contains both a component that goes toward the back the seat (to resist the leaning back) and toward the front of the seat (to resist the leaning forward). But since the seat swivels 360 degrees, these components must sweep around as well, to resist leaning forward or backward no matter which direction the seat is pointing. Hence, the spokes of the lower support section form a circle -- or a discrete version of one, like having 4 or 5 spokes, evenly spaced around the circle. So no matter where the seat is pointed, there are components from one or more of the spokes lying in the "resist leaning back" and "resist leaning forward" directions.<br /><br />Later, the continuous version of the support base was used -- a smooth solid circle, most notably by the American Eero Saarinen's <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_chair">Tulip chair</a> from the mid-'50s. That particular chair didn't have casters underneath to glide it across the floor, but its seat does swivel, and is supported in only one point like other swivel chairs. It was paired with one hell of a cantilevered table, too, to my knowledge the earliest example of a table with such a dramatic cantilever support. Less dramatic are the ones with huge blocks in below the middle of the tabletop -- the Tulip table stands on a single stem-like base!<br /><br />Other larger, lounge-ier chairs for the home also employ the swivel mechanism, albeit sometimes hidden underneath the floor-length upholstery in a more trad-coded model, but left out in the open for the more mod-coded ones, e.g. the Eames lounge chair and ottoman (both). The cantilevered nature of the support for swivel chairs is kept open to highlight the machine-age wonders of "wow, how did they engineer that magical balancing act? All that weight, leaning forward, backward, shifting side to side -- all balancing on that one tiny little point!" <br /><br />With all due respect to the dual-column cantilever chairs, including my beloved childhood dining chairs, the single-column cantilever chair is a greater example of modern engineering marvels.<br /><br />And it's also older! American president Thomas Jefferson invented a swivel chair for personal use, but this did not spawn any copies of itself. Around 1850, the American Thomas Warren invented and produced (through the American Chair Company) the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centripetal_Spring_Armchair">Centripetal Spring Armchair</a>, which does everything relevant here that a swivel chair does, including rest on one, not two, vertical support elements. I've found very little evidence that this chair was at all popular in its own day, and apparently vanished into oblivion within a few decades. It left no direct copies.<br /><br />Both of those early examples were a case of "right idea, wrong time" -- because American ethnogenesis has not entered its "defining new things for ourselves" phase, which happens after an integrative civil war, where who "we" are is up for grabs. Is it the one Us, or the other Us? During the initial rise of an empire, we are only defining ourselves against our meta-ethnic nemesis, in our case the Indians (and somewhat later, the Spanish / Mexicans). Our Civil War & Reconstruction Era ends in the 1870s, so distinctive American ethnicity does not really take shape until after then.<br /><br />If Warren had introduced his chair 50 years later, it would've been a smash hit. But before the integrative civil war, we were still holding ourselves to Euro antecedent standards -- and no European created a swivel chair. If it was too outre for the Euros, it was sadly also not going to find much success here because we were still insecure about being ourselves.<br /><br />But as fate would have it, an American architect and designer from the Midwest began working around the turn of the 20th century, and wouldn't you know it? -- Frank Lloyd Wright himself invented the modern office chair, for use in the Larkin Administration Building which he also designed, in 1904.<br /><br />His <a href="https://www.architonic.com/en/antique/wright-chair-larkin-administration/4100636">swivel</a> model streamlined the several large springs of Warren's earlier model, was made entirely of metal (aside from a simple seat covering -- unlike Warren's more elaborate upholstery). And it was made in an angular style appropriate for American Block Symphony, to distinguish America from serpentine-curvy Europe. The only problem was one of degree rather than kind -- the footprint of the base is too narrow, so it was able to tip over if someone leaned too far. But that was fixed with subsequent swivel chairs.<br /><br />Although there are several additional vertical support elements, they are not attached to the bottom of the seat -- they all converge in the center toward the top, and it's still just one point of support at the top of the vertical section.<br /><br />Wright also designed an entirely separate type of cantilever office chair for this building, which was demolished in 1950 by traitorous back-East scum (Buffalo, NY), who could not appreciate American culture even when it was handed to them on a silver platter. Sadly most or all of this second type were then thrown in the dump after.<br /><br />It's an integrated desk-and-chair combo, as seen in <a href="https://www.buffalorising.com/2017/07/for-sale-frank-lloyd-wright-designed-chair-desk-larkin-building/">this example</a> and in <a href="https://insideinside.org/project/larkin-adminstration-building-1906/">this gallery</a> (Fig. 6, "Type B desk"). There's only one vertical support element, roughly in the middle of the seat bottom, and two horizontal elements (a higher and a lower one) take it back to the desk, where they attach to a vertical piece along the inner side of the desk. It doesn't fall over because the counterweight is the huge hulking desk that it's attached to by tense metal supports -- and the distance is pretty close, no more than a few feet, so there's no torque that could bend the seat down, let alone overturn it.<br /><br />Very much like the roof extending out over the wall of the heavy bulky core of a home -- even if you jumped up and down on the edge of the roof, or sat on it, or hanged from it, it wouldn't come crashing down.<br /><br />The seat back can fold forward to a horizontal position, too, so that the chair can be fully stored underneath the desk when not in use. Neat idea! Not that much of a space-saver, though, and it meant that the chair could never be moved anywhere away from its desk-twin. So this model didn't go anywhere, as far as office or home furniture goes.<br /><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">* * *<br /></p><p><br />Let's return to the non-swiveling cantilever chairs. You can't deny that they have a more dynamic look, the way the back seems to be left in the dust by the front support -- since there is no direct support in the back. The "front to back" contrast is normally not that dynamic in a chair, and using the cantilever in this way does give it an industrial / machine-age speed and energy to it, even though it's a perfectly stationary object for a person who will be sitting perfectly still in it.<br /><br />The swivel chairs, although more magical in their support, have the support closer to the center rather than the front or back, so they appear more stationary and harmonious, not like the driver of a speeding car with a stark back-to-front arrow.<br /><br />Outside of Bauhaus, Finnish architect & designer Alvar Aalto created a non-swivel <a href="https://www.moma.org/collection/works/3171">cantilever chair</a> in 1930, only two years after Breuer and three after Mies Van Der Rohe. He went on in the '30s to create even more variations on this theme, with large lounge types for the home. These latter improve on the speed theme by disconnecting the lower horizontal supports from each other around the back -- this puts even more of the structure in the front, and makes the lower supports look like skies that are taking the sitter on a race across the snow.<br /><br />And unlike Bauhaus, they were made of wood, although they did not mix wood and chrome a la the American style. But that at least made them influential worldwide, fitting with the American inclusion of wood, as opposed to Bauhaus' general aversion to wood.<br /><br />America's seminal designer (who was not also an architect), Gilbert Rohde, took over creative control of Herman Miller in the '30s, and had an exhibit at the 1933 Chicago World's Fair, which served as a launch pad for primitive futurism (in the new form of Streamline Moderne). He made a whole bunch of cantilevered seating, and it's hard to tell when each one came out. But as early as 1935, he'd already made a <a href="https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/481846">chair</a>, as well as a <a href="https://www.invaluable.com/auction-lot/gilbert-rohde-z-stool-200-c-e7245f9939">stool</a> around the same time. Earlier, at the '33 Fair, he debuted a <a href="https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/490894">lamp</a> and <a href="https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/490893">clock</a> with cantilever support.<br /><br />During the '30s, he added to the "how did they balance all that weight?" theme by making the seats themselves massive and bulky -- no need for a person to sit in them to make you scratch your head. The chair on its own seemed to defy gravity, unlike the Bauhaus designs that were light and delicate unto themselves, in typical Euro fashion.<br /><br />I already mentioned Eero Saarinen's heavily, but centered, cantilevered Tulip series, which brought the concept to tables. That was from the mid-'50s.<br /><br />The next development was to switch where the vertical supports were -- from the front to the back, making it seem to want to lean forward. There's a Danish Modern desk in teak by Georg Petersens Mobelfabrik like this, which everyone attributes to the '60s without any evidence. And American designer extraordinaire Milo Baughman did this with all sorts of seating -- club chairs, loveseats, entire sofas, desks, etc. -- possibly also in the '60s or the '70s at the latest, again without any hard evidence of the timing. (He'd already done the "support in front, seeming to lean back" style earlier.)<br /><br />These seem to be the ancestors of today's cantilever side tables that every big box store sells (supported in the back, seeming to lean forward, with the empty space in front allowing the tabletop to slide over some other piece of furniture). In any case, not something that traces back to Bauhaus, but to America, perhaps with input from our fellow non-collapsed-Euro-empire friends in Scandinavia.<br /><br />Bauhaus did pioneer a certain style of cantilever chair, but had already been beaten to the punch by Frank Lloyd Wright when it comes to cantilevers in whole buildings, as well as seating (albeit in the form of the swivel chair, and the separate desk-and-chair combo). And they clearly weren't as obsessed with cantilevers as the Americans were, who put it to use in everything as soon as they could -- stools, clocks, lamps, ottomans, entire sofas, then tables, desks, anything really. It's more definitive of the American-led style (with help from the Scandis to define the culture of the post-Age-of-Euro-Empires era).<br /><br />Americans may not have invented sculpture or discovered contrapposto, but we did pioneer and perfect the same basic principle as applied to buildings and all other designed objects, shocking a sense of energy, movement, and dynamism into what would otherwise be a stationary, inert, dead hunk of matter, and in a way that seems to defy the laws of nature. Not just a slight overhang of a roof above an outer wall, but in a sweeping, dramatic, engineering wizardry kind of way. And our building-sculptures and object-sculptures are no less artistic or aesthetic just cuz they don't represent natural kinds like people, animals, plants, and so on. Abstract art is no less artistic than figurative art.<br /><br /></p>agnostichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12967177967469961883noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19346366.post-60239964661231831882023-05-05T04:23:00.003-04:002023-05-05T04:39:09.817-04:00The 2023 financial crisis: this time *is* different -- for the worse<p>Not much to add other than a link to my "old" <a href="https://akinokure.blogspot.com/2018/10/no-higher-finance-gods-left-to-be-deus.html">post</a> from late 2018, laying out the very simple logic and history of the neoliberal-era bubble. (Now that I'm proofreading, there's a little bit to add...)<br /><br />I won't rehearse the entire post -- read it at that link, and read my comments, too. You'll learn more than anywhere else.<br /><br />And best of all, you don't need to worry about understanding mortgages, commercial real estate, etc. Those are only the specific triggers for a bubble inflating, and the first symptoms of its popping. The trillions of fake newly printed dollars could've been misallocated into some other domain of society, it doesn't matter.<br /><br />The point is: "big" can only be bailed out by "bigger", not by a peer at the same level of the pyramid, and certainly not by an inferior. Progressively since the neoliberal revolution of Reaganism, the finance sector has been destroyed at higher and higher levels, reaching the very tippy top after 2008, with a global network of central banks working as a policy team.<br /><br />They destroyed their balance sheets after 2008, by absorbing so much toxic waste from the level just below central banks in the pyramid -- the big banks like JP Morgan etc. And that toxic waste was traded for freshly printed trillions of dollars, which the big banks spread through the top 10-20% of society, in the way you may have seen on the TV show Shark Tank. That was just open auditions for money-printer hand-outs, with the "investors" as the middlemen between the central bank and the "entrepreneurs".<br /><br />But now that the global network of central banks have destroyed their own credit-worthiness, and are in need of a bailout themselves -- so sad, but there is no one higher up on the finance pyramid. No central bank of the solar system, galaxy, universe, etc., exactly as I said nearly 5 years ago, but which nobody seems to have absorbed in the meantime -- probably because they're all wish-casters relying on central bank 12-D chess brilliance to keep their overproduced elite status secured.<br /><br />Sorry, suckers, there's no one to bail out the American central bank, let alone all the world's major central banks.<br /><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">* * *<br /></p><p><br />I was proven right when, not even 2 years later, the central banks turned the money printers on like crazy in 2020, printing as much in one summer as they had earlier printed in one decade -- a massive acceleration.<br /><br />But the real lesson from 2020 was that the whole money-printing trick can only be done once, as my model makes clear. If you expect to keep the printer on forever, even accelerating its rate, no one will take you seriously, and you'll need to be bailed out by a superior. But since there are no superiors to the American central bank, or the global team of them, they would not get bailed out.<br /><br />And sure enough, in the wake of the 2020 money-printing bonanza, suddenly inflation went sky-high and throughout the entire system. Not just higher than earlier periods, or in one sector of the economy but not others. It's high, and it's everywhere.<br /><br />This is because the central banks have lost their credit-worthiness -- nobody believes or trusts them, which is the origin of the term "credit". During the 2010s, people could make-believe that the money-printing and 0% interest rates were merely temporary, an emergency, a radical intervention like surgery for an acute trauma -- not chronic, ongoing, indefinite things that would never be undone.<br /><br />Central banks tried raising interest rates and contracting -- rather than further inflating -- the money supply during Trump's term, and by Christmas 2018 the stock market took a big fat shit. Rather than keep the pain on the overproduced elites of the neoliberal era, the central bank backed off, and turned on the money-printer in overdrive during 2020.<br /><br />This proved that the temporary and emergency claims were fake. Technically they could not be proven or disproven when first administered under Obama. Maybe they'll succeed in rescuing the real economy, and all those trillions of new dollars can be withdrawn from circulation -- because they will have created tons more of dollars through their healing powers. Like taking someone off life-support, and they start breathing and walking around and talking again.<br /><br />Without attempting to dial down the level of life-support, you cannot really know whether the patient is healed or still hopeless. Everybody with a brain knew the 2010s economy was fake, but you couldn't point to empirical evidence, since its fakeness vs. realness had not been tested.<br /><br />But that changed in 2018, and by the 2020 acceleration in money-printing, all doubt was removed. The central banks 0% interest rates and printing of trillions of dollars, euros, etc., was *not* just a temporary life-support machine for an acutely ill patient.<br /><br />When you dial down the life-support machine from 9 to 8, and the patient starts having an epileptic fit and flat-lining -- guess what, life-support didn't work, he's dead. Then in embarrassment you dial the machine back up to 9, then 10, then 11 -- and everybody can now see, with empirical testing, that your intervention failed.<br /><br />That's why it took until 2021 and after for inflation to skyrocket and strike the entire economy rather than certain sectors. If the central banks are just going to print more and more dollars, they're worth less and less, so we have to ask for more of them in exchange for whatever we were selling before.<br /><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">* * *<br /></p><p><br />The rampant and intractable inflation proves that the central banks, and the elite class they try to placate, have lost control. They have not cynically but expertly "kicked the can down the road". They're not diabolical selfish geniuses. Their plans are already blowing up in their faces -- and ours. Their currency is openly worth less and less, and nobody believes or trusts them anymore, and on top of that, by weaponizing the dollar during the Ukraine-Russia War, the rest of the world has already started to ditch the dollar.<br /><br />None of those results were present throughout the 2010s, or the 2000s, or the '90s, or '80s. This time *really is* different -- it's the end of the line for the neoliberal-era bubble, and it's taking down central banks and their currencies with it.<br /><br />Why? Because this time is different in the lack of further higher-ups on the finance pyramid to bail out the acutely ill patient.<br /><br />To be clear, the 2023 financial crisis is not about regional banks or commercial real estate -- the insolvency crisis is at the highest levels, the global central banks, including our own that used to print the world's unipolar reserve currency.<br /><br />Why is this top level getting taken out now? Didn't central banks always jump on the grenade during neoliberalism's earlier crises? No -- read that 2018 post I wrote. Continental Illinois Bank, the largest regional bank at the time, blew up in 1982 -- and was rescued by the FDIC, with zero help behind the scenes from the central bank, or even from the big Wall Street banks.<br /><br />As the bubble has inflated more and more, bigger and bigger rescuers have had to play the role of jumping on the grenade. And once the global central banks jumped on the grenade -- that was it. There's no one to jump on their grenade. Or to mix metaphors, no one to suck the poison out of their wounds. They're the top, period. When they're compromised, it's over for the whole pyramid.<br /><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">* * *<br /></p><p><br />I want to emphasize that the "diabolical genius" meme really is over. If the central banks try to print up another 10 trillion dollars, 20 trillion, 100 trillion, that won't buy its recipients anything. They'll be worthless. They could only pull that trick once, during the 2010s, when the credit-worthiness of the central banks had not yet been put to an empirical test. Will they normalize rates, will they withdraw the monetary life-support and keep it withdrawn? Who can say, for right now, in 2014?<br /><br />Back then -- seems like another lifetime -- you could print up $5 trillion, hand it out via Shark Tank to the top 10% of society, and they could purchase a lot more stuff and services because of it. There was no system-wide inflation, let alone at such high levels.<br /><br />Now, everyone has seen the results of the test of credit-worthiness, and so any future rounds of money-printing will have the same effects as the 2020 round -- soaring inflation, no improvement in the recipients' standard-of-living. You may go from a millionaire to a billionaire, but you won't be living in a bigger house, have a more beautiful wife, eat better food, or command a bigger army of slaves to drive you around, deliver your food, etc.<br /><br />And no, they are not diabolical geniuses in the sense of at least staying even, while printing up more and more money. Everyone's standard of living will go down as a result of persistent stagflation and/or hyperinflation. How did the elite class of Weimar Republic Germany wind up? Or the elites of Zimbabwe? Did they enjoy the same standard of living, but just with increasingly ridiculous nominal valuations of their wealth due to the hyperinflation of the money supply? No, they fell off a cliff, and their societies turned into basket cases.<br /><br />Our elites will suffer no different a fate. When belief, trust, and faith in the highest levels of the finance pyramid are removed, it will gum up the works in all kinds of ways. In some cases, the infinite supply of dollars won't buy anything in a certain sector -- because would-be sellers know that the currency is worthless now, and will be worth even less by the time they try to exchange it for some good or service that they want. So they just won't sell.<br /><br />"Jay Leno is going to gobble up all of the classic car market!" -- unless people come to believe that dollars are just funny money, and losing value faster than they can be exchanged for what the seller wanted to spend them on. They'll just keep the classic cars to themselves. What is Jay Leno going to do -- hire a private army to force classic car sales at gunpoint? His would-be soldiers wouldn't accept being paid in worthless dollars.<br /><br />Maybe if Jay Leno had gold, or oil, or food-producing land, or an armory full of toys for the soldiers to play with. But plain old dollars, whose value can no longer be stored for the future? Forget that.<br /><br />Ditto for "the big banks and hedge funds will buy them up instead!" Not if the sellers don't want dollars, fearing their medium-to-long-term stability in value. Plus financial actors never use their own money, they borrow it from someone higher than them in the finance pyramid, then use it however they want. Credit conditions are tightening like crazy, so they have less money than before to play around with. No more buying sprees for banks and hedge funds.<br /><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">* * *<br /></p><p><br />Ultimately, the current crisis, which historians will start with the 2018 event that prompted my old post, will wind up depopulating a lot of the elite class, which has been over-produced for decades, and finally have no one left to bail them out and support their ambitious standard of living. Naturally that will leave some players left at the highest levels, presumably JP Morgan among banks, while lots of aspiring elites in the regional bank tier will have to move back to the suburbs of Green Bay where they came from -- and where they belong.<br /><br />The system has finally become incapable of supporting 20% of the population competing to live in the 1% zip codes. Lots of people in the top 10-20% -- but below the top 1% or 0.1% -- are going to fall back down into the lower 80-90% of society, where their Greatest Gen ancestors were, before the destabilizing upward ambitions of the Silents and Boomers (collectively the "Me Generation" of the '70s).<br /><br />This will echo the Great Depression, which wiped out the Great Gatsby-type strivers from the Roaring Twenties and earlier, leaving only the Rockefellers at the top. That reduced inequality, shrinking the number at the elite level. But it was done without destroying our central bank and its currency -- the central bank simply refused to jump on the grenade in order to bail out the strivers.<br /><br />This time, though, we're going to see reduction in inequality while also lowering our average standard-of-living, since an imploding central bank and currency mean we can't buy stuff like we used to. The Great Depression saw reduced inequality, but with a rising average. (And no, homicide rates did not increase, nor did lifespans plummet -- those are independent of income and wealth trends.)<br /><br />I won't introduce at this late stage of the post, a cross-imperial comparison -- but suffice it to say we're at the phase in the imperial lifespan when the elites just debase the shit out of their currency, dooming it to obsolescence, while obtaining no short-term benefits either, just committing monetary suicide out of overweening ambition and stubborn hyper-competitiveness.<br /><br /></p>agnostichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12967177967469961883noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19346366.post-75139873535404421552023-05-02T06:36:00.002-04:002023-05-02T06:36:48.938-04:00Woodgrain + chrome mania during the '70s (extensive image gallery)<p>The previous <a href="https://akinokure.blogspot.com/2023/04/woodgrain-and-chrome-primitive-futurist.html">post</a> laid out the Midcentury Modern roots of the "woodgrain + chrome" aesthetic that we commonly associate with the woody Seventies, which in fact also had to include the industrial / machine / futuristic material of gleaming silver-tone metal as well (and perhaps also smooth black plastic, like bakelite).<br /><br />Another post will go further back to the Art Deco era, tracing the birth of this unique American contribution of primitive futurism.<br /><br />There's not much to add analytically now, just an extensive image gallery in case some people are unfamiliar with the style's peak during the '60s and especially the '70s. Or want a nice soothing refresher for how many product categories it touched.<br /><br />I'll only comment on one in particular for now: I was really shocked by the storage bins for VHS or audio cassette tapes. If you're Gen X or older, you've had these in your home at some point for years, and if you're younger than that, you've certainly seen them if you visit thrift stores. They were -- and are -- everywhere.<br /><br />We all recall the woodgrain pattern around most of the box. But on the pulls, there's smooth black plastic -- and what looks like aluminum tape! A shiny silver-tone decal, at any rate. It's not even a solid piece of metal, just a thin sheet glued on. But they required that shiny silver-tone metallic accent, or else it just wouldn't be industrial, machine-age, and futuristic enough for American culture!<br /><br />This aluminum-ish tape appeared on storage cabinets for 8 track tapes, cassette tapes, Betamax tapes, VHS tapes, and even CDs. It was no accident or after-thought -- it was obligatory, no ifs, ands, or buts. It can't be only primitive -- it has to be futuristic, too.<br /><br />Just as the toaster and percolator, usually taking part in only the chrome and bakelite combo, eventually did get the woodgrain treatment as well. Not too futuristic, now -- we don't want to slip into Bauhaus decadence like Europeans from collapsed empires. We're Americans!<br /><br />Finally, note the self-aware tone of the Panasonic ad copy: "With all that walnut-finished wood and midnight black and silver trim, knobs to finagle with and those wild-looking cylindrical speakers."<br /><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgixEPRjqDEUsiSlAo3hDsunp9uqST3jScA2RLc7aN2SoOHaIsT5cYKWmhJph0dPYuEnyWfV1M5UEAPRT6JwniCsnXBWIJ3owSkmQPHsfwe_sgit--99VM3vCXuVEYzkUzfTiiSl-AfTW2jesO6w4zkQJOFDOzCQQKgjw9QUPpt6FDAUBdmCDU/s1140/Wood-airplane.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="855" data-original-width="1140" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgixEPRjqDEUsiSlAo3hDsunp9uqST3jScA2RLc7aN2SoOHaIsT5cYKWmhJph0dPYuEnyWfV1M5UEAPRT6JwniCsnXBWIJ3owSkmQPHsfwe_sgit--99VM3vCXuVEYzkUzfTiiSl-AfTW2jesO6w4zkQJOFDOzCQQKgjw9QUPpt6FDAUBdmCDU/w400-h300/Wood-airplane.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6rc4xl9mDR1ef1IwfHhrKJXvPNd9Lk-e_fWYEGKrtj7WlsJYfYMdXDDE3cx3P3epodyl98VIHgfAyzCyGfLaI0vsZvDqebcz2DhUtQgk958g8t8SGfibBQU_S97qz7cpYiYRFny2lNDVGfVR-hZx2-Pcu5XjHYTpSkQrj1-hfYbYUFTypKpc/s5820/Wood-atari.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3270" data-original-width="5820" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6rc4xl9mDR1ef1IwfHhrKJXvPNd9Lk-e_fWYEGKrtj7WlsJYfYMdXDDE3cx3P3epodyl98VIHgfAyzCyGfLaI0vsZvDqebcz2DhUtQgk958g8t8SGfibBQU_S97qz7cpYiYRFny2lNDVGfVR-hZx2-Pcu5XjHYTpSkQrj1-hfYbYUFTypKpc/w400-h225/Wood-atari.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3jw7ArWPqwKXB9OLqLGcF2dsjo4NvjQobmyYnsyRxW5WI_8uzqH-bxCM_mkE53Ydm7d3JjOslyBHrwsIsZNbo1W6EoVSYtnb2avMmt_TBvwBTMp9sGGmqnMKwhKQnR7nmbdQlwypo3HYBNk0E5kf9-dSvTEZCMN7dSelHOL2xkBYnVla1H-8/s497/Wood-buickestate.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="250" data-original-width="497" height="201" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3jw7ArWPqwKXB9OLqLGcF2dsjo4NvjQobmyYnsyRxW5WI_8uzqH-bxCM_mkE53Ydm7d3JjOslyBHrwsIsZNbo1W6EoVSYtnb2avMmt_TBvwBTMp9sGGmqnMKwhKQnR7nmbdQlwypo3HYBNk0E5kf9-dSvTEZCMN7dSelHOL2xkBYnVla1H-8/w400-h201/Wood-buickestate.png" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1Zg3CsIbP1CTrjG0YEeDEw38-qe6bQcY70628QC2kMfJosaehk2iHJNgUQG3Fg2RYGaJl9pgLTMJHyBKRXChghd3dSF7EFvvqJ6QzH9IVl2kiogud8A-S3E66T-1Ugz4MOUIEoKSO9z4-nfBFr1z1ykAHv_eI0alkxUtC3Dfx0XNs0C8oHDo/s1600/Wood-decotelphone.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1067" data-original-width="1600" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1Zg3CsIbP1CTrjG0YEeDEw38-qe6bQcY70628QC2kMfJosaehk2iHJNgUQG3Fg2RYGaJl9pgLTMJHyBKRXChghd3dSF7EFvvqJ6QzH9IVl2kiogud8A-S3E66T-1Ugz4MOUIEoKSO9z4-nfBFr1z1ykAHv_eI0alkxUtC3Dfx0XNs0C8oHDo/w400-h266/Wood-decotelphone.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; 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Scandinavia also resembles these two empires, so it is more about being excluded from the Early Modern Euro empires club, and therefore taking a wholly different approach to cultural creation.<br /><br />First was a review of <a href="https://akinokure.blogspot.com/2023/01/realism-in-drama-as-cultural-specialty.html">realism in drama</a> for the literary arts. Then ornateness vs. <a href="https://akinokure.blogspot.com/2023/01/imperial-european-ornateness-vs-block.html">Block Symphony</a> in architecture, followed up by a cross-sectional <a href="https://akinokure.blogspot.com/2023/02/olde-worlde-larp-vs-american.html">comparison</a> of state capitol buildings around America, and a <a href="https://akinokure.blogspot.com/2023/02/distinctly-american-religious.html">review</a> (the first I'm aware of) tying together America's contribution to world religions (Mormonism) and architecture (Block Symphony).<br /><br />Now we turn to "design" in a broader sense, having already looked a bit at architecture. Furniture, consumer household products, interior decoration, and a little industrial design too, like cars. I'll save the images for a gallery / appendix at the end, rather than comment on each one in detail or use specific images to prove a specific point.<br /><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">* * *<br /></p><p><br />This all started when I kept hearing the audience of several streamers haranguing the poor girls to "buy the Herman Miller chair already!" as though it were obligatory to sit in an Aeron chair for an online-related job. Aside from being over-hyped and overpriced since their explosion in the Dot-Com Bubble Nineties, they just don't look American -- or Japanese, or Swiss, or name some other member of the recent / ongoing cultural elite. They're all-black, made mostly or entirely of synthetics, are too curvilinear in outline, and are too light / airy / meshy.<br /><br />So I started looking for examples of chairs to suggest to the girls (perhaps I can do that in detail in the comments section). And then it really hit me how different the aesthetic has become since the Early Modern Euro empires, other than Russia, bit the dust in WWI, ushering in a mostly American-led zeitgeist, although strikingly similar to Soviet aesthetics, and joined by the neutral Scandinavians.<br /><br />This began with the American strains of Art Deco in the '20s, crucially being independent of and in many ways contradictory toward European modernisms such as Bauhaus in design or cubism in painting and sculpture. Bauhaus only had the modern / progressive / futuristic tone, not the juxtaposition of that tone with the trad / reactionary / primitivist tone, which has always defined American aesthetics (since they began, in the late 19th C.). Cubism's blockiness was destructive, evoking the shards of a shattered mirror, whereas American blockiness was constructive, building various scales of blocks into a pleasing -- not dissonant -- rhythmic gestalt.<br /><br />The American movement peaked creatively during the so-called Midcentury Modern era, after WWII but before the neoliberal era of the '80s and beyond. Midcentury Modern has rarely gone totally out of fashion, so there have been influences, copies, and revivals at various points since -- like crazy from 2005 to 2019, epitomized by the set designs for Mad Men on the sincere side and Austin Powers on the campy side (the original core James Bond movies being prime examples of Midcentury Modern design).<br /><br />Perhaps the single best expression of the new era, in which America more or less dominated, is its choice of materials. The materials not only convey something about their origin and production -- making finished things from raw ingredients -- but also influence the color and texture and other purely visual aesthetic properties.<br /><br />By far the prevailing theme for materials was "primitive meets futuristic" -- so it had to include a very old, pre-historic kind of natural material. Something right out of the Stone Age -- wood, stone, even a whole animal skin for a rug or blanket (in lieu of a more civilized item woven from threads of wool).<br /><br />But it also had to have something very new, industrial, something that only precise machines could manufacture -- not just metal, which is thousands of years old, and may look rough and crude to begin with or patinated with age. Metal that is bright, gleaming, smooth, mirror-like in its reflection of light -- therefore, chrome, or as close to that ideal as a silver-toned metal can get.<br /><br />Depending on the functional needs of the object, it could have included some plastic as well, in a nod to modern chemical production processes, as long as it too had a glistening, smooth, reflective, uniform surface. And although any color dye could have been added during the production, the main choice was black, followed by white, perhaps imitating the neutral colors of stone materials. Vivid blues, reds, or greens would have looked too unlike raw stone, and ruined the "somewhat trad, somewhat mod" feel.<br /><br />And of course, all of these choices in materials would still be subject to the constraints of blockiness rather than ornateness.<br /><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">* * *<br /></p><p><br />For historical context, what did the American-led style *not* look like? Not like the Bauhaus '20s zeitgeist. For example, Breuer's Wassily chair, which does have tubular steel with a reflective finish, but no wood, and whose black leather straps also look too modern rather than trad (smooth, uniform in color, no grain, etc.). It's also deconstructed or analyzed into components or broken down, rather than being a harmonious unanalyzed holistic gestalt. It's also too light and airy, owing to its deconstructed nature -- you can see right "through" it in many places.<br /><br />Likewise the Barcelona chair by Mies van der Rohe.<br /><br />Le Corbusier's furniture is somewhat more in the American vein, probably because he was Swiss and not part of the Early Modern Euro empires club by upbringing. (Breuer was from the collapsing Austrian Empire, and Mies van der Rohe from the collapsing German Empire). There's no single work he made that combines all the key elements, but his club chairs are hefty and blocky, he used highly figured cowhide for upholstery alongside tubular steel (but in a deconstructed and airy "sling" chair), although he never used much wood.<br /><br />Nor did the American style resemble the various national incarnations of Art Nouveau (Modernisme in Spain, Jugendstil in Germany, etc.). Those were all rooted in Early Modern Euro imperial styles, going back to Baroque and Rococo -- no futuristic / industrial / machine-age suggestions, curvilinear rather than rectilinear, light wispy forms, highly ornate.<br /><br />Let alone did the American style resemble earlier stages of the Euro imperial cultures. Back East in America, there is more Olde Worlde Euro-LARP-ing, but that's not America's own style, which was born in Chicago and spread toward the western frontier. Even in its revival of European styles, America is far more comfortable resurrecting styles that were not made by America's imperial rivals during its rise. Romanesque (i.e., Frankish and pre-modern French), Byzantine, Roman, Ancient Greek, Egyptian, maybe Gothic at the tenuous latest. And generally those have more massive volumes, more straight lines, and less ornate ornamentation compared to Rococo.<br /><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">* * *<br /></p><p><br />What's the first major example of the American style in design? As far as I can tell, it's one of the most iconic -- the Eames lounge chair and ottoman, released in 1956. The cushions are wrapped in sleek black leather, and the metal supports have a chrome finish, much like earlier Euro modernist approaches. However, what sets the Eames chair apart is the wooden shell behind and underneath the cushions. Originally, and for decades after, made of Brazilian rosewood, this highly figured wooden component gave the whole piece a wild and primitive tone that none of the progressive / futurist Europeans could have ever dreamed up.<br /><br />Figured woodgrains had been staples of European furniture for centuries -- but the Eames' veneered it over bent plywood, giving it an industrial-age feel instead of a strictly hand-worked process. And none of those earlier European uses of figured woods paired them with futuristic chrome or sleek black leather. It was a uniquely American combination of materials, for a novel effect. And true to the American blocky volume approach, it was not light or airy or deconstructed, but solid and blocky -- with a few gently rounded corners.<br /><br />Even simpatico European designers, like the Dane Arne Jacobsen, couldn't quite make this leap in the immediate wake of the Eames revolution. His Egg and Swan chairs, from the late '50s, don't have woodgrain anywhere. And if Danish Modern used wood and/or leather, it didn't also include chrome or other bright silver-toned metal, as prominently as the American style did. It took until the '60s and '70s for European designers to adapt the American approach, especially through the Swiss firm Stoll Giroflex, whose lounge chair and ottoman pair is a slightly curvier Euro refinement of an earlier American invention.<br /><br />The most prolific, influential, and iconic designer in the American style is Milo Baughman, who used the woodgrain + chrome combination for chairs, sofas, tables, credenzas -- anything. And his lines were more rectilinear and in tune with American Block Symphony from architecture, compared to the Eames' somewhat more playful and curvier lines. Baughman was also more quintessentially American in not only being based in California (as the Eames' also were) but converting to Mormonism.<br /><br />From the large and expensive design objects -- furniture -- the style emanated out to the smaller and less expensive objects. By the '70s, it was hard *not* to find this mixture of materials -- or their simulation -- in a receiver, television, telephone, lamp, desk sculpture, electric guitar, alarm clock radio, car dashboard, car outer body, tobacco pipe, and any other kind of consumer product.<br /><br />We used to look back on that era as "the woodgrain era", but that's only half of the picture. Wood, even highly figured wood, has been popular forever. What distinguished that zeitgeist, and set the standard for American design ever after, is its mixture of trad, primitive woodgrain right alongside futuristic industrial chrome (and/or smooth gleaming plastic). That look and feel, and that impression, represents a unique American contribution to global cultural history.<br /><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">* * *<br /></p><p><br />As the American Empire reached saturation / stagnation during the neoliberal era, Bauhaus and other Euro approaches have come back from the dead, as America can no longer rule the whole world, politically or culturally. Sleek black leather and chrome -- but no woodgrain -- has become popular again, as has "blobitecture" in place of blockitecture, especially in Europe itself. Buildings made of only new-age metal and glass, with no stone or wood to reveal their wild primitive alter ego, make us long for even the least aesthetic strain of Block Symphony -- Brutalism. And all-black, meshy, totally synthetic chairs, rounded all over, are the go-to seat for the so-called creative class.<br /><br />Even the attempts to adapt Midcentury Modern to today miss the mark because they don't have a good intuition for what the originals were doing. For example, during the 2010s it became popular to make tables and desks out of heavy slabs of wood, perhaps "live edges" revealing all the grain, resting on minimalist metal legs -- which are black and usually matte. This attempt fails because "metal" isn't futuristic -- it's been around for thousands of years! And yes, you can use hand tools alone to give it a minimalist shape and surface appearance. <br /><br />Those metal legs have to specifically have a shiny, mirror-like silver tone to them, since that's what came out of the industrial age for building materials. Otherwise it looks like iron that's been painted black, like there has been for hundreds of years and did not look futuristic even back then. Their conception of "metal" or "industrial" is something coarse, ugly, and dark, as though industry is supposed to plunge us back into the dark ages.<br /><br />The Midcentury Modern conception was of industry as producing smooth, gleaming, bright things, in a way that no previous manufacturing technique could have done. That was the forward-looking part of the combination. But the manufacturing of wooden components was also done in a futuristic way, like bending the plywood, or keeping it rectilinear -- anything but plonking down a "live edge" with almost no woodwork performed on it at all, as though it were a freshly felled whole tree.<br /><br />Today's "live edge table with metal legs" leans too far in the primitive direction, in a sign that we are losing our advanced industrial capacity -- and along with those off-shored factories, our imagination relating to them. It's similar to the steampunk aesthetic in fashion, another product of the neoliberal era and our new cultural dark age. Steampunk is just Victorian LARP-ing, plus a few industrial embellishments -- it's not futuristic at all. Midcentury Modern was first and foremost a futuristic movement, even when using primitive materials. It wasn't a Gothic LARP, with some industrial embellishments.<br /><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">* * *<br /></p><p><br /><b>Appendix / Gallery</b><br /><br />I'm just posting the interior decoration examples now, will update with other consumer products later (as I think most people are familiar with those). Note in the Mad Men set, the wooden panels on the wall, along with the silver-toned metal. In today's neoliberal desecration of modernism, there would never be that much wood, let alone with a visible figure and rich stain. Probably would just be glass panes between the metal skeleton.<br /><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDIFOJvfkOkZYehBxdbKkQ3-FneQNB5LycsfH9NDvUEQmo-4cPL3Rd_BGqZIpekZIlxFputpFCJyIgHEwvs_SvYMqRp2L_zDAOoRz3KKgPuoqn8hlenUKHppAhXW7LZNzSGONlzWOwhu_ad9m4DS7vMqGBEVD3FCcpY9VZjCyDuVlumhi6qww/s890/eameschair.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="546" data-original-width="890" height="245" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDIFOJvfkOkZYehBxdbKkQ3-FneQNB5LycsfH9NDvUEQmo-4cPL3Rd_BGqZIpekZIlxFputpFCJyIgHEwvs_SvYMqRp2L_zDAOoRz3KKgPuoqn8hlenUKHppAhXW7LZNzSGONlzWOwhu_ad9m4DS7vMqGBEVD3FCcpY9VZjCyDuVlumhi6qww/w400-h245/eameschair.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRYKWxWzaCOzIY8QFaNgbvEc8ejYOwYNpEL0BOwjE5a0jVE-0I3GLiVeRcesSwJ2fy8Kr10be6uPqYv-6C26Qy3W5U-LJ96UPbzfZJ8436im51-aONYE26bbvNRvTCRmLV2mnL8P41FdlPtBi5x9qgOFRzlQzJKssIw_2fEt1XBe_X8Q6_fLc/s1140/baughmantables.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="602" data-original-width="1140" height="211" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRYKWxWzaCOzIY8QFaNgbvEc8ejYOwYNpEL0BOwjE5a0jVE-0I3GLiVeRcesSwJ2fy8Kr10be6uPqYv-6C26Qy3W5U-LJ96UPbzfZJ8436im51-aONYE26bbvNRvTCRmLV2mnL8P41FdlPtBi5x9qgOFRzlQzJKssIw_2fEt1XBe_X8Q6_fLc/w400-h211/baughmantables.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghIcI6vzo9hKMdbRho_diIoWglWRuNn_PPJXNZ5q9TOiqFzA8blxP2CpmWcFwQpPXIcefSaGJrJVhRLcfAR7RtpJCzQ2iPnavQt_XqCJWVIxzqAcymppS0XQIznkqOBC4zwOsBqpcwCMw7iygkPnbu_P0YuKuYPt1VAlcs2gfet_is22ojmio/s490/baughmansofa.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="289" data-original-width="490" height="236" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghIcI6vzo9hKMdbRho_diIoWglWRuNn_PPJXNZ5q9TOiqFzA8blxP2CpmWcFwQpPXIcefSaGJrJVhRLcfAR7RtpJCzQ2iPnavQt_XqCJWVIxzqAcymppS0XQIznkqOBC4zwOsBqpcwCMw7iygkPnbu_P0YuKuYPt1VAlcs2gfet_is22ojmio/w400-h236/baughmansofa.png" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPmm0KS-WcDnsmWn_zb42JTO_MUfst3Wzsfc5uKZMfzCcAkKtC0A3OCmKB4u9WOojxQyna-xtMPYbs2Kto__n_p6D6XjczndA6ZdVFRAF6jzNBi92yoBkNz0qr1665lqi6Gw9Ro73sdL6lSIMbmVXgS_zPKYezHk1ERnXNPn1O_8UoM7jitB8/s484/baughmancredenza.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="276" data-original-width="484" height="228" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPmm0KS-WcDnsmWn_zb42JTO_MUfst3Wzsfc5uKZMfzCcAkKtC0A3OCmKB4u9WOojxQyna-xtMPYbs2Kto__n_p6D6XjczndA6ZdVFRAF6jzNBi92yoBkNz0qr1665lqi6Gw9Ro73sdL6lSIMbmVXgS_zPKYezHk1ERnXNPn1O_8UoM7jitB8/w400-h228/baughmancredenza.png" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdtMAeFdzl4pEHcKoY5Lj5tuKB6C7YbLx0Cvfi1CHS8FU9ZajnrqAwRQSWSmx3Ux9mZVp6zl6C88IV9Yf6BpaTw9BxTug8PPeLMyjF0hoHdP2ecNoFM-kLwNShhafHYA9Se9qC-XVUvN8VAqnCnEPVLmISKN5qGWQ-9zexNVH1EzfPuPtjMCk/s1000/madmenwoodmetal.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="750" data-original-width="1000" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdtMAeFdzl4pEHcKoY5Lj5tuKB6C7YbLx0Cvfi1CHS8FU9ZajnrqAwRQSWSmx3Ux9mZVp6zl6C88IV9Yf6BpaTw9BxTug8PPeLMyjF0hoHdP2ecNoFM-kLwNShhafHYA9Se9qC-XVUvN8VAqnCnEPVLmISKN5qGWQ-9zexNVH1EzfPuPtjMCk/w400-h300/madmenwoodmetal.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitQ8_XoxTEirNot6231QBf3_fxrr99AYauesUwGJDINcpQnEngOVMeAo-wBTcJ8g88TkCfMUoTuRVGHwh1A5ggn4h3efroduu3Snvsv6NkTwSvXYORkH_vhW1jKjVuDM7OMItsU_gbssgu71D8ZzSTpYWhza9E7LIwKUJTo_nY-hXEWsHqc_k/s449/giroflexlounge.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="354" data-original-width="449" height="315" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitQ8_XoxTEirNot6231QBf3_fxrr99AYauesUwGJDINcpQnEngOVMeAo-wBTcJ8g88TkCfMUoTuRVGHwh1A5ggn4h3efroduu3Snvsv6NkTwSvXYORkH_vhW1jKjVuDM7OMItsU_gbssgu71D8ZzSTpYWhza9E7LIwKUJTo_nY-hXEWsHqc_k/w400-h315/giroflexlounge.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />agnostichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12967177967469961883noreply@blogger.com36tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19346366.post-4547509950054681132023-04-22T16:53:00.004-04:002023-04-22T17:01:36.338-04:00The Tooth Fairy and American ethnogenesis<p>The first reference to the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tooth_fairy">Tooth Fairy</a> is from a Chicago area newspaper (from the Old Northwest, site of intense Indian wars across a meta-ethnic frontier), after the Civil War & Reconstruction period (1908).<br /><br />There was no precedent for this practice in European or other world history. Superstitions relating to children's teeth are too vague -- the Tooth Fairy is specifically a diminutive fantastical creature that visits children when they're asleep, leaving a gift for the baby tooth that the child has already left under / near their pillow.<br /><br />Grown Viking real-life men paying children, while the children are awake and away from their bed, to wear their baby teeth in a good luck necklace lacks all of these elements except the transactional exchange, so that is clearly not related.<br /><br />The only correlate is a single short story for children by Spanish writer Luis Coloma, "Raton Perez", which has all the elements (only the fantastical small creature is a mouse, rather than a fairy). It was first published in a collection of stories in 1902 (Nuevas Lecturas), then in standalone form, with illustrations, in 1911.<br /><br />Only the standalone version has a preface explaining the supposed origin as him being commissioned by the Queen to write a story to memorialize her royal son losing a baby tooth in 1894. Just-so embellishment later on, or true story? Either way, the story came out around the turn of the century.<br /><br />Coloma's story also has far more narrative action, dialog, and a richer cast of characters than the simple Tooth Fairy folklore.<br /><br />If we believe that ordinary Americans at the grassroots level somehow were influenced by Coloma's story, it had to have been almost instantaneous, across a major language barrier (few Spanish speakers in America, esp. the Midwest, at that time), and other cultural barriers (we were barely influenced by Spain).<br /><br />Also, it would require that we not only altered the small detail of the creature being a rat or a fairy, but stripping out all the other richness of the narrative. Coloma's is a proper fairy tale, not just a simple folkloric practice. If American parents were in the mood of telling their children legends or tales, why wouldn't they keep the narrative, at least in part? There's no narrative to the Tooth Fairy, unlike Raton Perez.<br /><br />So we did not get the Tooth Fairy from Spain. Another possibility is that Coloma independently came up with all the elements of the Tooth Fairy legend, at roughly the same time, and exerted his creative will to come up with this narrative because he was commissioned by the Queen, whose son was losing a tooth at the time.<br /><br />The stark similarity and close timing rules out an independent origin. If he was commissioned, that would explain his greater narrative detail -- he wasn't just passing on an old wives' tale, but creating a work for his royal patron, deserving greater aesthetic detail.<br /><br />Another possibility is they share a common ancestor. But there are no other children of this hypothetical ancestor -- only the American Tooth Fairy, and Raton Perez, both born circa 1900. Since Spain and America had been culturally closed off to each other at that point -- not sharing a greater sphere of cultural influence -- then the ancestor would have to go much further back, like Indo-European or something.<br /><br />But then, it would have produced children in at least some of the other Indo-European cultures that still exist. And yet, no Tooth Fairy in any of them.<br /><br />By 1900, the Spanish Empire had already been in the collapse stage of its lifespan for nearly a century, whereas the American Empire was ascendant -- both politically, as well as culturally.<br /><br />As for the ease of acquiring the relevant information, it would be far easier for a single erudite scholar with royal patronage in Europe to learn about American folk customs, than for entire masses of ordinary Americans in the Midwest to learn of one specific recently published story embedded within a larger collection whose title does not indicate anything about it being children's stories, fairy tales, tooth fairy legends, etc.<br /><br />Therefore, it's far more likely that -- through whatever links of transmission -- the arrow went from America to Spain, not the other way around.<br /><br />And so, the Tooth Fairy is, <a href="https://akinokure.blogspot.com/2022/12/christmas-songs-and-american.html">like Santa</a>, a uniquely American cultural creation, whose influence has spread around much of the world as the American Empire eclipsed all others, aside from Russia, over the course of the 20th C.<br /><br /></p>agnostichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12967177967469961883noreply@blogger.com10