Eastern Steppe culture in Northwest America: Breaking precious copper decorated sheets for potlatches and funerals

Although I've established that the Japonic language family belongs to the broader Dene-Yeniseian family, which presently spans Siberia to the American Southwest, I had no idea what the time-frame for this relationship was, when first exploring the matter.

But upon further investigation of linguistic, mythological, and ritual relationships, I've not only uncovered further shared shibboleths, but determined that their common-ness lasted up through fairly recent times. Their common ancestor was not from 10, 20, or 100-thousand years ago. Not every element of their cultures dates back to the exact same time-period. Still, the earliest shared cultural ancestor they have goes back no earlier than 2000 BC. And in some cases the shared ancestor only goes back to between 500 BC and 300 or so AD. They could have been in lingering contact with each other through the 1st millennium AD.

This totally blows up the notion that the culture of the New World was either brought with long-distance migration from the Old World on the order of 10s of thousands of years ago, or that it evolved only in the New World after that initial wave of migration. For some New World cultures, that's true. But for others, who speak Na-Dene languages, their bodies and haplogroups may have come over 10,000 years ago, but their present-day culture did not, nor did it evolve solely in situ after settling into the Americas. There was a transmission of Siberian culture from the Old World starting as early as 2000 BC and perhaps lasting through 500 AD.

This is a great illustration of the non-correlation between genes and culture, or between migration of bodies and migration of culture. Cultural forms can spread by contagion, from one adjacent group to the next, and so on in a chain. Group A transmits it to group B, B transmits it to C, and then C to D. The fact that it is present in A, B, C, and D does NOT show that it began with A and then A migrated through all the intervening regions, leaving it behind them at each stop. In fact, it doesn't imply that A has migrated at all -- maybe they had contact with B (without, however, migrating to replace B, just interacting with neighbors), but not C, D, or any further link in the chain. And contagion is a far faster transmission process than migration of one spreader group to all regions affected -- as the phenomenon of epidemic diseases shows.

That's not to say that cultural forms spread just like epidemic diseases -- the key difference is how "susceptible" one group is to the cultural influence of another. Pathogens don't care about cultural groups or which other groups they choose as role models vs. groups they shun / avoid. Cultural transmission is not necessarily transitive either, unlike diseases -- in some cases, A influences B, and B influences C, but C rejects the influence of A (directly). In such a case, B acts as a gatekeeper between A and C, a role that does not show up in epidemic disease transmission. This is where all of the real art-and-science of cultural transmission happens -- just saying it can spread from one adjacent group to the next is not very surprising, it's what relationships must be in place for the transmission to take place, and when it will stop.

With that big-picture in mind, let's now look at some shared cultural shibboleths in Northwest America and cultures of the Eastern Steppe, including the off-shoot that wound up in Glorious Nippon. Some of these examples are from the comments in the previous post, some are ones I discovered just in the past few days.

I'm going to try breaking these up into smaller, more digestible separate posts, instead of having a long string of 250 comments on a single post.

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First, we'll start with ritual. An earlier post demonstrated that ancient Japan (starting sometime before 300 AD) shared a cultural shibboleth with the Xiongnu and the Pazyryk cultures of the Eastern Steppe (and Silla, in Korea) -- breaking precious bronze mirrors as a funeral rite, and burying them as grave goods. See that post for all the details, which begin in the 3rd section.

For the time-frame, this ritual began in the mid-1st millennium BC (Pazyryk) and lasted through the mid-1st millennium AD (Kofun-era Japan). After then, the practice seems to have faded away...

But not in Northwest America, where a strikingly similar ritual lasted up through the conquest of the frontier by the Americans. Perhaps in the Old World, gradual sedentarization and civilizing influences from China led to the abandonment of this Eastern Steppe barbarian ritual, while in Northwest America there never was a sedentary mega-state civilizing influence until the white man showed up. They certainly were not in the cultural orbit of the Aztec, Maya, or Inca empires. So perhaps the Mongolians and Japanese would still be practicing this funeral rite, if there had been no China for them to interact with...

Metallurgy was never widespread in North America before European colonization. But there was a limited amount of iron and copper production in the Northwest, where the raw material was sourced from Alaska. We'll get to the mythical or not-so-mythical legend behind that, when we look at myths!

But after they began working with copper, various groups in Northwest America, not only those speaking Na-Dene languages, began to practice a ritual of breaking precious copper ceremonial shields, sometimes as part of a funeral, although sometimes as part of a potlatch. In both occasions, though, the broken fragments were buried somehow -- either under the ground or tossed into the sea, where they sank to a watery grave.

In both occasions, the "coppers" or copper shields were not very utilitarian, they were symbols of status and wealth and perhaps a connection to the supernatural and to ancestral lineages. They were decorated as art-works. They were owned and traded as decorative status symbols, with some degree of otherworldly power -- just like those bronze mirrors in the Eastern Steppe.

The main difference in the New World ritual is the shape -- they are beaten smooth and are between half a foot to several feet in length, like the Old World round mirrors, but they take the form of a T-shaped shield (again, not used as an actual shield in battle). And the adornments are also local patterns. So there was some degree of syncreticization between the Old World ritual and existing Northwest American arts-and-crafts traditions.

They don't seem to be treated as magical for their ability to collect and reflect light, as though they were mini-suns, like they were in the Old World, where they played into the solar cult of the Eastern Steppe.

We can't tell if their use at potlatches is different from their Old World context, which was funerals -- perhaps the only difference is when potlatches were held in the Old World, like mainly during a funeral, whereas in Northwest America, potlatches were held outside of funeral contexts as well. But in both cases, their breaking and burial can be viewed as a form of conspicuous wealth destruction, as an honest signal of the large amount of wealth held by the leader. In this way, it's no different from human and animal sacrifice, on the same occasions (potlatch and/or funeral) -- it's the sacrifice of precious objects, which only a wealthy household owns.

However, it's not just a vague conceptual similarity like "sacrificing precious objects" -- they are made of copper, beaten smooth into a sheet, adorned as decorative objects, used in a ceremonial context rather than a valuable object that sees real-world use, and their method of sacrifice is the same -- breaking into fragments.

Most inclusion of precious objects in a funeral or other ceremony does NOT involve breaking them or rendering them worthless as utilitarian objects, or even as decorative objects. Indeed, if they were just decorative objects made from copper, they would not seem so similar to the Eastern Steppe versions -- it's the fact that they're ceremonially sacrificed by fragmentation that jumped out at me when reading about them.

All these unnecessary / arbitrary points of similarity show that it is a shared shibboleth, not just independent variations on a universal theme.

This New World ritual goes back no further than the mid-1st millennium BC, when it is observed among the Pazyryk culture in the Eastern Steppe. It was still practiced in Japan during the early Medieval era. When was it transmitted into the Pacific Northwest? Sometime after the prerequisite adoption of copper metallurgy, which was more limited regionally and occurred later in the New World.

I'm guessing sometime at the twilight of its use in Japan, or just afterwards -- when the Siberian transmitters would have still been familiar with the ritual, but since it was no longer de rigueur in Siberia, it was not emphasized as strictly to the New World adopters. It was likely transmitted by the same Siberians who taught the New Worlders about copper in general -- "Y'know, this isn't just utilitarian stuff. Where we come from, we beat it into sheets, decorate it, and break it into fragments during major ceremonies like a funeral. You guys should do that, too!"

Maybe they specifically said to make it into a round mirror, and the New Worlders said that wasn't as relevant to their local culture, and made them into shield-like shapes instead. Or maybe since the ritual was fading away in Siberia, the Siberian transmitters didn't insist on every element being preserved -- what the hell, the ritual was dying out anyway, just give them the basic understanding, which is that copper is valuable, it can be beaten into a smooth canvas for artwork, and this valuable object can be broken into fragments for a major ceremony like a funeral.

I doubt it was too much later after it died in the Old World, since hardly anyone would still remember it in order to pass it on. Probably not 1000 AD. But also not too early, since it only began in 500 BC, and it required use of copper or bronze. So perhaps more like 300 to 700 AD, though after being transmitted, lasting right up through the "present" (closing of the American frontier circa 1900). Pacific Northwest natives never had to worry what a civilization like China might think about them sacrificing people, animals, and precious mirrors, well after the Dark Ages...

Further failures of AI slop "art", wannabe Ghibli edition

Gonna post the comment thread from the previous post into a standalone post, to get a new ball rolling, and start some more aesthetics posting in the comments, putting the 50-year civil cohesion cycle on the back burner for a few days (although I have plenty more to say already).

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Well, if no one else is gonna spell out why the Ghibli-fied AI slop doesn't actually look like Ghibli, I guess I will. I already wrote a more expansive post about AI slop in general. This'll just be a couple comments since it's more focused and won't be wide-ranging.

I'll skip the typical midwit crap that no one cares about, but that generates all the buzz in the media -- no one cares about copyright, it's fake.

Employment for artists does not depend on how they perform vs. AI, it's solely a matter of the patrons' willingness to give up their money for something great, or cool. If they're unwilling, the artists don't get hired -- whether this is rationalized as "no one does good art anymore" or "AI does an equal or better job than human artists" or "artists are Democrats and I'm a Republican".

So AI is not going to eliminate jobs for artists that would have been there, if not for the AI. "AI" is just an excuse for slashing jobs that were going to be slashed no matter what.

The American Empire is collapsing, so there's less wealth to spread around, and the elites are greedier than ever. *That* is why there are hardly any jobs for artists, compared to the good ol' days.

At the heart of the matter is "does the Ghibli-fied AI slop even resemble Studio Ghibli works?" And the answer is -- no. It's just a re-skin of an image, usually a digital photo but perhaps another piece of AI slop.

And the aspects of the image that it re-skins are the most superficial -- mainly the facial features on human faces, giving them the standard in-house proportions, lines, and shapes, and as a result the expressions, of Ghibli characters.

It also re-skins the use of line / line art into a more illustrated look, and blocks in the color as in an illustration, with minor use of sculptural shading.

However, just cover up the facial expressions, and ask how Ghibli it looks -- it doesn't, it looks like any ol' Photoshop filter that makes a photo look like an illustration instead. E.g. the ubiquitous Photoshop rotoscoping of the 2000s, which detects the outlines of major shapes and gives them dark bold outlines, and then you can fill in the interior with whatever color block you want.

Someone went further to make an entire movie out of digitally rotoscoped film footage (i.e., the alterations were done by computer programs, not by a hand moving a pencil or pen over tracing paper on top of a lightbox with a film still being projected up through it).

That was the 2006 movie adaptation of Philip K. Dick's iconic novel A Scanner Darkly -- it was such a snooze that I literally fell asleep in the theater. I didn't go out to the movies much after the '90s, when they all started sucking. But I did venture out for that one, and I wrote it off as just boring.

After reading the novel some years later, it really struck me how terribly they butchered it in the movie, and the visuals were a key part of that. There was nothing in the novel to suggest visualizing it as taking place in a '90s virtual reality aesthetic. It looks so stupid.

So, the Ghibli AI slop is just a reheated Photoshop rotoscope filter. Depending on which illustration style you're telling it to emulate -- Ghibli, 1940s Disney, or whatever else -- it renders its rotoscoped trace-over lines in the intended line art style. And then it fills in the color blocks in the same style, with or without sculptural shading depending on the intended style.

It really is mind-blowing how technologically retarded, and aesthetically blind, everyone has become by now. It's just a Photoshop filter, belonging to an existing class (rotoscoping), that requires a full input image to operate on, then spits out the output. This slop is literally 20-25 years old, not cutting-edge at all. I don't mean that Studio Ghibli's signature style is old, which it is, I mean the tech used to "make my image look like Ghibli" is old.

It doesn't qualify as AI either -- no more than "Photoshop" counts as an AI image-generator. When AI generates images from verbal prompts alone, is where the real slop comes in, and I already covered that in the standalone post from a few months ago. When it's just transforming an existing fully rendered image file, it doesn't even count as "generating" the output -- it's just an alteration or re-skin or transformation, a la Photoshop.

Putting aside the datedness rather than cutting-edgy-ness of the tech being used, how good is it at emulating a certain coherent style, e.g. "Studio Ghibli" or whatever else you prompt it to emulate?

Not good at all. As mentioned, 95% of the dum-dums' "gee wowzers!" reaction is due to the human facial expressions alone, which does not count as an entire aesthetic or style.

Damningly, the AI gets the Ghibli *animal* expressions completely backwards. I image-searched "Ghibli AI cat" to see representative examples, and the cats all look very naturalistic in line, shape, proportion, and expression -- with some basic line art and color-blocking to make them look like drawings rather than photos.

But Ghibli never renders animals that way -- their signature, distinctive in-house style is to make animals look caricatured, from the mundane ones like Kiki's black cat or the fantastical Totoro. Their animals always look unusual, exaggerated, even surrealistic, compared to the human beings from the exact same movie, who look much more naturalistic -- just with a little line art and color-blocking. But the people are rarely caricatured visually.

As I said in the previous standalone post, AI slop is biased toward photorealism rather than stylization. Even when you specifically tell it to emulate an illustrated / animated style, and where the animals have a distinctly stylized and caricatured look, it can't help but portray them naturalistically, by illustration standards, rather than the caricatures that are truly and already present in the training set data.

So, even if you were as lenient as possible, "OK, let's just grade it on how Ghibli-esque the faces or bodies look," it fails. It does well with people's faces, although Ghibli doesn't have very distinctive human body shapes (unlike, say, The Simpsons, South Park, Peanuts, Garfield, etc.), so the fact that the AI slop matches the original on body shapes is no proof of its intelligence or accuracy.

But it fails completely for animals -- and in order to achieve a Studio Ghibli aesthetic, how the hell can you ignore animals? They're central to every single one of their works -- sometimes they're the main characters, like in Pom Poko! It's like with Disney, an imaginary world filled with animals who have more personality than ordinary persons.

The line art and color blocking and minor sculptural shading is the remaining 5% of the "gee wowzers!" reaction. It does all right, but that's cuz Ghibli doesn't have very distinctive line art and color blocking -- that's just a generic illustrated or animated look, not specifically Ghibli.

The programmers would get more credit if they tackled a more distinctive target, like Disney's Aladdin, which has very specific line art, itself derived / inspired by the illustrator Al Hirschfeld. *That* movie, hand-drawn from 1992, is impressive -- matching the line art to the original inspiration's style, and doing it throughout an animated movie rather than still illustrations.

So far we've only tackled aspects of (Florentine) disegno, not (Venetian) colorito. And as any art appreciator knows, disegno is basic or irrelevant, and colorito is where all the artful liveliness... well, comes alive!

The reheated Photoshop rotoscoping filter does fill in the interior of outlines with color blocks, but which colors does it choose? And which color combinations? And in what lighting conditions -- evenly lit bright, evenly lit dark, evenly lit hazy twilight, chiaroscuro?

It makes no decisions on these central facets of the image's aesthetic. It blindly copies them over from the input image. It flattens a range of colors into a color block, and likewise for lighting variations getting flattened into a "shaded color region," like animation.

But the range of colors it's choosing from, and brightness or darkness conditions it's choosing from, is what is already present in the image.

If a person is wearing a brown shirt in a photo, there are in fact a zillion different shades of brown present at the pixel level. The filter chooses from within that range of browns, and expands that one shade of brown throughout the entire region of the image.

But the filter didn't choose the person to be wearing a brown shirt, rather than a red, blue, yellow, or purple shirt.

Ditto for the lighting conditions -- copied over, and simplified, from the input image. Not over-writing them or second-guessing them, like making a relatively bright region dark, or making a high-contrast image into an evenly lit one, or whatever.

Therefore, the distinctive Ghibli-ness of the output image is entirely dependent upon the input image already possessing the distinctive colors, color combinations, and lighting conditions, of a Ghibli image. Whether deliberately or coincidentally -- but given that this filter showed up after the photos were taken, we can assume any resemblance of the input image to Ghibli is purely coincidental.

That is, because the input photos were NOT made to look Ghibli-esque to begin with, regarding colors and lighting, the output of the Ghibli filter will look no more Ghibli-esque. It adds no value, passively copying over the original choices, simplifying them somewhat to look illustrated rather than photographed.

No wonder none of those Ghibli AI slop images look like they were taken from a Ghibli movie -- where are the rich blue skies, the verdant green grass or foliage, the pale buttery creamy yellows to contrast against the saturated blues and greens, billowy white clouds, and all the other fixtures of a characteristic Ghibli image?

Where are the brightly lit exteriors and landscapes? Where are the chiaroscuro interiors, or outdoor interiors like a clearing in a forest? Where is the connection to the ukiyo-e woodblock prints, which all iconic Japanese art afterward derives from? Something as basic as the background of Super Mario Bros looks more Ghibli-esque and ukiyo-e derived, regarding color and light, than the latest dud of a Photoshop filter that purports to be oh-so-much smarter and cutting edge. It looks dumb and dated.

Then there's composition, or the arrangement of the separate objects in relation to one another to yield a single coherent scene. Since Japanese animation is heavily influenced by photography, regarding composition, this implies things like "camera placement," "camera angle," and so on.

As with colors and lighting, the reheated Photoshop rotoscoping filter does not make any decisions about camera placement -- height off the ground, angle in any direction, proximity to subjects, blurry vs. sharp focus, and so on. Just blindly carried over from the input image.

Therefore, any resemblance to Ghibli images is coincidental, and due to the creator of the input image, not to the AI programmer.

And of course, very damn few of those photo-snappers were going for a Ghibli look, meaning they largely do NOT look Ghibli-esque. If Ghibli had totally naturalistic camera placement, angle, etc., then perhaps a fair share of ordinary candid photos would resemble it.

But they go for more stylized camera placement, like very high or very low angles (especially in those iconic landscapes, a low-angle camera somewhat close-up, showing the people or animals appearing to tower right up into those rich blue skies and billowy white clouds).

Most ordinary photo-snappers don't opt for off-center compositions, cropping, or really consider composition at all. That's why none of them looks like a still from an anime, where such concerns are central to every scene.

They look exactly like a typical candid photo shot by someone with no aesthetic concern while pressing the button -- cuz that wasn't the point, it was just to record a memory or event in visual form, not to be artistic, let alone to emulate a certain aesthetic like Ghibli or whoever else.

The fact that line art and color blocking is slapped on top of these totally ordinary compositions, ordinary colors, and ordinary lighting, does not change the fact that the original images -- and therefore, the superficially re-skinned outputs -- do not look like anime, of any studio's style (Ghibli or otherwise).

Final meta-observation, about the state of commentary or criticism in both art and technology. I see no evidence that anyone commenting on these topics majored in art history, or is self-taught in it.

Maybe some of the practicing artists, who all uniformly hate AI slop -- but then the dum-dums just write that off as professional jealousy against their computer program job market rivals, rather than taking their opinion more seriously since they have demonstrated some level of "having a good eye" through their art.

Otherwise the terms I used would be standard in tHe DiScOUrSe about this AI slop. Again, perhaps the practicing artists have, but I don't think so. They just say, "Wow, this looks like shit". Fair enough -- they're artists, not commentators or critics. But anyone else should have a basic toolkit of terms, and the visual and perceptual skills needed to analyze images, along with practice from studying art history.

As I said in the previous post, though, all the AI slop cheerleaders are wordcels, not visual people. Forget artist vs. critic -- the more important difference is wordcel vs. shape-rotator or color-perceiver.

Again, their choice of words and their arguments are never about the visual nature of what they're bla-bla-bla-ing about. It's too vibe-y or meta-, like does this represent the human spirit or not?

Who cares about what you think represents the human spirit? -- just tell me what you're looking at. You can't build an argument about art without first knowing what it is you're seeing. And these wordcels can't tell you what's staring them right in the face. They're just not visual-brained. They can analyze narratives and dialog and word choice, but they can't talk about visual art at all. It's beyond their ken.

Nor have they written a computer program of their own -- OK, that's forgivable, like not being a practicing artist. Do you at least know what programs do, have you used them before? Maybe you could be a decent critic of the tech, despite not being a practicing computer coder. How many hours did you spend Photoshopping digital photos during the 2000s?

These dumbos can't even recognize a Photoshop rotoscoping filter when it's staring them in the face -- and the output of that filter was ubiquitous, not a niche thing. How about the program itself -- Photoshop?

Their only awareness of that seminal piece of tech is in their verbal wordcel meme-world, where "haters will say it's photoshopped" was verbally altered into "haters will say it's AI". They view that as a mere verbal riff, updating an older and semi-outdated joke -- or so they think. What if this use of so-called AI is functionally identical to a Photoshop filter? Well then, there's no need to update the joke.

In fact, the datedness of the tech's functionality needs to be called out, and the pretense of it being cutting-edge / the future must be cut down to size. It's not progressing and cutting-edge when it's 20-25 years old -- eons, in computer tech lifespans.

As I said before, these AI slop-slurpers are just gadget-diddlers, they don't know any math or computer science. Jesus, they don't even remember what Photoshop already did 25 years ago! And they're not visual people either. They are the last people to ask about the matter of "AI art".

They just really get a dopamine rush from playing around with gadgets and devices, and the AI prompt is just another gadget for them to diddle and feel dopamine hits from.

Some of them are paid to hawk this slop, some are just really obsessive about their favorite gadgets and shill them for free.

Either way, it's a sign of our collapsing culture that the legacy and Millennial media outlets won't track down, let alone pay, someone who can do what is necessary to comment on these matters.

But then, that's why you keep returning to these ruins of the blogosphere, to ask the cliff-dwelling sage what he thinks about all this crap. ^_^

"This'll just be a couple comments since it's more focused and won't be wide-ranging."

Famous not-so-last words that I never, ever stick to... but you've probably picked up on this quirk of mine by now. I just can't help it, and I'm like that with in-person presentations too, not just online / in writing.

But it's worth it, you wouldn't want some crisp, terse, just-the-facts bullet-point slideshow, if you're trekking up the Cliffs of Wisdom. You can get that from any ol' talker. My meandering is always coherent, on a zoomed-out-enough perspective, not pointless. ^_^

All for now.

RIP David Lynch, who mythologized the normies of Edenic Americana, through saturated dreamy naturalism

Following up on a series of comments starting here on the topic of "cool vs. weird," and another series starting here on the topic of the 50-year cycle in social cohesion vs. chaos -- and its cultural correlates -- I explored David Lynch's role in American cultural history, on the occasion of his recent death. I'll just paste the comments here, to get the ball rolling on a new post.

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RIP David Lynch, who produced most of his works during this wholesome period, and was always more cool than weird -- as were his creations.

If Twin Peaks had been weird and normie-shocking and taboo-violating and ugly or anti-aesthetic, there would never have been "Peaks mania". It was so widespread, I still vividly remember the day in 3rd or 4th grade, when a girl who sat at our little group of 4 desks pushed together, spontaneously burst out with

"Have you guys seen Twin Peaks???!??!?!??!!!! :DDDDDD"

None of us had, but her older sibling or parents were into it, and she watched along with them. We could tell how excited she was, so we believed it must be REALLY COOL, so tell us, what's it about? What makes it so cool? She couldn't really put it into words, and looked dejected after awhile, like, "Yeah, my 3rd-grade brain cannot convey the awesomeness of this show to my fellow 3rd-graders..."

But I always took that to heart, and watched it in earnest when it was shown in reruns on Bravo during the '90s or y2k (back when Bravo was like the Criterion Collection cable channel). I think I was reminded of it by some guy in our freshman dorm -- *not* a counter-cultural type, but a boarding school preppy -- was gushing over it, playing the opening theme song, etc. "You HAVE to watch it, whenever you can!"

Artsy-fartsy types loved it, too, but it was a surprise hit sensation due to its immediate appeal to normies. Nor does it depict counter-cultural types, or Bohemian urban niche environments -- exactly the opposite from someone like Woody Allen, who is primarily popular among art-y types.

It pains me to see Twin Peaks and other related works become hijacked by sub-cultures during the "weird instead of cool" phase of the cycle. Yeah, their predecessors liked it, too, but they didn't try to hijack or gatekeep it, or taint the association with it in a way that would repel normies from gushing over it as well, like their normie predecessors did back in the early '90s.

The elements of gore, violence, occult, etc. are played for sublime threat value, not for shock value or taboo-violation value. And they're balanced or heightened with elements of the beautiful -- the total babes he selected for the cast, the stunning locations, the striking rich colors and dramatic lighting, and the rest of it all.

Really his only weird / ugly / body-horror movie was Eraserhead, from '77.

The Elephant Man, from just 3 years later, was not like that at all, despite the subject being a disfigured freakshow attraction. I checked that out from the local library ALL THE TIME in kindergarten, when Blue Velvet had only just come out.

Yes, it was possible to "be into David Lynch before it was cool" back in the '80s, even for a Midwestern kindergartener who didn't even know his name. That movie was just too cool to not watch again and again and again. The things you could have imprinted on as an impressionable child in the good ol' days...

If only that girl in 3rd grade had told me that Twin Peaks was made by the same guy who made The Elephant Man, I would've been sold right away! And not had to wait until nearly 10 years later to track it down on cable -- and later, on DirectConnect.

Along with respect for taboos, goes respect for the holy and sacred and spiritual, which he incorporated into his work like few other art-school directors. And for the same reasons, his being one of the most all-American directors in the history of the medium.

Now that our cultural identity as Americans has largely matured, further down the line the dictionary definition of "Americana" will simply be David Lynch's '80s and '90s channeling of the late '50s and early '60s.

It isn't canonically American if it isn't in a David Lynch movie or TV show!

Very admirable role, to not only contribute so much primary material to American culture, but to serve as one of its main canonizers at the secondary level as well. RIP.

Delving further into Lynch's place in the "weird vs. cool" divide.

Surrealism, dreams / dreaminess, alternate dimensions, paranormal phenomena, etc. -- not weird in themselves. Not ugly, disgusting, disorienting, alienating, sacrilegious, profane, obscene, and so on.

The main way that surrealism *can* be taken in a weird direction is warped perception, hallucinations -- in the sense of trippy out-of-the-ordinary sensory perception, not just "such a thing couldn't exist here" like a person sitting on a wall or ceiling. Lynch never went with blurred vision, melting shapes, undulating lines of perspective within the spatial frame, kaleidoscopic ballets of pure shapes, and so on.

His surrealism is more of an "alternate reality" type, where the rules and nature of sensory perception remain the same as we ordinarily feel them. Perceptual naturalism.

So where does the alternate-ness come from, then? It ties into his pervasive tone of mystery, secrets, exploring the dim hidden crypts of reality. You can't immediately make sense of what you're encountering -- the space is too barren, the space seems to have no entrance and no exit, a person is sitting silent and looking at you but not saying anything, when they speak it's in a language you don't understand, or you understand that language but it's in concealed in cryptic riddles that invite you to solve and unlock their secret meaning, and so on.

Which is not to say it's off-putting or repulsive or dread-inducing -- it can go that extreme, but fundamentally it's more about cryptic meanings, which *can* be solved and understood, but not in the way you're used to determining the meaning of things.

The closest analogy to the sensation these alternate realities produce is discovering a treasure trove of communication in a language you don't speak and can't even decipher just yet, but which sparks your curiosity to decode it and learn to communicate in this unfamiliar language. You're hoping it's something mystical and BIG, not just ancient trade regulations or something boring and mundane like that...

We've all been in situations where we can't speak the language. As long as it's temporary, it's not so alienating -- before long, we'll be back to where we *do* speak the language effortlessly. And while we're in the foreign-speaking place, we can still try to figure out a pidgin to interact with this fascinating exotic world.

That's why he ties it so much into dreams -- dreams are fleeting and temporary. You'll wake up before too long, so even if you're having a nightmare, it's not a chronic condition. You're still grounded in the safe familiar waking world of your everyday environment. You're not permanently crossing over, climbing through the looking glass, whisked away by some cosmic force that may never whisk you back, etc.

Maybe you will -- maybe this is the big sleep, not just a single night's nightmare. But dreams are not inherently permanent, they are typically fleeting acute "conditions".

So, Lynchian surrealism is more about curiosity, exploring, a sense of adventure, going on a quest, solving a mystery, unlocking secrets. Fun, exciting, stimulating, inspiring -- not ugly, off-putting, demoralizing, degrading, or queering / weirding / warping. Especially not at the perceptual level, which would induce nausea and other disgust reflexes. Semantically disorienting, but never physically sea-sickening.

How about his famously "quirky" cast of characters? Isn't quirky synonymous with weird, misfit, etc? No, it just means they're not identical clones of each other, they all have their own distinct fingerprints, voices, faces, and yes personalities.

It's "all the colors of the rainbow" diversity, where each band of color is perceptually distinct, but all are equally natural examples of "color". There's not a standard color vs. marginal, misfit, outcast colors. There's no antagonism between the colors.

So I'd rather use the term "colorful characters" rather than "quirky," which can sometimes be conflated with weird, affected, etc.

That's the other thing -- colors don't strive to construct their own persona as being orange, green, etc. Their colors are just what they naturally are -- not carefully curated constructions and affectations performed for a real or imagined audience of spectators and evaluators. Lynchian "quirkiness" of characters is always unpretentious, naturalistic, and uninhibited. That's why they seem "extra" -- they're holding nothing back, concealing nothing, lacking artifice, uninhibited by anxieties about how they'll be perceived or accepted vs. rejected, etc.

I would call these personalities "highly saturated" if we're sticking with the "colorful" metaphor. They're not phony or affected colors, they just seem out of the ordinary due to how rich and saturated the pigment is -- almost realer than real -- since the artist did not dilute the pigment before applying it to the canvas.

These colorful characters are VIVID, not ostentatious or garish or caricatured or grotesque. Not campy either -- vivid.

So in this way he's emphasizing what is natural, not playing up the artificial. Celebratory naturalism, adulating naturalism -- not warping people into weird caricatured mask-wearers.

And so his characters are the opposite of affected, neurotic, performative theatre kids who curate an aura of being quirky, twee, or le sad and depressed, or whatever else. You've never met LESS neurotic characters in the history of the world's cultures...

Why are they so uninhibited, so lacking in artifice, so carefree inhabiting their distinct personalities? Cuz they aren't misfits, weirdos, etc., but belong to a community that accepts and values them simply for being members of the in-group. Like a great big single family, they are loved and appreciated unconditionally, so they are free to be themselves instead of having to construct a persona based on what will please some conditionally-loving fickle-taste audience or jury panel.

Not just among small-town folk either -- Mulholland Drive shows the same close-knit-ness of Angelenos broadly. Not to say there's never any conflict or antagonism or drama -- there's conflict within any family. Just to say that Angelenos treat each other like members of an extended family, not transactionally (and if a character does behave that way, it marks them as evil, misfit, threatening to the order, etc.).

You might even say Lynch's characters, their environment, and their social communities are Edenic -- Edenic Americana. There was temptation, conflict, etc. in the Garden of Eden, too -- Edenic doesn't imply free from threats or dangers or temptations.

But they live in a primeval, wholesome paradise, and the drama and conflict involves their loss of innocence through temptation and experience with not-so-wholesome elements (perhaps hostile invaders of their paradise, perhaps seductive antagonists who they succumb to through their own sinful free will).

This is another reason why his characters seem dialed-up -- they are more in the allegorical direction than the documentary / verite direction. They're Edenic, mythological, legendary, even though they're portrayed as inhabiting contemporary America. Mythological naturalism, legend-making naturalism.

Brief aside to say that Lynch never indulged in making anti-heroes, or glamorizing threats to the social order. The harmony and closely-knit fabric of the social order represented Edenic paradise, and whatever threatens to tear that to shreds is portrayed as an unalloyed evil, sometimes as a literal demon from a demonic dimension.

He never glorified weirdos, misfits, and anti-social types. At most, maybe gave them a seductive coolness, like leather-jacket-wearing, muscle-car-driving Frank Booth. But that was always undercut by exploring their own seedy underbelly (not just that of the wholesome small town) -- a raving nut who couldn't have fun without taking weird drugs, sexually crippled by perverse taboo-violating fetishes, deeply insecure, and ultimately pathetic, not someone anyone would want to emulate as le dark misunderstood anti-hero. Like other Lynchian characters, he's certainly colorful and vivid and memorable -- but not glorified or shown aspirationally.

You can instantly spot who misunderstands and hijacks Lynch's "quirkiness" by whether, when Lynch comes up in conversation, they chime in with "Heineken? Fuck that shit! Pabst Blue Ribbon!" or "A damn fine cup of coffee!"

Agent Cooper is equally colorful, vivid, and memorable -- but not the insecure, pathetic, LARP-y weirdo villain. *He* is the one that's glorified, and shown aspirationally. A modern day role model -- Lynch was a proud Eagle Scout, after all.

There was little in the way of moral ambiguity and other theatre-kid pretentiousness in the tone and themes -- there was good, and there was evil, and the creator was clearly on the side of the good guys. To choose otherwise would make the social order vulnerable to corruption and dissolution. He wanted to uphold and preserve it, and to express his gratitude at all the Edenic wonders that it provided to its dependents.

Another brief aside to emphasize that none of this morality was even crypto-Christian, let alone openly. That would have been too Olde Worlde LARP-y. If anything, it was part of New Age spirituality and morality -- how very American of him, yet again.

Ditto for the sacred music that accompanies this morality and narrative -- distinctly 20th-century American styles like jazz, R&B, blues, gospel, rock n roll, even synth-y New Age. The Twin Peaks theme song *was* included on the original definitive New Age compilation CD, Pure Moods.

I've brought this issue up before, but characters must be likeable and relatable and normie or at least normie-friendly / normie-aspiring, if their plight is to be felt by the audience. We don't care if an angry-at-everyone, self-focused, hyper-competitive brat suffers. All those taboo-violating, filthy-club-inhabiting gay weirdos from Cruising? Hard to feel sorry for them getting serial-murdered. They're already so debased, hardly human anymore.

That's why violence and other threats in Lynch's worlds are so poignant -- they're targeting the relatively innocent Edenic normies, who belong to a community, look attractive (naturally, not as in vain looks-maxxers), love others and are loved by others. THAT is a real loss.

When directors emphasize weirdos, misfits, anti-social types, competers, grade-grubbers, attention-whores, and other self-promoting types, and make them the victims, they're trying to force us into caring about people who don't care about us and would actively cut us down if given the power to. Sorry, no sympathy for the devil or his demonic minions, no matter how hamfistedly a grown-up misfit director tries to hector us into praising those who should be condemned.

Lynch allowed us to bemoan the loss of those who deserved to still be here. Moral naturalism, ethical naturalism, not moral inversionism.

Seduction, allure, glamor, temptation, and sin were other pervasive themes in his work. Ties into the beautiful, and the Edenic, and the loss of innocence, but also the mysterious, the cryptic, the puzzling -- that's another kind of attractive, enticing seduction. Irresistible, possibly to our own downfall, but an all-too-human desire.

Things that are weird, ugly, cursed, warped, unnatural, repulsive, etc. -- are *not* tempting, *not* alluring, *not* inviting us to stray from our normie path. Even when threats to the social order are shown, they have to have a kind of glamor or beauty, at least superficially and initially.

What could possibly tempt us to stray from our already beautiful Edenic paradise? -- something even more beautiful, more concentratedly beautiful, beauty in a form we haven't yet experienced hence exotic.

There is the occasional ugly revolting outsider threat (like the dumpster demon in Mulholland Drive), but those are rare. Ugliness, gore, splatter, filth, scat -- very rare in Lynch's rendering of the evil side of the universe. Also rare in his depiction of their evil effects on the good side -- no torture-porn gruesomeness done to the victims.

This places him in square opposition to the puritanical strain of American culture, especially as it arose during the late '90s and after, with torture porn that originated with David Fincher's Seven (1995), where ugly disgusting gruesome tortures are meted out to sinners in order for the punishment to fit the crime. See this earlier post.

Lynch is part of the Dark Age-oriented empathy toward sinners approach, emphasizing the seductiveness and superficial appeal of sin, understanding and trying to coax would-be sinners away from falling into temptation. As opposed to the puritanical discipline-and-punish approach of the humanist, Renaissance, Scientific Revolution, Enlightenment eras, where sinners get what they deserve, reap what you sow, etc., and where they get appropriate torturing punishments (which did not exist in the Dark Ages), witch-hunted (from the Scientific Rev era, not the Dark Ages), and so on and so forth.

There are no revenge fantasies, fan-fic, or other forms of self-aggrandizement in Lynch's work, unlike in many other favorites of the art-y crowd (like Woody Allen, to pick on him again somewhat, but he really is a good foil for Lynch).

He doesn't create these worlds in order to escape the perceived injustice of this world, into a better, just world where he comes out on top of his rivals or antagonists. Not masturbatory.

It's not escapist -- in a way it's embedding yourself even further within this reality, by not treating it in a documentary / verite way, but also not as some horrible unjust prison to escape from. It's dignifying this world, its characters, and its environment -- and even elevating them to legendary, mythological, allegorical significance. That's devoting yourself even more to this world.

So it's really not so fantastical after all, the "extra"-ness or intensity comes from imagining our world to be even more real than it really is, to be more whatever-it-is than it really is. Not "super"-natural, that has other connotations -- ultra-naturalism, maybe.

And again, those brief visits to and from alternate realities or spaces, are treated entirely naturalistically -- you visit such-and-such coordinates on a map, and presto, you're transported to the Black Lodge. It's like traveling via wormhole, in a "heavy on the science" sci-fi space story.

Just as Lynch does not denigrate the normies as enemies of the weird, he does not downplay this world as a bland flavor that should be left behind for a more fantastical razzle-dazzle escape-pod. He mythologizes the normies, as well as their worldly environment. Nobody to seek revenge against, no place to flee or escape from. Somebody to be treasured, and some place worth embedding yourself further into.

The Indo-European-ness of Ashkenazi Hanukkah, Rosh Hashanah, etc.

I'll get to Christmas and New Year's posting later. For now, to get a new post started, I'll begin with a narrower topic.

Earlier posts this year have reviewed the work of others, and uncovered tons of signs from my own investigations, pointing to Ashkenazi Jews being converts to Talmudic Judaism during the 2nd half of the 1st millennium AD, and coming from mixed Indo-European sources -- one East Slavic, the other East Anatolian / Armenian / Iranian -- that eventually genetically merged into a single-mode genepool, after forming a loose cultural coalition based around controlling trade routes in and around the Khazar Khaganate.

So for the Christmas season, I naturally wondered, "How much of Hanukkah came from Christmas, Nowruz, or even earlier Indo-European holidays of this time of the year?"

Before getting to the main topic of Christmas, my investigation led me to stumble upon another highly distinctive Indo-Euro tradition that Ashkenazi Jews practice, but for Rosh Hashanah -- New Year's. They bake a loaf of challah bread for the occasion, but this isn't any ordinary loaf for any ordinary occasion -- the new year is all about bringing good luck, improving over the bygone year. So for Rosh Hashanah, they bake a key -- yes, a literal metal key -- into the loaf. This is meant to be a magic charm that will bring good luck in the new year.

Recall an earlier post that surveyed this very same ritual from Ireland to Iran, including a good luck charm in the dessert for the New Year's holiday. In some of those cultures, it is tied to Christmas, like the "king cake" from Spain and France (and places influenced by them, like New Orleans in America). They bake a figurine into a cake, and whoever gets the piece with the good luck charm will have good luck in the new year!

Well, the Ashkenazi "shlissel challah" (after the Yiddish word for "key" and the Hebraized word for "loaf of bread") is not fully identical to the Indo-Euro tradition, since there's no practice of dividing up the loaf and whoever gets the portion with the metal key has good luck. Apparently, the good luck belongs to the baker of the loaf, regardless of who finds it when eating the loaf. Also, the food item is not specifically dessert.

And yet, it's impossible to ignore the striking similarities. The "baking a key into a loaf of bread" seems to go back several centuries, although perhaps not much further. I think there must be an earlier form that this ritual took, where it was a sweet baked good and not just a typical loaf of bread, and where the good luck only belonged to the individual lucky enough to get that portion of the dessert that contained the charm -- not the preparer of the food.

But somewhere along the way, this ritual was lost, and a diluted form remained in the newer shlissel challah tradition. Needless to say, Jews from the Saharo-Arabian sphere, such as Moroccan Jews, do not practice this tradition -- it's a distinctly Indo-Euro thing. And the fact that Ashkenazi shlissel challah is 90% identical to Irish Christmas pudding and Iranian samanu for Nowruz, is a powerful testament to the Indo-European-ness, rather than Saharo-Arabian-ness, of their culture.

Moving on now to Hanukkah, two of the major features of contemporary Ashkenazi Hanukkah -- gelt and the dreidel -- are fairly recent, going back maybe a few centuries in Europe, so it's hard to infer anything about Ashkenazi roots from them. Maybe they just picked it up from their European hosts, like they did with the dreidel (teetotum). Maybe they invented it themselves, but long after Ashkenazi ethnogenesis had taken mature form (like the gelt).

However, the most prominent symbol and practice -- lighting the menorah -- is more revealing, since it goes back further.

Here is a good review of the earliest Hanukkah menorahs, whether surviving examples of them, visual depictions of them in old sources, or written accounts.

The earliest accounts of them date to circa 1000 AD in Europe, followed centuries later by illustrated depictions and surviving examples. They do not trace back to Classical times, or Bronze Age times, or anything related to Second Temple Judaism and its account of the past. They're absent for most of the Dark Ages, for that matter.

That is just after the collapse of the Khazar Khaganate, though, when the Jewish converts who controlled the trade routes would have had to migrate further westward into Europe to earn a new living. 14th-century Jewish cemeteries, like the one in Erfurt, Germany, show that they had developed a culture of their own, having their own section of a cemetery, although their genepool was still bi-modal at that point.

But sometime between the fall of the Khazar Khaganate and these 14th-C. cemeteries in Germany, Ashkenazi ethnogenesis had taken off.

The lack of menorahs during most of the Dark Ages shows that, yet again, there is no evidence showing a cultural continuity from Second Temple-period Judaeans and the Ashkenazi Jews. Most notably, the Ashkenazis have never been documented as speaking a Semitic language (until some of them began LARP-ing as neo-Judaeans, moving to Palestine and reviving Hebrew), or any other member from the Saharo-Arabian family broadly. Only Indo-European ones, like Yiddish.

Moreover, the menorahs from the earliest depictions do not resemble the Temple menorah from the Classical period, which had 7 branches, with 1 in the center, and 3 pairs of symmetrical branches leading out from the center. This verbal description and visual depiction is widely attested in Classical times themselves, e.g. in the Arch of Titus from roughly 80 AD that shows the Roman removal of the Temple menorah after destroying the Temple 10 years earlier.

Re-shaping the Hanukkah menorah to take this form, but with 4 pairs of branches plus a central branch, is pretty recent, perhaps from the 19th C or so, and maybe connected to or pre-figuring the Romantic nationalist movement of Zionism.

At any rate, the early Hanukkah menorahs don't resemble the Temple menorah whatsoever. They don't have a single branch and pairs of symmetrical branches. And the structure is not a pedestal or base, with the light-bearing elements being held aloft by the branching section. Rather, the light-bearing elements were all resting flat on a single horizontal surface, like a shelf or fireplace mantle, with no branching or supporting elements underneath the shelf.

More tellingly, the earliest depictions show candles as the light-bearing element -- a practice that continues to this day, even after the change in the shape of the main supporting structure, from a shelf to a Temple-esque design.

The original Temple menorah did not use candles at all -- the end of each branch held a cup for oil, in which a wick was dipped. Even further back, in the narrative that motivates the holiday of Hanukkah, there is a miracle of oil -- which continued to burn for 8 days and nights, when supposedly there was only enough oil to burn for one. It's not a miracle of a candle that continued to burn longer than it should have -- there's no mention of candles, only oil lamps.

Throughout the Medieval period in the Saharo-Arabian sphere, including our Western contempo depiction of it, oil lamps were the defining way of portable artificial lighting.

In fact, to this day, Moroccan Jews -- who *do* come from the Saharo-Arabian sphere, and *are* documented as speaking a Semitic language historically -- use an oil lamp form of a menorah for Hanukkah, unlike the candle-based form that the Ashkenazis use.

Did anyone in the Middle East adopt candles as much as the Europeans did? Yes -- the Persians! And the Indian groups further to their east. Candles are not so ancient, but they're ancient enough -- going back to the Romans. And yet, their spread seems to have been confined to the Indo-European sphere, with Greeks and Persians and Indians adopting them, but not so much the Arabians or North Africans.

See the article on candles from the Encyclopedia Iranica for the full history of candles in Iranian culture, but the fact that it has its own entry testifies to how central they are to Iranian culture.

And -- wait, what's this? -- Iranians light candles to place on the main table during Nowruz, along with the Half-Seen items. And like the early Ashkenazi menorahs, they are not held on a branching symmetrical candelabra, just on top of the table top. Nowruz and Christmas overlap a lot due to them being "end of the year" holidays, although over the centuries, Iranian New Year's has stayed in the arrival of springtime (when the Proto-Indo-European New Year's holiday was likely held), while the Indo-Euros who adopted Christianity moved it back toward the new central holiday of Christmas, nearly at the end of their calendar year.

Candles have been central to European Christmas traditions for centuries, including placing them on the Christmas tree in the Modern era, until there were electric lights. Or the Lutheran practice of Advent candles, which are similar to the Hanukkah menorah in keeping track of the time during the late December holiday. Candlemas, in early February, is the end of Christmas / Epiphany season, transitioning into the New Year.

Candles on a Hanukkah menorah places the Ashkenazi holiday within the Indo-Euro, rather than Saharo-Arabian, traditions. But maybe it's just the Ashkenazi adopting or assimilating to practices of their Euro hosts? How do we know it goes back further and may originate outside of Europe?

Back to those Nowruz candles! Some practitioners of Nowruz include one candle for every child in the household, making the number of candles variable -- a multiple of the number of children in the home.

Wouldn't you know it? -- the Ashkenazis also tend to increase the number of candles, as a multiple of the number of children in the home! They give everyone their own individual menorah, each of which has 9 candles.

So it's not exactly the same as Nowruz, where each child only gets one candle. But the Ashkenazi child getting 9 candles is due to the invariable nature of 9 in the Hanukkah holiday -- it celebrates the 8 nights of the miracle of the oil, plus the 1 candle to help light the others. Each child must get 9 candles, not just 1, otherwise it wouldn't commemorate the 8 nights.

However, the number of candles does increase as a multiple of the number of children in the home, for both Nowruz and Ashkenazi Hanukkah. I don't know of a similar "certain number of candles per child at home" tradition in other Indo-Euro cultures during Christmas or New Year's. If it exists, it must be fairly marginal, whereas the practice is widespread enough to this day for Nowruz that it's mentioned in reviews of the holiday rituals.

And the good ol' Moroccan Jews seal up the other side of the argument -- they don't have one menorah per child, or anything that varies with the number of children at home. They only use one menorah for the entire household, no matter how many people live there.

So, Ashkenazi Hanukkah rituals more closely resemble Iranian Nowruz than Moroccan Jewish Hanukkah, aside from the indisposable elements like commemorating the number 8, artificial light-bearing things, etc.

Those Late Medieval depictions of menorahs in Europe only show them lighting 8 candles in a place that is probably a synagogue. And in that context, there's no family living there -- so they can't, in principle, vary the number of menorahs with the number of residents. Perhaps as Hanukkah became a popular holiday within the domestic setting, it met an older ritual that involved "increasing the number of lights according to the number of children". And that older ritual came from the Iranian sphere.

This is yet another sign that the source populations for that coalition that would eventually become the Ashkenazi Jews definitely included one in or around Iran.

But more than that -- I think most of their religious and sacred traditions were carried over from that Iranian source, and not from the East Slavic source that also held sway in their coalition.

I've mentioned the divide between Germanic-surnamed Ashkenazis, who seem to have a higher proportion of genetic and/or cultural background in the Iranian source, vs. the Slavic-surnamed Ashkenazis, who have less of it and more of the Slavic source.

The Iranian source seems to have been more cultured, elite, prestigious, sophisticated, with a long history of being administrators, bureaucrats, scientists, artists... and perhaps also priests. Not merely "religious officials," but priests as an elevated specialist elite stratum in society, propped up by the material surplus of a large sedentary agrarian economy.

East Slavs in the Dark Ages simply did not have that kind of economy, nor did the West Slavs for that matter. Only the South Slavs did -- namely, the Bulgarian Empire, who sponsored and spread the Cyrllic Alphabet among the previously illiterate Slavs, adopted and codified Christianity for the Slavs (including the use of Old Bulgarian, AKA "Old Church Slavonic," as the liturgical language, even for other Orthodox Slavs to this day), founded the Orthodox Slav style of churches through their proximity to the Byzantine Empire, and so on and so forth.

East Slavs were semi-nomadic, mainly peasants, no large or powerful central state ever in their history, illiterate, with a folk culture but not much of a high culture, etc. They represented the brusque, pushy, materialistic trader type. That type also exists in a civilized culture like Iran, but there's also the spiritual specialist type, who fill a permanent role of "priest".

So when it came time to come up with rituals for the new converts to Judaism, the Ashkenazis all looked at each other and decided, "Well, you Iranian types seem to know what you're doing with the whole priestly role -- why don't you handle that part of our culture-to-be? As long as we East Slavs don't find anything too fishy about it, we'll just take your civilized word for it."

This ties into the genetic data on Ashkenazi Jews, where there are certain genetic markers for the so-called "priestly bloodline" AKA the kohanim (such as those with the surname Cohen). They are supposedly descended from the temple priests of the Second Temple era, who, after the temple was destroyed in 70 AD, continued to play some kind of new priestly-ish role in society, just not the same was as tending to the now-destroyed temple. And they supposedly kept that role within their bloodline, only marrying into other priestly families.

Well, the "keeping our bloodlines priestly" I can buy -- but not them tracing back to the Second Temple Judaeans. We know from all the other evidence that they have no genetic or cultural connection to them, not even religiously -- the Ashkenazis are only documented as practicing Judaism from the Talmudic era, not Second Temple Judaism.

However, if the kohanim within the Ashkenazis were more likely to come from the Iranian rather than the Slavic sub-population of their founders, then they'll at least pass as "Middle Eastern", which is always a weasel-word in genetic studies. Middle Eastern meaning an Indo-European-speaking "fire worshiper"? -- or a Semitic-speaking monotheist? Very different cultures!

And who knows? Maybe there was one actual Judaean priest who wandered into Persia in order to help train the new converts, and he left some of his kohanim bloodline there, where it got preserved through priestly caste endogamy. I highly doubt that, but even if true, it only says there was that one ancestor who was Judaean, vs. 99% of Ashkenazi "Middle Eastern" ancestors being Iranian / Armenian / East Anatolian.

That suggests that, like Iranian bureaucrats, Iranian priests are mainly based on their role in society, not on the specific institution it serves. They were priests under Zoroastrianism, then mullahs under Islam, and some of them as kohanim within the Iranian-derived portion of the Ashkenazi Jews.

That makes me wonder about when Christianity used to be a big deal in Persia and further east ("Nestorians"). That was during the Dark Ages, when Zoroastrianism, Islam, Christianity, and Judaism were all vying with each other for influence. There were certainly Iranian Christian priests in those days.

Maybe there's a common priestly genetic sub-population that they all came from, no matter which religion they performed the priestly role within. At that narrower level, I'm sure there are genetic differences -- Zoroastrian priests wouldn't have married into Christian priest families (knowingly), or with Muslim clerics (knowingly), and so on.

Maybe take the Parsis in India as a convenient example of Zoroastrian priests, although DNA from actual Late Classical / Medieval Zoroastrian priests would be ideal. Muslim clerics in Iran are still around, with some families or bloodlines being well known already, I'm sure. And then use Ashkenazi kohanim as the other comparison.

I'll bet, at a certain level, they all came from the same priestly genepool in Iran! Just like Iranian bureaucrats who were famously adept at serving one empire, or another, or another still. It's the specialized role, not the master, that they preserved. Iran is not an anarchic, tribal, nomadic culture of honor like it used to be way back in the Bronze Age, or like many of its neighbors have been (Turkic, Mongol, Arabian). It's one of the most thoroughly and thorough-going civilized cultures on Earth, for better or worse.

Where else would new converts to Judaism recruit their priests from, if Iranians were an option? For the Ashkenazis, it was -- and they did.

AI slop is stylistically schizo and contradictory, human art is coherent and unified in style

A recent post from Scott Alexander on AI slop vs. human art asked respondents to guess whether certain images were made by AI or a person. If AI could fool enough respondents, was it not real art, a la the Turing test for judging whether a machine was intelligent?

Well, they did not fool respondents -- the average and median score was 60% correct, compared to 50% if they flipped a coin. We just had an election -- 60 to 40 is not a close election. This contradicts the title of section 1, that people had a hard time identifying AI art just cuz it wasn't near 100% correct. Having a hard time would mean they did worse than a coin-flip.

And he admits that he put a massive thumb on the scale by screening out AI images that had the telltale signs of being AI -- which is to say, the telltale signs that are already known about. This experiment revealed, to me at least, other telltale signs, but more on that later. E.g., disfigured hands and fingers, garbled text, "wrestling" poses where there's a lot of interaction between two bodies, and the entire style of the recognizable DALL-E model. Even with this thumb on the scale, people were still not fooled.

Of course, when it comes to computer models, the question is not can a computer program do something, but how much complexity does it cost, and how good is the output? If it has a 137-degree polynomial to connect a line between 7 data points, that's over-fitting the data. How many prompts, with what degree of specificity, does an AI generator require before it gives sufficiently passable results -- plural, as in reliably replicated, not just a fluke success?

The more complexity that needs to be built into the model by these prompts, the less smart and talented it is. The real comparison is, how many prompts or constraints, and with what degree of specificity, would you have to tell a human artist before they gave sufficiently passable results? Not many at all! The computer is a massive downgrade, if you're telling someone or something else what you have in mind.

The real fascination with AI slop is that the turnaround time for results is relatively fast, compared to the labor-intensive work of human hands. And so even though the results are slop, they're at least 20% real-ish, so you're OK with that trade-off -- crappy quality, but fast results for AI, instead of high quality results that take much longer for a person.

So then AI is not superior or equal to a person, it's a different point along a trade-off continuum, and nothing to gawk at as though it were a higher form of intelligence or existence than our own.

* * *

My main interest, however, is in further analyzing what gives away AI art, beyond the already well-known signs like mangled hands, garbled text, and interactive bodies that turn into Mr. Potatohead abominations.

Those are specific to the subject matter -- what is being portrayed. But scrolling through the images -- and I was not fooled by more than a few (more on why they can fool, later) -- I discovered a more fundamental and stylistic giveaway of AI art, which gets to its very nature, or perhaps lack of a nature, compared to human nature.

Namely, AI -- being a program without a mind or spirit of its own -- can easily be of two minds, even in contradictory ways (not just divergent), at a stylistic level. Not what subject matter is portrayed, but the manner in which it is portrayed. Human beings, possessing a single mind of their own, are of one mind about the manner in which they portray the subject matter.

Consider image 4, which I instantly felt was AI (and it is). There is a clear main subject, close to the viewer, and it's a person. I don't think it matters if the subject is a non-human animal, plant, inanimate object like a boulder, or human artifact like a chair or door -- something that is the focus of attention, in the foreground, near the viewer. Then there's a background environment in which the subject is embedded -- not a portrait in a vacuum.

The subject being a person means it takes the form of a portrait, while the environment takes the form of a landscape.

Yet the styles of these two forms are different and contradictory. The landscape is Impressionist, although who cares exactly what period it's mimicking -- the point is, the level of detail is low-resolution, blurry, with blobs and patches and planes of color more than crisply delineated and complex shapes. This applies not only in the distance, where things are naturally more blurry, but right up in the foreground -- look at the flowers directly around the girl, their stalks look like single thick brushstrokes, and the petals are thick daubs of color. Low-detail, blurry.

Then all of a sudden, the girl in the portrait section is rendered in fairly high detail, in focus rather than blurred. It's not 100% photorealistic, but it's far more in that direction than the highly stylized rendering of detail for the landscape section. You can see multiple folds on the fabric of her clothes, with light / shading for sculpting purposes -- which is NOT used on the grass, flowers, dirt, trees, etc. in the landscape. You can make out individual wisps of hair on her head, each tiny curving line inside her ear (with shading-for-sculpting again), and so on.

This detailed focus gets more blurry and Impressionist as you look toward the bottom of her dress and shoes, and I notice in the other images that the trigger for photorealism seems to be a human face or other exposed parts of the human anatomy. So even just her dress -- which is a single garment, not a separate top and bottom -- looks schizo stylistically, with a more photorealist upper region and a blurry Impressionist bottom region, further from the trigger of exposed human anatomy.

The machine doesn't understand that a single self-contained work of art is supposed to be coherent and unified in style or presentation. It has clearly been trained on photorealistic portraits and Impressionist landscapes, one not-so-stylized and the other highly stylized. And so when asked to combine a portrait within a landscape, it figures why not combine the best of both worlds? -- a high-detail portrait in a landscape that is blurry immediately surrounding her, not to mention farther away as well.

This is not just shallow focus from photography or cinematography -- at the exact same distance from the "camera," there are simultaneously a sharp-focus object and blurry objects. That's not physically or technologically possible -- and could only be done by deliberate choice of the artist, in some warped form of artistic license.

But artists never use that license, cuz it violates the fundamental requirement to present the subject matter in a coherent unified style -- all blurry and Impressionist, or all sharp-focus and photorealistic, but not some of one and some of the other in the same work.

To give a pity point to the machine, it at least does the sensible contradiction instead of the wacko contradiction -- it renders subjects in sharp detail (as though we're giving them our attention), while leaving environments in blurry detail (as though they're in our peripheral vision, not as important), rather than an Impressionist portrait set within a photorealistic landscape (akin to animated figures superimposed on a photographed real-world environment, like Who Framed Roger Rabbit?).

This schizo clash of styles within a single work is how I identified most of the other AI images.

Photorealist portrait in blurry landscape also told me the following were AI: 7, 10 (again, not a portrait of a person, but with a clear subject taking up much space), 13 (cartoon head, realistic water), 16 (the background being just a fairly uniform color plane), 21 (the environment's flowers are blurrier than the decorative flowers on her clothes, despite both being close to the camera), 23 (background looks like an Abstract Expressionist painting, and even within the mother's clothing, the colored pieces are blurrier than the white pieces), 27, 33, 40, 46, 49 (the wacko contradiction, where the close-up buildings are blurry while the distant water is in sharper focus)...

And the most insane is 26, whose subject looks like he was photographed under pristine studio conditions -- while the landscape outside the window is a highly stylized Venetian type portrayal. Is it supposed to be a painting within the artwork, hanging on the wall of this room? To me it looked like a landscape shown through a window, that ol' trick. There's what could be a decorative frame just below it, but not running up the left side of the landscape... so it's a bit schizo in its subject matter, but also in the style, with totally opposite styles for the landscape and the portrait.

Related, there are some whose subject matter is a bunch of abstract geometric shapes, with no 3D depth cues, no lighting variation, etc. -- and then a single human face or body, with multiple features (eye outline, iris, pupil, lips, individual teeth, etc.), sometimes with shading-for-sculpting. The dum-dum AI doesn't understand that a single work has to be entirely abstract or entirely representational. This gave away 6, 17, 24, and 50.

I could tell that 19 was by a person cuz although there are geometric shapes and a stylized human head, the geometric shapes are not separate abstract objects from the representational head -- they're used to form the lines around the head and its features, or to fill up volume within these features, suggest texture of the features, etc. They are building blocks to render a representational object -- not a separate array of abstract shapes, plus a representational head in their midst.

The Impressionist landscapes with no dominating subject are less obviously AI, cuz the contradictory rendering of subject and background cannot happen. Still, their subject matter or compositions look more like photographs, which were then passed through a blurry / stylized / Impressionist filter. The point-of-view, angle, perspective, cropping objects at the frame's edges, etc. Very photographic in composition, if not photorealistic in detail. And painters or illustrators rarely did this -- they create more of a staged array of figures or natural elements if there's no dominant subject.

This gave away 11, 20, 31, and 43. I could tell 22 was by a person cuz there's a semi-prominent human and plant subject, and they're both rendered Impressionistically along with the landscape. However, 38 and 45 do not look like photographs in composition, and have the same approach to detail throughout. 38 has a little wacky of subject matter, with fairly crisply intact ruins amidst a sprawling pasture, and maybe the level of detail on that building is a bit too much compared to the landscape and figures, but it's not as obvious, and the figures are pretty blurry.

44 was the only one that really got me, glad to know it got everyone else too. Kinda photographic in composition, but could easily be a painter as well. Everything rendered in blurry brushstroke blobs, nothing is contradicting that with sharp focus. The presence of multiple people is not triggering the high-detail tendency for portraits. And the arrangement of them looks somewhat staged for dramatic effect, not a typical photograph. Very consistent and coherent stylistically.

Well, one getting through is just a fluke, as far as I'm concerned. By random chance the algo didn't do the many wrong things it is tempted to do. And if you could somehow spell out what is different about this one, to try to replicate it, it'd need so much more complexity in its instructions, that it wouldn't be worth it -- over-fitting the data.

I also missed the most commonly misidentified human picture -- 25. It has that wacko subject matter that makes you think it's AI. And the insane level of detail on the front of the ship, but far less on the bottom, the blurry / misty right and left sides of the landscape (including the smaller ships on the right), are the common contradictory styles of AI.

I wonder if this one was purposely made to resemble AI. If so, that still proves the larger point -- humans are better at imitating AI slop, than computers are at imitating human art. We are superior to them, so we can understand them and imitate them better than vice versa. Their output is a subset of ours, so it's interpolation and valid when we imitate them. Our output is a superset of theirs, so it would be extrapolation and invalid for them to imitate us.

The only human one I was fairly convinced was AI, was 30 -- there's such insane photorealistic detail on her dress, far less detail shown on her face, almost none on the walls of the room, and fairly low-detail on the scene outside the window. I don't think this painter from the turn of the 19th C was trying to imitate AI -- she was just obsessed with painting the details of a dress, and the rest of the composition was an afterthought. Not a very coherent portrait or mini-landscape through the window.

* * *

So, the main points remain. People are much better at identifying AI from human art than just coin-flipping -- even when the really egregious examples are removed.

And crucially, AI models do not have a single mind of their own, like people do, so they frequently violate the fundamental rule to maintain coherence of style within a single work. It's so fundamental that most of us probably didn't even consider it necessary to spell it out explicitly -- like, what other approach would you take, clashing and disjointed styles? Computers are too analytical and slicing-up and zooming-in, not holistic and gestalt-oriented enough to appreciate what coherence, unity, and harmony among parts are.

Presumably they would do the same with a verbal medium -- parts of it would be verse with a strict meter and rhyme scheme, while other parts were dull drab prose. Or where entire paragraphs are dull drab terse prose, then others are highly ornate and full of figures of speech with sentence diagrams that look like someone smashed your windshield with a tire iron. You'd wonder whether the person had a schizo episode while writing a single chapter / story.

But verbal media are more serial, not as all-at-once parallel in processing. So harmony among elements isn't quite as salient of a property of speech as it is of images. IDK what AI story-slop reads like, but at least on the visual side, it's overly analytical schizo nature really comes through, and accounts for why we reject so much of it as decent or good art. It didn't even fulfill one of the most basic requirements -- stylistic coherence!

And again, I don't care how many trillions of parameters they add to these models to make them less ridiculously off-putting. That's over-fitting the data. And it's certainly a worse model to choose than "give prompts to a human artist" -- way less explicit detail needed there, cuz so much is already built-in to human nature, as well as during their training.

But something like stylistic coherence is too obvious and universal and unspoken to be picked up during training. It's part of innate human nature, and machines will never possess that, without ever more risible degrees of complexity-explosion. Sad!

Halloween mega-post / thread: horror movies, music, video games, sublime aesthetics, vtuber recommendations, ancient Indo-European origins of trick-or-treating, etc.

Let's just get the Halloween season ball rolling by thanking Holo honey Raora for hosting a watchalong for a classic horror movie, The Thing! (The canonical 1982 version.) Irys also did a watchalong for it last year...

So does that mean that Raora is a daddy's girl like Irys? It's rare for girls to have cool tastes, usually only guys do. Ame also watched a lot of classic "guy's movies," but she's a bit on the tomboy side, whereas Irys and Raora are very girly.

So where do they get their preference for cool-guy culture? From wanting to bond with their dad! Their dad is a guy, and has guy tastes, so if they want to bond with him, they'll have to develop a taste for guy movies, guy music, and so on. Raora has fondly mentioned her dad quite a bit, more so than her mom or her sister, so I think she might be a daddy's girl -- very rare, and very appreciated! ^_^

On the Holo JP side, I'm pretty sure that the Koronator is a daddy's girl -- she's mentioned the two of them bonding over classic video games while she was growing up. Marine must be a daddy's girl -- she has fondly mentioned him quite a bit on stream (he thinks Choco is pretty, he has some rules for marrying Marine, etc.). And it sounds like Lui is closer to her dad than to her mom (who is more like Lui's brother), so I think she's a daddy's girl too. And they all have cool tastes! And they're not tomboys, so they found an interest in cool things so that they'd have something to bond with their dad over. ^_^

And those are only the ones I know about -- perhaps there are others, but I just haven't seen clips or heard them talk about their families on stream before. It seems like there are a lot more daddy's girls in Glorious Nippon than in other countries. And Japanese girls *do* have cooler tastes than girls from other countries.

Probably because their men are cooler -- descendants of samurai, ninjas, pirates, and warrior-monks (yes, Japanese Buddhist monks could marry and have children). In China and Korea, the dominant classes were scholar-bureaucrats and literally castrated eunuchs, along with the military. Girls are more likely to want to bond with their dad when he has an exciting personality, which comes from leading an exciting lifestyle (not the life of a scholar-bureaucrat).

Even among the non-warriors, Japanese men were more likely to be hunters and fishermen than the Chinese and Koreans were, because Japan is so mountainous that arable land is relatively less common, so intensive agriculture is not as common as it is in China and Korea. And fishing is just another form of hunting -- more adventurous, setting off into the unknown, having to fight against hostile natural forces.

If the fish are migratory like salmon, then fishing is more like pastoralism, and the fishermen are tending to a herd of underwater livestock, much like the Pacific Northwest Indian tribes -- which makes them a lot cooler, resembling pastoralists (risk-taking, badass, culture of honor) instead of intensive agriculturalists (boring, predictable, hardscrabble).

Mongolian girls also have cool tastes, like practicing horse-mounted archery for fun! Your daughters would be cool, too, if they looked up to their fathers as the descendants of Genghis Khan! Hehe.

I'll be posting more post-length comments in the comments section shortly, just wanted to get the ball rolling...

Wide-ranging thread on shoot 'em up video games, vidya in general, and Japanese vs. American aesthetics

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.

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).

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...

* * *

Frogger was the original "bullet hell" game -- not even appropriate to call the genre a "shooter" or "shoot 'em up" etc.

*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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. ^_^

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).

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).

Venetian ethnogenesis and its role as the creative hotbed of the Italian peninsula after the fall of the Roman Empire

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.

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).

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).

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.

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.

I'll call this the "sculptural" use of chiaroscuro.

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.

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.

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...).

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.

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.

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.

* * *

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.

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.

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.

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.

But to give credit where it's due among the Florentines, Ghirlandaio used chiaroscuro compositionally in his Adoration of the Shepherds (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.

Partial credit for his Old Man and His Grandson (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.

Raphael's very late Transfiguration (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.

Pre-Renaissance Florentines like Cimabue and Giotto also did not use chiaroscuro compositionally.

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.

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.

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.

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.

* * *

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?

This was the war between Florentine "disegno" (drawing) and Venetian "colorito" (coloring, but in the full sense of combining hue, saturation, and brightness). Here is a brief overview, which in an uncanny coincidence, I linked to in an old post 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.

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!

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.

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 Kingdom of the Lombards, 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

* * *

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

For Alexander, it was the collapse of the Persian Achaemenid Empire, and his "empire" did not last beyond his own death.

* * *

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).

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.

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.

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).

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.

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).

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.

The revolutionary Giovanni Bellini already began developing this style in his St. Jerome in the Desert, and Agony in the Garden (1450s), a subject also painted 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 St. Francis in Ecstasy (1480) and Holy Allegory (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.

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.

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.

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.

This would become a Venetian trademark after Bellini. See Giorgione's Adoration of the Shepherds (1505), Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne (1520), Bonifazio Veronese's Adoration of the Shepherds (1520s), Palma Vecchio's Diana and Callisto (1520s), Paolo Veronese's Deposition of Christ (1540s), Jacopo Bassano's Adoration of the Kings (1540s), and Tintoretto's Christ at the Sea of Galilee (1575).

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.

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.