Showing posts with label travesty. Show all posts
Showing posts with label travesty. Show all posts

Thursday, December 5, 2019

A FAUN is not a FAWN! (the cheapening of culture)




I just have to unload something here. I just watched a dreadful BBC music special about the Romantics, with some godawful English lady with two curtains of hair and big teeth, narrating with a constant, fatuous smile on her face. She began to talk about De-BEWW-sea, and when introducing his masterpiece Prelude a l'apres-midi d'un faune, she informed us in her sickly cheery voice that "this marvellous orchestral feast portrays the wonder and awe of a young deer as he slowly walks through a forest glen." 






A young deer. A fawn! The BBC cultural elite thinks a "faun" is Bambi, not some langorous half-drunk satyr wallowing with loose goddesses in an afternoon of  guiltless debauchery.

Even Wikipedia gets it right: "The goat man, more commonly affiliated with the Satyrs of Greek mythology or Fauns of Roman (emphasis mine), is a bipedal creature with the legs and tail of a goat and the head, arms and torso of a man and is often depicted with goat's horns and pointed ears. These creatures in turn borrowed their appearance from the god Pan of the Greek pantheon. They were a symbol of fertility, and their chieftain was Silenus, a minor deity of Greek mythology." 





Tom Robbins wrote an entire, gorgeous novel about Pan (Jitterbug Perfume, one of my all-time favorites), exploring the human sense of smell, its neural roots and erotic significance. Pan's no Bambi in this novel - he cavorts with the tattiest of has-been goddesses, and even in his invisible state gives off a sort of primal reek that sends his unwitting human victims into sexual frenzies. So powerful is his ponk that a magical perfume must be concocted to disguise it. The perfume is made from beet pollen, and here Robbins goes into a vegetable rhapsody unequalled in fiction:





“The beet is the most intense of vegetables. The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent, not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly serious.

Slavic peoples get their physical characteristics from potatoes, their smoldering inquietude from radishes, their seriousness from beets.






The beet is the melancholy vegetable, the one most willing to suffer. You can't squeeze blood out of a turnip...

The beet is the murderer returned to the scene of the crime. The beet is what happens when the cherry finishes with the carrot. The beet is the ancient ancestor of the autumn moon, bearded, buried, all but fossilized; the dark green sails of the grounded moon-boat stitched with veins of primordial plasma; the kite string that once connected the moon to the Earth, now a muddy whisker drilling desperately for rubies.

The beet was Rasputin's favorite vegetable. You could see it in his eyes.”







(Back to me - I can't write that well!) The power of the beet and its reeking pollen (an odor which Robbins describes as "embarrassing") is the only thing that bests the animal stink of the goat. THAT goat, you know? That half-goat, unspeakably lashed to the torso of a man.  No, this is not  Bambi, folks, this is PAN, one of the most basic, fundamental, primal figures in all of ancient human lore, the pagan god of pagan gods, and not only that, the image most often associated with Satan.  And the BBC thinks he's a little forest darling with speckles on his rear!





The huge stir this piece caused when it debuted in Paris had little to do with the sensuality of the music, and everything to do with WHAT it portrayed: a lustful pagan goat-man in full rut. But oh, no, the music historians at the BBC, ALL of them, for surely the text must have been vetted by many, think that Prelude a l'apres-midi d'un Faune is about a baby deer, a FAWN! I don't know why I expected better from a British "music expert". But shit, I knew what a "faun" was when I was eight and my parents dragged me off to classical concerts.





I knew, not because I was some musical prodigy when I was a kiddie (far from it, I was the only dud in the lot), but because I was old enough and curious enough to read the backs of album covers (a lost source of musical education in this digital age). But the best classical music programming the BBC has to offer has no idea what Debussy's masterpiece is even about. Nobody caught it, nobody corrected it, nobody edited it out, and I am beginning to wonder with a sense of despair if I am the only person who even noticed it. It's the cheapening of culture, the shallowing-down of the brimming pools in Debussy's wild pagan landscape.





An outrageous, truly filthy old satyr lolling around in blatant sexual debauchery has somehow been collapsed down into a frolicking Disney character. "Some fun, huh, Bambi?" Dear God.





And the beet goes on! Another of Robbins' inspired passages, this time about the pollen of the beet which makes up the "bottom note" of Pan's perfume:

"If the waft that streams from a freshly opened hive is intimate to the point of embarrassment (ask any sensitive beekeeper), so it is with beet pollen. There is something personal about it, and something primeval. If there is a comparable odor, it is, indeed, the moldy inner sanctum of some fermenting, bursting hive; but beet pollen is honey squared, royal jelly cubed, nectar raised to the nth power; the intensified secretions of the Earth's apiarian gland, reeking of ancient bridal chambers and intimacies half as old as time."






OK. . . I will now stop writing. For the rest of my life.

(Post-post. I HAD to smell it, I had to try to find a sample of beet pollen to see if it really reeked in that intimate, embarrassing way. And I couldn't. BUT - I had a certain house plant, until it died, with thick, dark green, spiky leaves which had a purplish down on their surface. It grew away untended, then suddenly the thing bloomed, and I could tell it had bloomed when I walked into the room: the tiny, dandelion-shaped, bright orange flowers stank of locker room, of sweat, and of all the intimate things Robbins talks about. It's possible the purple passion plant is somehow related to the beet, and its fat, aggressive leaves look similar. This is probably as close as I will get to that smell. And I do wonder, in considerable despair, if anyone now on earth can equal or surpass the lush cascading poetry of Robbins' prose.)






POST-POST-"whatever". As I try to dig up more information on beet pollen, I am finding absolutely NOTHING specific to that plant. It's as if it doesn't flower, which confuses me. All I can come up with is BEE pollen, which is obviously not what I want. For some reason, lupines came up too - the elegant, long-stemmed, bell-flowered plant I plucked on a walk around the lagoon in the summer. It's also known as foxglove, from which the heart drug digitalis is extracted. It's one of the oldest and most effective of  folk remedies. But why is lupinus perennis the only image I can come up with? Is Robbins having us on by inventing a substance just to tease us? 




Persistence pays off. Or, sort of. I  finally found SOMETHING about beet flowers, but it pertained to sugar beets, those hard, lumpy, turnip-like things which were processed in a plant in my home town, emitting a scorchy smell of burnt sugar on hot summer days. This ISN'T the beet Robbins write about, which, incredibly, does not flower (how can you have a plant that doesn't flower?). Small, shrivelled, yellowish petals cling to a gnarly-looking stalk, and I have no idea what they smell like. But the name! The name makes this entire meandering enterprise worthwhile (and didn't we start with "faun vs. fawn"?): 




  
It's BETA VULGARIS. If Robbins didn't find this name while researching his sensuous tour de force, then he should have.


Wednesday, February 8, 2017

Entrance of the Catholic Idiots






This thing is absolutely inexplicable. It's some sort of cheesy Italian Catholic circus-thingammy, with out-of-tune music that cuts in and out, and so-called acrobats who look like they've been scraped off the streets of Rome. If this IS Rome, which it's not, I'm sure (in fact, I think it's somewhere in Brazil). I don't know what Novena Solena is, but I've found a few more of these videos which are along the same lines. There is one involving acrobatic angels with fur wings and crimplene gowns, and another one featuring little kids carting around bowls with live goldfish in them.

Exceptionally cheesy. All the comments (with a sample below) are indignant and blame Vatican II, whatever THAT is. You know that expression "so bad it's good'? This is so bad, it's bad.

COMMENTS • 180

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Fruit of Vatican II....people ignoring Fatima this is what we get. God have mercy on mankind!

Que grosería

Totally inappropriate and scandalous to say the least. All organizers and "priest" to be excommunicated asap .

This is total carnival of heresy.

Unreal. I really hope this was not a Roman Catholic Church or Roman Catholics doing this.

 Just Evil.

Anh?



I want to freaking puke!! Why was I born post vat 2??? I can see why the orthodox do not want to unite with us!

yep, this makes me want to go bacK u__u

This is sick.

How horrible.

They were thinking Vatican ll with the liberal modernist evils.

Sinful and shameful. THIS IS VATICAN ll. Forgive them Father they know not what they do.

CAN NOT BELIEVED THIS IS TRUE, MAY BE A GRAPHIC DESIGN TRICK OR SOMETHING LIKE THAT.

Is this supposed to be Catholic or something? It looked and felt 100% pagan.

CHE SCHIFO, VERGOGNATEVI

El espanto.....

Why?? God, why??

Que coisa mais ridícula, abominável! Aonde vamos parar? Isso é missa ou é circo? 

Aparecida clowns!

What r u doing? Brazil Stahp!

This one will have even non-traditionalist Catholics face-palming? What were they thinking?



Monday, August 8, 2011

Emily Carr: bold strokes, mutilated treasures





The above video is just a snippet of the most superb documentary I have ever seen: Winds of Heaven, a fresh approach to the life and work of the brilliant West Coast Canadian artist, Emily Carr. Fresh because it dares to throw off the shackles of those dusty, crusty old National Film Board movies that we had to sit through in school.The narration is riveting in its sense of presence, in the eerie feeling that Carr is in the room with you.

But when I recently watched this treasure on Knowledge Network in Vancouver, I had a sense that it ended rather abruptly. I did some research on the net and found one reference after another to this "90-minute film".

Wait a minute. 90-minute?

Then why was it shown in a one-hour time slot? And why were there 10 or 15 minutes left over, at that?

I was horrified, and began to fire off emails to Knowledge Network (which is forever yammering on and on about the significance of Canadian culture, not to mention trying to get my money to support such efforts) and White Pine Pictures which released the film.

Below is my correspondence with the director of the film, Michael Ostroff. I was stunned to discover that my worst fears were true: the film had indeed been mutilated, with 40% of the original material excised. But it got worse. I discovered which part of the film had been put on the chopping block: all the material about Carr's legendary relationship with First Nations people.

But this is the soul of Emily Carr, one of the main reasons her work is so celebrated! The comfortable myth is that she cozied up to Indian chiefs and was given an "Indian name", but the reality was much more complex. Carr never quite lost her Victorian perspective which was closer to the "noble savage" beliefs that dominated the early 20th century.

Was this too contentious, or did it disturb the myth we have always taught our school children? Did it overturn the traditional sanitized version deemed more palatable to the good people who open their eyes and their wallets to the Knowledge Network?

Before I run on all day, I will include my initial email to White Pine Pictures, director Michael Ostroff's response, MY response to his response, and a snippet from the web site lamenting the casual mutilation of this masterwork.

In the meantime. . .

DO NOT GIVE MONEY TO KNOWLEDGE NETWORK IN BRITISH COLUMBIA. You will be throwing it away. You will be allowing these idiots to go on slashing and burning films that celebrate irreplaceable Canadian icons and their work.

Ignore their ludicrous pledge drives. Don't listen to excuses from them. What they did was evil. It never should have been allowed. Would someone take a Carr original and hack off 40% of it? What part of it is dispensible? Maybe this picture of a totem pole? We've seen lots of totem poles, haven't we?

To:    White Pine Pictures
From: Margaret Gunning

Your Emily Carr documentary is riveting, the best thing I've seen on the subject. Knowledge Network in BC ran it in a one-hour time slot, and it ended after 45 minutes. Then I found out this is a 90-minute film! Knowledge Network does this sort of thing all the time. There is no indication whatsoever that it is a "Part I" or "Part II". It's just run the way it is, I would assume a badly truncated version left in mid-air. I have tried to inquire about this kind of policy before and have been brushed off, or else they tell me they'll show the second part whenever they can find a slot in the schedule. I just do not understand it. If I'm wrong about this, and I hope I am, please set me straight. This film was so significant that I felt it was nothing less than a spiritual experience for me, as if Carr was in the room speaking to me. Something this sacred should not be tampered with!


From: Michael Ostroff
To: magunning@shaw.ca


Sent: Monday, August 08, 2011 6:19 AM


Subject: Winds of Heaven


Dear Margaret;


Thank you for taking the time to send me your thoughts on Winds of Heaven.


You are correct – the version broadcast on Knowledge Network is a travesty. We were forced to provide the Network with a 52 minute cut; more than 40% of the original version was deleted to meet their demand. Removing that much out of a film destroys its integrity. I did everything I could to reason and argue with Knowledge to reverse this decision. In the end I removed my name from the credits. If you wish to register your complaint you might contact Murray Battle at Knowledge.


The full-length version in dvd format is available for purchase at the RBCM, the AGGV, Carr House, the VAG and several locations on Haida Gwaii. If none of these are convenient for you can purchase the dvd through our internet store.


Again thank you for your kind words. This year - Dec 13 - is the 140th anniversary of the birth of Emily Carr - and there is a possibility of special screenings of the film in Victoria and Vancouver to mark the occasion.


Best, Michael Ostroff


Cine Metu


613.237.0618 cell
613.237.9687 landline


Winds of Heaven
blog: http://carrdoc.wordpress.com/


From: Margaret Gunning
To:     Michael Ostroff

Why is this legal? Why aren't those people facing major fines or worse? Why do they claim to promote Canadian culture? Why do they constantly ask for my money (and if they do answer my complaint at all, it'll probably be with their hands out). I did think it ended rather abruptly, with her dates of birth and death suddenly flashed on the screen. But it wasn't until the next day, doing a little research (and by the way, I have already ordered two DVDs, one for me and one for my best friend: in truth, I wanted to order one for everyone I knew because I felt like they HAD to see this) that I saw "90 minute film" and all the info on the premiere.


90 minute - ??

I will say, however, that I was STILL mesmerised by this film. It was nothing short of enthralling. The music had a fey supernatural quality which perfectly matched the narration, which was spookily spot-on and made me feel Carr was in my living room talking to me. I remember all the horrid old NFB things about her in which some narrator droned on and on about the monkey in the baby carriage. We all know that stuff, so it was delightful to see the monkey screeching into the phone, a great way to convey the information without dropping it on us like a cement block.

Yes, come to think of it. . . I wondered why there were relatively few of her works shown, why I still felt hungry. Oh God, more comes back. A while back they showed a documentary on WWII - I wish I remembered more about it. It was left hanging. There was a Part II, missing. I contacted them and they said it would be on, but they didn't know when just yet, they weren't sure it would fit into the schedule. (To my knowledge, it was never shown, nor was there any indication at all that there was a Part II: for all the public knew, this was the whole film.)


So. Knowledge Network is a bastion of the uniquely Canadian, of national treasures and art at its finest, and we should all be watching it instead of some cheap reality show because it's CULTURE, folks, so get with it! We should also be opening our wallets when they have those chintzy pledge drives with people trying to look busy talking to imaginary contributors. But it's OK to pare those Canadian treasures down, isn't it? If we only have an hour to spare, for God's sake. . . For after all, we have to show that program on sperm whales for the 47th time this year, don't we? It's educational and doesn't cost us anything.

An hour and a half, for God's sake! How much can there be on this wacky old woman who was a landlady most of her life and kept a monkey? Besides, this film had the effrontery to say she wasn't all buddy-buddy and cosy with the "Indians" all the time, but often felt a typically Victorian sense of superiority to them. Heresy! Artists can't be that complicated, it just confuses people, and she spent most of her time crashing around in the bush and was crazy anyway. And she wasn't one of the Group of Seven so she isn't included in those calendars we buy half-price after Christmas.

I don't like to rant, but I am truly incensed by this. I am, to be honest, horrified that a film of this quality was slashed like that, that they were allowed to do it. I am very sorry now that I sent them a rave review of it before it dawned on me that I hadn't really seen it. Then I sent a follow-up email lambasting them for what they did to it (which I couldn't quite believe - surely there would be a Part II sometime?. . . No?).

When I look at the crap they show, and their habit of repeating the stuff ad nauseam, I am tempted to stop watching them altogether. Unfortunately, I wouldn't have been aware of this extraordinary film because things like this tend to get buried. "Art" is ghettoized and treated like some rarefied, white-gloves thing that most of us can't be bothered with.

I would like to know whose decision it was to do this, why someone must have felt it was OK and acceptable and even good to cut a leg off it and show it mutilated. Someone did, someone with the power to decide. I will try to forward this letter to the good folks at Knowledge Network if I can, but I have no illusions it will do anything but draw criticism (of me) from them. Meantime, having ordered the DVD from White Pine Pictures, I look forward to seeing a truly outstanding film in its entirety.

Thank you for enlightening me on this, distressing as it is!

Margaret Gunning


(From Winds of Heaven web site, White Pine Pictures)
January 30, 2011



The 87-minute theatrical version of Winds of Heaven is now for sale in DVD format. Order Winds of Heaven from the White Pine Pictures online store.


If you were disappointed by the version recently shown on television – it’s not surprising. That version – 52 minutes – is missing forty percent of the content of the original film. Missing was the entire parallel story of Carr’s interactions with the First Nations people of BC.


(AFTERWORD: Everyone should see this film. Order a copy of the DVD.  Don't trust any TV network to show it without it being truncated or interrupted by ads. Do not allow the kind of casual censorship which obviously gutted the film and will no doubt be vigorously denied by the networks. AND DON'T GIVE THEM YOUR MONEY! Do not believe for one instant that anything you give them will be used in the service of Canadian culture. It will go to some insensitive idiot with a large pair of scissors and no conscience.)