"I want to destroy everything." -Jackson Pollock /
Abstract Expressionism, the Golden Age of Burlesque, The Beats, Bebop Jazz, Method Acting and Rock and Roll all came to fruition in the aftermath of World War Two, leaving us with such iconic figures as Jackson Pollack, Marlon Brando, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Bettie Page, Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan, Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs.
The war against Fascism that led to the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan produced the Cold War and later the radical youth revolution and various civil rights of the 1960s and 70s.
Then came the 80s, 90s & the 00s, decades bracketed by the emergence of Burlesque-like pop starlets from Madonna to Britney Spears, et al, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and now the so-called Arab Spring and the continuing “War on Terror”.
Culture and society is dominated by computers, the media is ubiquitous, marijuana is on the verge of being legalized, mass segments of the aging and growing population are afflicted with Autism, ADHD, PTSD and Alzheimer’s. More people die from prescription pills than from heroin and cocaine combined.
Atheists push their Evolutionary agenda while religious zealots push back with violence and superstition. Homosexuality and racism still divide people while violent sex crimes are at an all time high. Art and literature have become bastions of apathy and elitism. Music is merely a rote appendage of corporate subsidiaries.
Abstract Expressionism, the Golden age of Burlesque, The Beats, Method Acting and Rock and Roll arguably have their roots in the Modernist Jazz culture of the Lost Generation that emerged in the 1920s following World War One. That culture produced Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, TS Eliot and Ezra Pound. The 1920s also saw the emergence of the Hollywood film industry.
What these artists and movements all wanted to do was break with the past, but what they did was break with the present.
The existence of the Tachyonic universe resolves the particle/wave paradox of quantum mechanics while annulling Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity by positing one universe composed of space moving forward and a second one composed of time moving backwards since both exist simultaneously.
Simultaneous universes created at the moment of the Big Bang annul Einstein’s Special Theory, with one universe moving backwards in time but faster than the speed of light.
The Big Bang was the beginning of our universe, where all light emerged from what to us is a primordial black hole, but in reality is the end of the second universe where all light waves coalesced at a single point.
The Romantics and Impressionists were also inspired by the science of their time. The Romantics had steam engines and electricity and the Impressionists had optics. Time and Space exist simultaneously and communicate in various subtle and obvious ways, some of which we don’t understand, some that we aren’t aware of, or can even comprehend.
What seems amazing is that all this couldn’t be grasped without a concept of God. Remember Einstein was an atheist but Isaac Newton was a devout Christian and practicing Alchemist.
You always about hear about well-off kids with Asperger’s. These kids are also pampered dicks, uncommunicative and entitled. I had Asperger’s as a child, but my family wasn’t rich enough to afford the best schools or therapists. No, I had to make due with the bullies, druggies and sluts on the street.
So like they say, kids with Asperger’s develop peculiarly intense, single-minded obsessions. I became obsessed with porn. Makes sense, right? And you know why? The first actual “dirty” pictures I ever saw, I saw when I was nine, fished out of some wet gutter and later rediscovered at the bottom of a friend’s father’s sock drawer (my own father, a hunter and body builder that carried a gun a security guard and was otherwise a skirt chaser and barfly), were of Bettie Page in a black and white digest sized magazine, in full fishnet glory, those classic vintage six or seven-inch heels, and a period black bullet bra. Not even titty, and I could stop thinking about her.
It did or didn’t, depending on your perspective, help greatly, or at least greatly intensify the uncanny experience of this same friend’s mother (wife of the owner of the sock drawer); a perfect late 20’s-early thirty-ish brunette with slender and perky Irish everything, who wore the traditional black bras and panties of the time, this being the early seventies (the equivalent of the Stone Age), along with garters and garter belts to hold up her reinforced heel and toe nylon stockings.
If you’ve read all this up to here, you’ve realized what I wrote in the beginning about having Asperger’s is true. Bettie Page replaced, combined with and intensified any latent feelings or impulses I had as a child. She is my Goddess and over my lifetime has led me on to the study of comparative mythology, art history and tons of smut. She taught me about the Golden Mean and S&M.
She was classic, distant, quiet and up close. Bettie was the secret cleaved within the wood, like Christ. Bettie was the Christian who said, “Adam & Eve were naked in the Garden, so why should I be ashamed of being naked?””I want to destroy everything.” -Jackson Pollock /
Pre-conceptual Art derives its name by analogy from ‘Pre-Raphaelite’, as in The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, led by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and best exemplified in the work of Edward Burne-Jones, which sought to return art to its medieval roots prior to the ascendancy of the Renaissance typified by the art of Raphael.
Conceptual art is thought mainly to have begun with Duchamp and Dadaism.
Pre-Conceptual art therefore seeks to return to an aesthetic of preconceptual origin, pre-Dada and premodern. An example of this kind of art will be resolutely non-conceptual, emerging from the space between Post-Impressionism and Imagism.
“What nearly every contemporary discipline of psychology neglects, to their rue no less, is the existence of the Subconscious. Post-modernism exists in the space where exactly this subconscious erupts in that although its certain existence is well known to all, it is nonetheless vehemently denied.
The Beat poets, Abstract Expressionist painters & Method actors were able unleash this energy after it became materially manifest in the Atomic bomb explosions of the Trinity & Manhattan Projects and subsequent bombings of the Japanese cities Hiroshima & Nagasaki.
Japanese culture, which had always been allowed access to the Japanese subconscious then incorporated it into its own Pop cultural iconography. Its most striking representative in this regard was the writer and man of action Yukio Mishima, who was also a self-styled latter day Samurai and homosexual.”
Unlike America and most Western nations, Japan has no social prohibitions against rape, pedophilia, or cannibalism. This has primarily been attributed to the fact that Asian societies are not rooted in so-called Christian morality (The population of Christians in Japan is less than 1%.).
Ruth Handler (November 4, 1916 – April 27, 2002) was an American businesswoman, born to Jewish-Polish immigrants Jacob and Ida Moskowicz, the president of the toy manufacturer Mattel Inc., and is remembered primarily for her role in marketing the Barbie doll.
Ruth Handler had noted that her daughter Barbara, who was becoming a pre-teen, preferred playing with her infant paper dolls and giving them adult roles. She wanted to produce a plastic doll with an adult body but her husband thought it wouldn’t sell.
But when the Handlers were on a European trip, Ruth Handler saw the German Bild Lilli doll (which was not meant for children at all; rather a gag gift for adults) in a Swiss shop and bought it and brought it home.
Back home she reworked the design of the doll and re-named her Barbie after her daughter. Barbie debuted at the New York toy fair on March 9, 1959.
Barbie became an instant success, rocketing the Handlers and their toy company toward fame and fortune. Later, they would add a boyfriend for Barbie named Ken, after Handler’s son as well any many more other “friends and family” for Barbie’s world.
Studies in England have shown that little girls treat their Barbie dolls like concentration camp prisoners; stripping them, cutting their hair off, burning their bodies and finally dismembering them.
One of my fields of interest, which I more or less created, is what I call “The Psychology of Super Heroes”. Years ago as a student I created my own elective, “The Psychology of S&M” and this seems to be the logical follow-up to that.
“…Experiencing the id and ego engaged in a mating-dance while super-ego directs…” sums it all up brilliantly. You’ve touched a primal nerve with that one.
I have to admit, I’m not a big comic book guy. I prefer newspaper strips and then vintage Dick Tracy and Krazy Kat. I grew up reading underground comix while my friends all read super Hero stuff and nowadays it’s mostly the cartoons in the New Yorker.
Because the symbolism of ‘human-animal-god’ is so basic and instinctual it remains perennial in popular culture but few people seriously ask why, and when they ask, they can’t comprehend the answer.
Look at Holidays: Halloween (alter-egos, monsters, the supernatural), Christmas (the birth of a savior), fireworks (the celebration of war). Our entire culture consists of Idols, heroes, villains and super villains, robots and beauty queens.
My friend, who is also a big Kierkegaard guy, remarked last night on the nature of the struggle being eternal, which is perhaps the healthiest view, as in Japanese Shinto, which has no apocalyptic scenario. Which I’m sure is why some of Japanese pop culture’s most enduring images emerged from the ashes of nuclear devastation.
I think Jung influenced Moulton in his rejection of Freud. In Moulton’s psychology dominance and submission replaced the infantile Oedipus complex. Just as the super hero Superman parallels the Nazi idea of The Superman, Moulton’s ideas of bondage and slavery parallel but do not correspond to the more heinous associations we have with those terms.
Super heroes are invincible and fly through the air, just as do angels, demons, and fairies, but do not correspond in exact psychic terms with those mytho-historical entities. Where they do correspond is in the perimeters of the collective consciousness where all of these beings and states coexist. That collective consciousness is neither Heaven nor Hell because all religions and mythologies are subsumed into it into a single psychic conglomerate.
Christianity and Islam are the only two religions with martyred heroes. You have to go back to ancient cultures like the Aztecs, etc., with virgin sacrifices for anything similar.
What Norse, Greek and even Jewish mythology reveal is that mythology is truly a mirror in that it is a tale told backwards, a flashback (as we say of film noir) that starts at the end and works its way to the beginning. Destruction comes first: in Greek myth the Olympians utterly defeat the Titans before creation even begins; Satan falls from heaven eons before God created the earth.
Piss on me and I’ll piss on you. Wait, that’s something else entirely, but maybe not! Good pulp fiction is artistic and well considered; thought through and executed with finesse like fine art.
Sophisticated and poetic yes, but to be cinematic there has to be an element of voyeuristic exhibitionism, a show, a spectacle: the gun going BANG! in the dark, the flash of the report, a scream, another BANG!; and then another!; A dying groan, the dead weight of a body landing to the floor, perhaps making a noise as things crash along with it. Inevitably sirens rise in the distance.
The hot breath of the girl and the feel of her well formed chest heaving with relief as she flings herself into the arms of her hero, his strong arm embracing her, the smell of gunpowder. The sense of safety and security in his arms but also the tingling thrill that danger still lurks nearby and the heated anticipation of rewarding him for his bravado, later that night when she can let her hair down and show him how he makes her pale skin ripple and their pulses race to a firm and exciting climax.