I have wanted to write a post about our culture's Epicureanism for quite a while, and unfortunately this article in The Atlantic is not only more thoroughly researched than I have the capacity or discipline to carry out, but also references Livy which immediately trumps any sort of allusion I intended to make. Fortunately, I still have half an original idea left to contribute that the writer, B.R. Myers, does not cover, so I shall proceed ahead, mooching off his thorough and no doubt slightly soul crushing work (the man has read multiple books with titles like Spoon Fed: How Eight Cooks Saved My Life, multiple). Before I begin, I should say that I had no idea people took food so seriously, or, I should say, I knew plenty of people made far too much money off of food, and plenty of people took the consumption of food to be some kind of religion, but I suppose I never realized the depth of their shallowness and utter lack of irony, but a lack of irony seems to be one of the real hallmarks of whitepeople, so I should have known better. To be so sanctimonious about say, a steak, seems more than a bit misguided, but as Chesterton said, when people stop believing in God they don't believe in nothing, they believe in organic offal.
Because the West has been fraught with ontological tension as soon as Athens found out about Jerusalem, or vice versa, a tension exists in the food world, and at its heart it is this: eating luxuriously until you want to vomit (and maybe do vomit) is good, but being fat is bad. Nothing in the modern world is worse than being fat. It is, far and away, our Cardinal Sin, worse than the only sexual taboo we have left, pederasty, simply because when you are fat, you are fat all the time, and pederasts cannot constantly molest children. Being overweight to most people goes far beyond any sort of venial, corporeal sin to a moral sin; the fact that a sin against the body can be raised to the level of a sin against the soul shows how superficial and bodily we moderns are (that it is a contradiction not believing in a soul, but still believing you can sin against it also should not fall on deaf ears). Our Gods are eating well, living well, and being healthy; no culture before ours placed as much emphasis on health as a end, not a means. The Romans no doubt valued health in its soldiers, but it was not so they would look good and live long, it was so they could more effectively kill barbarians (and often their fellow citizens). Medieval Christians valued health, but it was because man is made in God's image, and because they had an understanding that sins against the body, if left unattended, could become sins against the soul; the corrupt body had to be kept as clean as possible lest you corrupt the Holy Spirit residing within you. Gluttony was ranked a Catholic sin, but was by most enumerators the least severe of them, and was linked to a sin against the spirit, not just the body.
Moderns have no such problem making this distinction, and multi-million viewer television shows exist simply to exorcize people of their fatness. Millions of people every week tune into The Biggest Loser to watch people become morally better as they lose weight (it should duly be noted that a previous iteration of this show existed, Extreme Makeover, but people obviously found it distasteful that the participants should become more moral without having to work for them. Gastric bypass surgery was not sufficient penance). That they think these people are better after losing weight is a testament to modern superficiality.
If being fat is immoral, then what is viewed as the highest morality is not healthfulness, but some vague respect for food and Epicurean pleasures. Fat people are, to borrow from Woolf, out of proportion. That, and they do not eat at morally correct eating establishments. Fat people, or most Americans, eat at places like Applebees and The Olive Garden, while moral foodies eat their own chicken's eggs, or the eggs of chickens that were laid very close to them. To a certain foodie set, lying, stealing, and betraying those closest to one are hardly as bad as eating at the wrong restaurant. I am acquainted with a large enough set of people who would be wholly comfortable breaking bread with an adulterer, but would not sit down to eat with a person that consumes 'fast' food. These people do not see their moral bankruptcy, and in fact find themselves to be morally superior to others because they shop at a farmers market and eat organic. Myers links the foodies in with gluttony, but I do not think he has gotten the sin correct. To me, it is pride that the foodie is guilty of. Pride in their morals, self-satisfaction, and the inability to see beyond themselves. The foodie sees the whole world through the compass of food. Other places have no culture outside of food, and one can understand everything about a place through its food; it is an odd sort of revision of Marxism, where even economics takes a back seat to consumption. To the foodie, prayer before a meal is just time to sniff and salivate, and the idea of food having a spiritual aspect to it is transformed to vague, Pantheistic, Transcendental ideas about Nature and God, whatever the hell those mean. It is this, the moral superiority of the foodie that is most irksome and sinful.
In The Gay Science, Nietzsche distinguishes Epicurean and Stoic times, and links the Epicurean with extreme sensitivity and intellectual curiosity; basically himself with his delicate stomach and penchance for migraines. Watching Anthony Bourdain eat the eyeballs of cats, and whoever it is on Man vs. Food eat god knows what he eats, I do not see a good deal of sensitivity or intellectual curiosity.
Monday, February 21, 2011
Saturday, August 21, 2010
500 years of Swiss democracy =
A cuckoo clock.
I have watched Carol Reed's The Third Man too many times to count, and have owned it on every format it has come out on. First the old, non-Criterion dvd that I stole from my father, then the old Criterion re-mastery, next the newer Criterion re-remastery, and finally, the Criterion Blue-Ray edition of the film now that I have a Blue-Ray player to match the HDTV my mother kindly bought for my wife and I to counterbalance the washing machine and dryer she bought for my brother (my father, of course, lacks this sense of equal distribution, and will do things like call me to talk to me about how he is tired of his current camera body, and wants to give it to my younger brother, despite the fact that my brother already owns a different make of camera, and thus lacks the lenses to attach to said body. I myself actually do own lenses that would work with my father's camera body, but when I point out to him that I would not mind using his old camera body, he immediately retracted his desire to part with it). I have read this book on it published by the BFI, as well as this one. I have even bought the remastered soundtrack of the film off of iTunes, and, unfortunately for my wife, make her listen to it on drives to her parents house (nothing like a little zither music to get you hungry for Sunday brunch!) I like the film so excessively I even bent the curriculum of a Humanities class I used to teach to show it to my students, who, generally, also loved it.
The movie has been consistently ranked number one by the British Film Institute (ahead of the under-edited but beautifully shot Lawrence of Arabia, the practically perfect 39 Steps, and the elegant The Red Shoes), and really is shot-by-shot perfect, clocking in at 104 minutes, with possibly the best, lowest brow score to appear in film (Yojimbo's almost matches it, except it takes more than one dude sitting in a hotel room to play its score). Herbert Dreyfus who teaches the movie in his Existentialism in Literature & Film class at UC Berkley 'reads' the movie from a Kierkegaardian perspective (he even has this handy chart to explain the four man characters positions in relation to the ethical and the religious), but I think he slightly misses the point, both artistically and philosophically.
The composition of the film, its very creation, is one of happy circumstance. The best speech in the film, this one: <
was made up on the spot by Welles, and the famous ending, where Anna simply passes by Holly after we have had to wait two minutes for her to walk towards him was not in the script. Reed and Greene disputed whether the film (or film in general) had the weight to carry such an unhappy ending. Thankfully, Greene won out. Personally, I find the ending deeply satisfying, as Holly is the embodiment of simplistic morality, American cocksureness, is an artistic cad, and Anna has previously told him, in what has to be the best kiss-off a man has ever heard, that if he were to call her up, she would not be able to tell him if he were fair, dark, or if he had a mustache or not. The entire film has a really lark-y quality to it, from Greene randomly hearing from an OSS officer about the importance of the Viennese sewers during the war to Anton Karas happening to be playing the zither in a restaurant Greene was eating at one night. This quality gets at the Dionysian heart of the film, and posits the superiority and necessity of chaos in artistic creation, and the possibly of evil coming from it (as Heracleitus says, "war is father of all, king of all. Some it makes gods, some it makes men, some it makes slaves, some free") over the false, Apollonian order that attempts to rule the city after the war. Harry is clearly the most attractive character in the film, despite his betrayal of Anna, and her choice of him over Holly simply confirms, to both him and us, the Higher Immediacy of his actions. The movie is also clearly aware of itself, and plays with the boundaries of Noir, from the false burial to the femme fatale to the small dog that always betokens the evil of its owner. It constantly and willfully rubs up against these low-brow genre barriers, much like Pnin rubs up against the wishes of his narrator for him to act in certain ways. It is almost self-aware (Holly wanted to name his next book 'The Third Man', and the western, thriller-esque quality to the movie which cut against its higher philosophic and aesthetic composition) but never breaks character, instead constantly fluctuating between documentary, thriller, noir, and western, much like The Wasteland fluctuates between its different voices. Godard might be more joyful, but he's also more showy.
The title of the film is a pull directly from Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy, and has to do with science's desire for technical superiority over the truth, thus differentiating from theoretical man's (Socrates') search for the truth. It is utterly impossible to watch the film, to see Vienna, the heart of intellectual Europe, bombed out, and not read it as a philosophic argument against the Enlightenment and 2,500 years of rational thought. If rationalism, progress, and technical development lead us here, where does that leave us? At our worst (and our best) it leaves us with Harry Lime, a man who has been freed from all morality, and stands either godlike above men, counting how many dots he can stop moving for $20,000 each (tax free, of course) or travels below them in the sewers, subverting all attempts at a rational ordering of the city between the various powers. Those sewers are always there, and as earnestly as the post-war powers (all powers) attempt to carve out a sphere where reason and techne can rule, Harry will always be there to break free. It is no small thing that Harry almost makes it out, his fingers (Reed's actually) grasping through a sewer grate before he dies, and it is also no small thing that it is Holly that shoots him. Satan needs to be given another mouth in the cold Inferno with which to chew him.
A small note about favorite movies: My wife's most brilliant psychology professor, while lecturing about Freud, needed a copy of the movie Backdraft and asked the class if anyone owned a copy he could use. One male student responded that owned the film, and added that it was his favorite. The professor then proceeded to question the student about the movie, why he liked it, what he liked about it, and how many times he had seen it. When the student answered (too many to count as well), the professor said something like, "all those big hoses and sprays of water." You can imagine the shame the boy felt, being so unpacked in front of the whole class with so few words. Why you would call attention to yourself in front of a man with such penetrating psychological intelligence is beyond me, especially in reference to a movie like Backdraft (which really is a bunch of men with big, flesh colored hoses spraying fires with massive jets of white water) is beyond me, but obviously that boy's love of Backdraft reflected his need to assert his masculinity, having been brought up in an effeminated, pleasure seeking regime. What The Third Man reflects about me I suppose depends on your own analysis of the film. Here's the wonderful opening of the movie, with the unknown narrator (making the movie a frame story like James' Turn of the Screw) and the actual documentary footage of the war powers policing Vienna. Enjoy.
I have watched Carol Reed's The Third Man too many times to count, and have owned it on every format it has come out on. First the old, non-Criterion dvd that I stole from my father, then the old Criterion re-mastery, next the newer Criterion re-remastery, and finally, the Criterion Blue-Ray edition of the film now that I have a Blue-Ray player to match the HDTV my mother kindly bought for my wife and I to counterbalance the washing machine and dryer she bought for my brother (my father, of course, lacks this sense of equal distribution, and will do things like call me to talk to me about how he is tired of his current camera body, and wants to give it to my younger brother, despite the fact that my brother already owns a different make of camera, and thus lacks the lenses to attach to said body. I myself actually do own lenses that would work with my father's camera body, but when I point out to him that I would not mind using his old camera body, he immediately retracted his desire to part with it). I have read this book on it published by the BFI, as well as this one. I have even bought the remastered soundtrack of the film off of iTunes, and, unfortunately for my wife, make her listen to it on drives to her parents house (nothing like a little zither music to get you hungry for Sunday brunch!) I like the film so excessively I even bent the curriculum of a Humanities class I used to teach to show it to my students, who, generally, also loved it.
The movie has been consistently ranked number one by the British Film Institute (ahead of the under-edited but beautifully shot Lawrence of Arabia, the practically perfect 39 Steps, and the elegant The Red Shoes), and really is shot-by-shot perfect, clocking in at 104 minutes, with possibly the best, lowest brow score to appear in film (Yojimbo's almost matches it, except it takes more than one dude sitting in a hotel room to play its score). Herbert Dreyfus who teaches the movie in his Existentialism in Literature & Film class at UC Berkley 'reads' the movie from a Kierkegaardian perspective (he even has this handy chart to explain the four man characters positions in relation to the ethical and the religious), but I think he slightly misses the point, both artistically and philosophically.
The composition of the film, its very creation, is one of happy circumstance. The best speech in the film, this one: <
was made up on the spot by Welles, and the famous ending, where Anna simply passes by Holly after we have had to wait two minutes for her to walk towards him was not in the script. Reed and Greene disputed whether the film (or film in general) had the weight to carry such an unhappy ending. Thankfully, Greene won out. Personally, I find the ending deeply satisfying, as Holly is the embodiment of simplistic morality, American cocksureness, is an artistic cad, and Anna has previously told him, in what has to be the best kiss-off a man has ever heard, that if he were to call her up, she would not be able to tell him if he were fair, dark, or if he had a mustache or not. The entire film has a really lark-y quality to it, from Greene randomly hearing from an OSS officer about the importance of the Viennese sewers during the war to Anton Karas happening to be playing the zither in a restaurant Greene was eating at one night. This quality gets at the Dionysian heart of the film, and posits the superiority and necessity of chaos in artistic creation, and the possibly of evil coming from it (as Heracleitus says, "war is father of all, king of all. Some it makes gods, some it makes men, some it makes slaves, some free") over the false, Apollonian order that attempts to rule the city after the war. Harry is clearly the most attractive character in the film, despite his betrayal of Anna, and her choice of him over Holly simply confirms, to both him and us, the Higher Immediacy of his actions. The movie is also clearly aware of itself, and plays with the boundaries of Noir, from the false burial to the femme fatale to the small dog that always betokens the evil of its owner. It constantly and willfully rubs up against these low-brow genre barriers, much like Pnin rubs up against the wishes of his narrator for him to act in certain ways. It is almost self-aware (Holly wanted to name his next book 'The Third Man', and the western, thriller-esque quality to the movie which cut against its higher philosophic and aesthetic composition) but never breaks character, instead constantly fluctuating between documentary, thriller, noir, and western, much like The Wasteland fluctuates between its different voices. Godard might be more joyful, but he's also more showy.
The title of the film is a pull directly from Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy, and has to do with science's desire for technical superiority over the truth, thus differentiating from theoretical man's (Socrates') search for the truth. It is utterly impossible to watch the film, to see Vienna, the heart of intellectual Europe, bombed out, and not read it as a philosophic argument against the Enlightenment and 2,500 years of rational thought. If rationalism, progress, and technical development lead us here, where does that leave us? At our worst (and our best) it leaves us with Harry Lime, a man who has been freed from all morality, and stands either godlike above men, counting how many dots he can stop moving for $20,000 each (tax free, of course) or travels below them in the sewers, subverting all attempts at a rational ordering of the city between the various powers. Those sewers are always there, and as earnestly as the post-war powers (all powers) attempt to carve out a sphere where reason and techne can rule, Harry will always be there to break free. It is no small thing that Harry almost makes it out, his fingers (Reed's actually) grasping through a sewer grate before he dies, and it is also no small thing that it is Holly that shoots him. Satan needs to be given another mouth in the cold Inferno with which to chew him.
A small note about favorite movies: My wife's most brilliant psychology professor, while lecturing about Freud, needed a copy of the movie Backdraft and asked the class if anyone owned a copy he could use. One male student responded that owned the film, and added that it was his favorite. The professor then proceeded to question the student about the movie, why he liked it, what he liked about it, and how many times he had seen it. When the student answered (too many to count as well), the professor said something like, "all those big hoses and sprays of water." You can imagine the shame the boy felt, being so unpacked in front of the whole class with so few words. Why you would call attention to yourself in front of a man with such penetrating psychological intelligence is beyond me, especially in reference to a movie like Backdraft (which really is a bunch of men with big, flesh colored hoses spraying fires with massive jets of white water) is beyond me, but obviously that boy's love of Backdraft reflected his need to assert his masculinity, having been brought up in an effeminated, pleasure seeking regime. What The Third Man reflects about me I suppose depends on your own analysis of the film. Here's the wonderful opening of the movie, with the unknown narrator (making the movie a frame story like James' Turn of the Screw) and the actual documentary footage of the war powers policing Vienna. Enjoy.
Friday, August 20, 2010
Synergizing your profit streams
Because facebook now bombards you with posts about the television shows, movies, and films you like, I received lovely video from Mad Men:
In it, Janie Bryant, the costume designer for the show discusses men's suits with Simon Kneen, Executive VP (whatever that is) slash creative director for Banana Republic. The entire 'conversation' is basically 4 minutes of sycophantic flattery of the costumes of the show. The best moment of the interview though is when Kneen talks about how 'now' the fabrics used on the show are, and how the 'true inspiration' for him is 'what's happening out there', which is, coincidentally Mad Men. As if anyone were confused about what the purpose of this video is, Kneen hawks a suit seconds before he talks about his 'inspiration.' Why is this such a non-coincidence, well because Banana Republic has hitched its trailer to the sho, with a 'integrated marketing campaign' (in quotes because it is bussiness-speak, not actual english), and a contest where one can win a walk-on role to the show, and $1,000 gift card from the store (very generous of them, I know).
The partnership is completely perfect because the suits on Mad Men are boring, as are the suits that Banana Republic sells. As a shamefully avid shopper, I have been inside a Banana Republic too many times to be proud of, and have always found the clothing terribly drab, with the sort of color palette Ceauşescu's would have selected for the uniforms of the Romania schoolchildren. On a side note, I actually worked at a Banana Republic in Boston for a summer during college where I distinctly remember trying to figure out where a flamboyant gay man could rangle himself a large, floppy straw gardening hat. My father had one, of course, but was hardly the person to go to for such things because up until this summer, he wore bright blue Crocs with white tube socks pulled up high, making his already quite white flesh actually look grey when see through the little holes of the Crocs. The only other really salient thing I remember is how messy the women's sale section got by the end of the day, you would think a small vortex touched down there; women shop like hyenas.
My wife aptly pointed out that this sort of 'integration' happens all the time (Snapple anyone?), but the awkwardness of the interaction between Bryant and Kneen, and the falseness with which they flatter each other struck me as somewhat flagrant. I also particularly liked how Kneen talks about the importance of 'great details' building upon Bryant's similar point related to the different fabrics a character wears (Hamlet, is he more of a mohair, or more of a worsted wool?) Bryant might get to make such choices, but the slave-labor made Banana Republic suits, made in an actual banana republic, cannot really include such detail work, unless you want to call poor Apu in Sri Lanka and tell him you want a different color lining your suit.
To boil things down, we have a large, upmarket clothing retailer attaching itself to a critically loved television show the public is mostly indifferent to (two million people watched the last episode compared to the nine million that watch The Big Bang Theory with regularity) in order to up its cache amongst the urban haute bourgeois, while also giving those people the opportunity to dress like their favorite star, attached a sort of hatism and celebrity linked object cathexis to the clothing itself. So, if you have $500 free to spend on a poorly made suit that makes you feel like Don Draper (you don't really want to feel like Pete do you?) run on over to Banana Republic. Or just watch the video and enjoy the synergized profit streams. Jack Donaghy would be proud of you.
Note: Hatism is a term coined by Philip Wylie in his fantastic, must read book A Generation of Vipers that he uses to explain a tendency he saw in Americans (he was one himself) to act like the hat they wore. I think it extends to all clothes, and need only cite the 'weekend warriors' that ride their motorcycles with obtrusive noise by my house on Saturday and Sunday morning as evidence. To Wylie, this extended to the president Eisenhower itself, whom he thought changed his behavior and started acting more like a cowboy when he put a cowboy hat on.
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