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I have a question for everybody old enough to answer.
I was watching the music video for Michael Jackson’s “Black or White” a few minutes ago. I remember when it came out; I was newly-seven years old, and watched it upstairs in my parents’ bedroom while my mom watched TV in the den downstairs, probably The Cosby Show or Cheers, both of which were on that night. I’m assuming it was Cheers, because The Simpsons was on that night, meaning the video had to have premiered at nine PM…but I digresss.
It’s a convoluted mess of a video, fun as it may be, that struggles to riff off popular culture at the very same time that it’s trying to make a racial and cultural statement that’s supposed to transcend that sort of thing. And so you have George Wendt and Macaulay Culkin, the latter lipsyncing to some generic rap piece about rising above racial categories (which is oddly unsatisfying when coming from a rich, famous white kid), and the King of Pop himself dancing with colorfully-dressed natives as he mysteriously traverses the world. The money shots are the black and the white babies sitting together atop a model of the earth and the famous morphing sequence (which included then-unknowns Tyra Banks and Cree Summer, who is apparently a shapeshifter). The hubris behind this video is quite simply staggering.
I approach my point.
There is, in the main body of the video, among Jackson’s romp across the world through the magic of dance, a shot of him dancing with a bunch of Russians in front of St. Basil’s or a building with at least some passing resemblance to St. Basil’s. Let’s consider this a moment. This is 1991. The Soviet Union is in the process of collapse, and will cease to exist in a little over a month. Glasnost and perestroika have long since run their course, and here in the US there’s a newfound sense of optimism even as across the sea the systems begin to collapse.
The first few years of the 1990’s, for that reason, fascinate me. The cultural climate shifted so much; just a few years earlier, Reagan described the Soviets as the “evil empire” and Nena sang “99 Luftballons,” yet another cultural marking of the terror of nuclear war. And boom, 1991, and Michael Jackson is dancing with the Russians. What happened in that space?
I was too young to really remember it, but I have the vaguest recollections of newfound shows of solidarity cropping up everywhere, from Ukrainian kids showing up on Nickelodeon GUTS (which was a few years later, actually) onward.
What do you guys remember about the popular portrayal of Russia and Eastern Europe in those years immediately preceeding and following the end of the Cold War?
Video Documentary.
Reader Jordan Henderson sent me an interesting piece over the weekend I’ve been meaning to blog about. The brief post concerns celibacy among superheroess, something I’ll admit to never having noticed, what with your Lois Lanes and Lana Langs and Lori Lemarises and Pepper Potts and Carol Ferrises and Vicki Vales and Selena Kyles and Betty Rosses and Rachel Daweses and Mary Jane Watsons and so on and so forth. Every superhero seems to have their lovely leading lady. So what’s all this jive about celibacy?
The conflict of interest between having a highly sophisticated and important job whilst maintaining a romantic interest can have serious pitfalls. Spider-Man 2 reflects deeply on this theme and the heartbreaking impossibility of having both the job and the girl. The latest Batman film The Dark Knight, we see flickers of how Batman struggles with the impossibility of being loyal and undivided in attention to his love interest, whilst maintaining order and justice in Gotham City. Anakin Skywalker grimaces at the tragedy of forbidden love in Star Wars and also experiences this classic conflict of conscience. Is it possible to do extremely important work, being on call 24/7, and at the same time have a family and a woman close to you? Batman, Spider-Man and the Jedi would all disagree.
As much as I want to agree, I’m not sure I can. Your best case for celibacy would be with Batman, and that’s simply in his unwillingness to take on a permanent mate, not to avoid romantic entanglements altogether, as the recent revelation of his previously-unknown child with Talia al-Ghul (who is herself the closest thing Batman has to a significant other). I can’t think of a single major superhero who is a committed celibate, although I did find this old article (from 2002) from Slate.
“This story, like any story worth telling, is about a girl,” Peter Parker intones in the opening line of the summer’s blockbuster hit Spider-Man. Except it’s not about a girl. At the film’s end, Spider-Man wins the girl, as we’ve come to expect of our movie heroes, but instead of embracing her, he spurns her love. Spider-Manturns out to be a coming-of-age story about a boy who decides that his moral responsibility to the world at large is too great to allow himself the selfish, singular attachment of romance.
Which sounds a lot like what Roman Catholic priests do. Or are supposed to do, anyway. Many critics have pointed out that Spider-Manunfortunately reminds viewers of the World Trade Center disaster. But the movie also speaks, quite eloquently, to the debate over celibacy in the Catholic Church. By the end of the movie, viewers learn that Spider-Man is celibate, and his superherodom is a calling, a voluntary priesthood.
Taking Spider-Man as a single case, this is a compelling argument, put to paid, unfortunately, by Spider-Man 2, which remains neck and neck with The Dark Knight for the title of the greatest superhero movie of all time, in which Petey spends two hours, among other things, pining away for Mary Jane in the face of her impending marriage (to the son of J. Jonah, of all people!). In the end, of course, he wins the girl, and it’s a triumph for us all.
In the comics, before One More Day/Brand New Day, however, the existence of Spider-Man was a constant strain on their marriage, eventually leading them to separate for a time. It proved damn near impossible to balance the demands of a family with what I like to call Spider-Man’s “bitter obligation” to do good with his abilities. The truth of the matter is that, realistically speaking, superheros would need to be rather free from any ties that could take them away from the task they’ve set for themselves. To be a superhero is to live vocationally, and when you live vocationally, you must put away the things that hinder that. It’s why married men shouldn’t go sleeping around, and why the Catholic Church asks its priests to remain celibate; the work of marriage or the priesthood is demanding, and should not be distracted.
One immediately points to Nightcrawler, who was on track to actually become a priest until some writers decided that was a stupid idea and introduced the even stupider one of it all being an evil plot. Yet even he has not remained celibate, keeping an on-again, off-again relationship with a sorceress named Amanda Sefton.
I can’t blame him. She’s pretty cute and a Beatles afficionado, going by the name “Day Tripper” for a while.
Let’s keep it going!
Here’s the official, final Italian poster for Star Trek (henceforth “ST09″)
Continuing the whole “Italy” theme, I want to note that I have now, for a second time, dreamt in Italian. It’s a little unsettling, really, to wake up and remember yourself asking someone, perfectly casually, “l’hai fatto?“ This one was a bit different than the first one I had:
I don’t remember terribly much about this dream except that I was trying to explain the differences between American and Canadian football to someone in Italian, and in the dream, I knew about the same amount of the language as I do in real life, and was struggling to make myself understood. But the fact remains — I totally had a dream in my language of study, and that pleases me greatly. Or rather, mi piace.
This time, I wasn’t attempting to speak the language; I simply was speaking it. Effortlessly, thoughtlessly, no struggle, no difficulty. It was a simple and casual conversation, and the whole dream was in the language. I’m not really sure why this has started; I suppose I’m studying it a bit more than usual. But still, it’s a little weird, and I’m not sure what it means.
Hey, e’rybody! Check out this great typography blog. I’m a fan of fonts, and I pay attention to elements of design, especially typography, so this will be of great interest to me, at least.
Sweet.
San Genarro a Napoli
Christians treat pagan as a dirty word. There’s ample reason to do so; we believe our faith rather exclusively, and the textual witness of much of Scripture points rather clearly to the notion that the pagans deceived themselves, worshipping powerless objects instead of an actual god. The Lord takes pains to keep Israel from turning to idolotry and condemns repeatedly the vain worship of the Nations, lest Israel yet again succumb to it, which it had an unfortunate history of repeatedly doing. And in these days of science and progress, where we know from whence lightning comes, we look back on Thor and Zeus and Apollo and think to ourselves “While the origins of the Hebrew God may be a bit murky, these fellows were clearly devised for the sole purpose of explaining natural phenomena. Their stories seem largely limited to telling us why the seasons change and the sun traverses the sky, but now we know the truth about these things.” So we look back and scoff at their ignorance if not their stupidity, secure in the knowledge that we in the now really do know better (lest you think this is yet another “Science is arrogant, RAAAR!” sort of rant). All of this is true.
In my Italian class today, we discussed how intertwined Italian popular Catholicism is with ancient Italic paganism. I have no experience of the sort of culture about which la mia professoressa spoke; I’ve never lived in a traditionally-Catholic ethnic enclave in the States or in any society of that sort. I live in the diocese of Richmond, which has just over 220,000 Catholics among the four million-strong population, which puts us at around 5.5 percent. There really isn’t a popular Catholicism here; we’re a small church, and while we do tend to, ahem, congregate, the faith doesn’t have particularly deep roots in Virginia, being largely a fringe faith in this overwhelmingly Baptist part of the state. So I can’t say that I know too much about the sort of Catholicism she’s discussing.
According to Cinzia, Italian Catholicism is deeply pagan, and she refers to that sort of expression of the faith as “religione,” with the sarcasm quotesm (she was very careful to make that distinction), and referred repeatedly to Italian idolatria, the extent to which Italian Catholics place the saints, not so much above God, but higher on their priority list. The saints, she went on, simply have a more profound place in their lives, to the point that they are often treated as Gods. She took as her principal examples San Genarro and Saint Anthony of Padua, both of whom are invoked and trusted with more frequency and fidelity than ole’ Gesù himself.
The standard text is that the Christianization of Italy never really took, and that the people, the pagani of ancient Rome, the country-dwellers, remained, well, pagans at heart. They just turned their devotion to Artemis to someone else, and treated the Company of Saints as little better than a replacement Pantheon of Gods, to whom they entrusted their lives; the God of Abraham, it’s reasoned, was simply too high, too distant, to be approached, and soon lost all practical relevance to them.
During this discussion, one of my classmates, an Evangelical Protestant named Nina, was visibly squirming, clearly uncomfortable with the discussion of saints, offering a few objections to the whole enterprise. This interrelation seemed to bother her deeply, and I can’t say I blame her terribly. Because, as I said, pagan is a dirty word.
And yet, Catholicism recognizes, and has since St. Paul, that often pagan religion is man’s native religious sense grasping at a divine it has difficulty comprehending, and not solely a struggle to explain things science would eventually unlock. That superstition arises not only as our ability to recognize and codify patterns, but an awareness of the breadth and width of the invisible world, and our attempts to understand and manipulate it.
To that end, one could say that, to the extent that Cinzia is right, Italian popular Catholicism has yet to really encounter the divine firsthand, and remains grasping at straws. The people have simply not been engaged by their faith, nor taken it seriously as much besides a means to manipulate fate and probabilities, a call to the powers above instead of a communion with God.
There’s a trailer up for Mark Shea’s delightfully terrifying starring role in Manalive. If you’ve ever wanted to see the star of Catholic and Enjoying It!, nominated for three Academy awards, brandish a gun like a deranged Tyler Durden, this is the movie for you.
I have now more-or-less acquired every significant gadget of the age. I’m not wholly sure if this is something of which I should be proud. Regardless, I am rather pleased at my recent acquisitions and the thrift that made them possible; all told, I spent, perhaps, $30, and came out of the last week with a Playstation 3, a laptop, and a bluetooth headseat for the aforementioned PS3 (I will not be that guy who walks around talking to the air; I’ll be that guy in his apartment screaming at the TV).
I was, turns out, successfully able to parlay a single acquisition into a rapid slew of them. The recent death of my grandmother resulted in an inheritanced doled out to her children, who then themselves oversaw any distribution to the grandkids. Out of that estate, my mom purchased for me a new laptop, which I’ve been needing for school and will still be useful even considering my impending graduation, as I won’t have to fight for a public computer in the library anymore when I need to do research). The laptop, I realized upon my consideration of the specs sent me by my stepdad, was roughly as good — if not better — than the two-year-old HP Pavilion Slimline I’ve been using. Same amount of HD space. Same amount of RAM. Better graphics acceleration. All told, I rapidly concluded that I did not need to have two computers, or the irritation with maintaining two sets of active documents and other files. I thereupon resolved to sell my desktop to True over at the Blarg!, who’s been itching for a new computer for months. I sold him mine for $300.
These three-hundred dollars were essentially all gain for me. I gave up nothing, really, to get the money, in terms of functionality or need. The math proceeded to allow me to purchase a Playstation 3, retailing for $399, if I was willing to part with one other thing: my Playstation Portable, which I don’t really like and never use. The games I had for it were boring and lacked depth. And yet, I know there are people out there who would kill for one. So, listing it on Craigslist a week-and-a-half ago, I sold it off for $120, including two games and a movie. All told, I had $420 dollars. More than enough.
The Playstation 3 I had purchased the previous week. And now, as of yesterday, it was fully paid for. The price I’d doled out for it was matched in sales, and I’m right back to where I started, not a dime missing, not a loss in sight. I was even, finally having some cash in my pocket, to make a nominal contribution at this week’s collection, a practice I intend to continue. I’ve always given to the Church in terms of liturgical service; now that I’ve retired from the Campus Ministry (graduating as I am, I wanted to ensure there was an altar ministry in place for mext semester; I’ve been doing it more or less single-handedly for two or three years), it’s time to open the wallet.
God has been to me very generous. I need to be generous back.
Sexy Saturday continues with another great post.
Last night, I went to see The Rocky Horror Picture Show at the new Movieland Theater with my friends True and Maria. I’ve always wanted to attend a midnight showing of this, one of my favorite movies, and was quite grateful when the ticket clerk told me that, “unfortunately,” this movie would not include the live cast. For those of you unfamiliar with the bizarre rituals surround this strange little flick, a live cast is a group of people who, in full costume, will act-out the movie alongside it as it’s playing, and guide the audience in the now quite-formalized audience responses. It’s ridiculous fun, but I’m really just there to see the movie, to be honest. I don’t need to throw toast at the screen during the toast to absent friends.
I’ve seen The Rocky Horror Picture Show many, many times. My dad introduced me to the music from it when I was maybe eleven or twelve, and at some point not long after, I managed to catch it on VH-1’s Rock and Roll Picture Show feature they used to do. Around the same time, The Drew Carey Show featured “The Time Warp” in a Rocky Horror/Priscilla, Queen of the Desert dance-off. And thereafter, it became a favorite of mine. Sure, it’s a weird, creepy in a mustached-man-in-a-conversion-van sort of way, with corny acting, horrible special effects, and a ludicrous plot. But the music is so damn good. I watch for the music more than for anything. The rest of it’s a hilarious cheeseball of a film, though at times it borders — borders, mind you, and never crosses the line — on pornography.
Basically a science-fiction sexploitation musical, it does, however, have a particular message to it that I think may have been missed. I missed it until last night, and I’ve been watching this picture half my life (which explains a lot, by the way). After we got back to my apartment at around two in the morning, I, groggily, asked my equally-heavy-lidded comrade what he thought the movie’s message was, to which he replied “Bacchanalia is a good thing.” I would have agreed a week earlier, but last night, that seemed to be the exact reverse of the story’s real meaning; Frank is destroyed by his bacchanals.
Watching it on the big screen, I noticed many details I’d never caught before, like Magenta playing Columbia’s leg like an electric guitar during “Sweet Transvestite,” but none as much as this huge thematic element. I’d always been too distracted by the cheese and glitz of the picture, the dances and songs, the whole over-the-top production, to notice Frank’s murderous narcissism. He’s constructed a world around his sexual jollies, and, as Columbia points out before she’s turned into a statue, he does nothing but use the people around him; he takes and takes and takes until there’s nothing left, at which point, he tosses them off like used garments to move on to his next sexual conquest. First Columbia, then Eddie, until Eddie proved both dangerous and insufficient, and Frank decided he could only really love his own creation. So he makes Rocky, and this golem of his, designed to love him or at least want him, rebels against his master’s brutal will and turns to Janet Weiss.
This movie doesn’t glorify anything; the madman behind this strange adventure is a violent, destructive, abusive user who manipulates people for his own gratification, and in the end, is turned on by his servants (and it turns out they’re all space aliens). There’s no catharsis for Frank, no explanation, and no redemption; his appetites have cost him everything, which he can only attempt to reverse by stealing from his houseguests their free will. As Frank himself says, “It’s not easy having a good time.”
The man pushing the anything-goes sexual libertinism turns out to be an evil scientist from outer space who is judged and executed for his excesses. Frank, who’s whole persona is this mix of coked-up 1970’s glam rock and B science fiction, cannot defend his actions. He has torn apart an engaged couple, murdered Meatloaf, and abused everyone who has ever loved him.
