Entries Tagged 'Culture' ↓

Yes.

I just couldn’t take it any longer.

Used to think it was good to keep one ear to the municipal ground, to read the everyday events and so forth but I’ve come to realize that my morning rants are giving me more grief than pleasure.

I do believe that the news, in general, reports not only badly (and of course there are exceptions) but falsely. It seems to be documenting some sort of parallel universe which runs not on science but belief and where fear is the only reasonable way to engage with the world.

And equally as bad, even though I know that letters to the editors are not written by most of the people out there, they are eroding my sense of my fellow human as worthy of consideration.

In the newspaper world, everything runs on fear and ignorant responses are accorded undeserved respect. Kind of like the Conservatives.

So its out with that crap and back to thinking more about the sunshine coming through the window, about that people are generally good, and the world incredibly safe by any measure.

Above are two shots from a television commercial that seemed to be on just about every time we turned on the television in the flat in Barcelona. The product consists of vibrating pads which will melt off the pounds even if you are absolutely sedentary. Another set of commercials, which I did not manage to get any pictures of, were for corsets for young women. This coupled with the lack of any visible exercisers in this town seemed to be a clue as to why the old people tended to look pretty run down, and an indicator that some of the many many hot young women around might in fact not be so much fit as fit to burst.

I’ve always liked watching television in countries not my own, and in languages I don’t understand. In Warsaw, there was a very strange voice over version of CSI (see here), and in Prague a dubbed soapy Western (see here), and I’ve already mentioned a little big about the mountain of psychics on Spanish television (see here).

A few years ago I was with my daughter in Kawaii.  It was just her and I so I was bound back at the place at nights and ended up watching more television than I would have expected. There were a few rerun channels which convinced me once again that most television shows should have had stakes punched through their artless hearts and forever silenced.  Now, thanks to digital technology, we will have to live with the low points of our culture forever.

The best thing though were the religious channels (not just shows but whole channels).  Watching the small brained make sense of existence is always amusing (I will admit that this shows Christians at their very worst) but saw something absolutely amazing…imagine a Jim Morrison of Christianity…free-form charismatic rock n roll type extorting to Jesus….not quite up to the Lizard King but pretty good. Watched that for almost an hour. And then ended up tuning into the channel every day…it was mesmerizing. Saw other preachers, sweat flying, rapping, speaking in tongues and laying hands, and all these people were quite aggressive…no platitudes here….the theme was taking it back, getting back control of the culture…it was like watching Martians but being a little scared that they might be invading some day.

These religious networks or channels have born again comics, religious extreme sports, game shows, the whole spectrum of typical channels. (To be continued…)

A friend of mine sent me this video of the now famous Matt.  I’d read about him but hadn’t bothered to look him up yet so it was good to find out what all the hoopla was about.

You know he seems like a nice average guy.  A nice average guy who has been bankrolled around the world to dance his dance everywhere.  I should be so lucky.

What is annoying about this is that what I would like to see is someone doing something a little difficult in all these places.  Even a waltz or tango with a woman, or better yet, a handstand held for a minute.  Those are things i cannot do (or in the case of the waltz, do well) and I would be more interested in seeing that.  Why oh why does anyone care to watch someone do that dance, which would be no different than peeling potatoes at those locations, when there are talented people in this world.

This seems to be part of a larger trend of praising the untalented, of lauding the unexceptional.  Is it that we are so afraid that we will ever amount to anything that we are hoping that will be enough to make us famous and loved?  Is it that we fear true talent?  Is this what Ayn Rand warned us about? (And I am not a fan of her philosophy but she got this one right I think.)

C’mon Matt.  Take the money and get some lessons in an unusual skill and take that around the world.   Sword swallowing, competitive eating, turtle juggling.  Get special!

Over ten million views of this one…we all need to get a life!!

1. From OddityCentral, this picture an amateur took of a stingray migration which may have consisted of as many as 10,000 individuals.  See OddityCentral for more.

2. From SecretDead, this poster (see SecretDead for the source).

3. From DailyDoseOfImagery, that dinner in the sky phenomenon first reported in Brussels has now made it to Toronto. See DailyDose for more images.

4. Finally from DerSpeigel a story on the ongoing Naples garbage scandal. The take here is that they are sending in “crisis psychologists” to help with the tension.

Makes more sense to send out the Mafia clowns who are most responsible for this.

People say all the time that they hate reality television but then there is this one show they watch.  Its just a genre and as such is capable of greatness even if its usual output is dross.  Its particularly annoying to me because (and yes I do watch some) it seems to take the worst of our culture, pump it up, and feed it back as desirable.  It also tends to be mass friendly to a fault, and overwrought.

That being said, it is interesting to consider this lumbering clumsy infant that no one can quite take their eyes off of.

My 13 year old daughter and I have had a few shows over the years that we could watch together.  It started with Blue’s Clues and oddly enough Seinfeld, and then Malcolm in the Middle.  Our shared reality shows were Fear Factor and now we make a date to see Hell’s Kitchen.  She also watches Survivor but I never quite liked it after the first season.

The first Survivor had Richard and it was new, and then though they varied the formula here and there, the times after that I dipped my toe into that pool I always got quickly bored. I think the true kiss of death came when I saw the Canadian version and thought “now, that is difficult”.  See here for a description of what these people contended with.  And already any of us who ever did a bit of camping were watching Survivor thinking that these were a sorry collection of milktoasts and on a tropical island to boot.  No mosquitoes, no snow, no bears…paradise.

But Fear Factor stood out. It was the post modern reality show in that unlike the others, the host, Joe Rogan, was openly dismissive of the types who would show up, and of some of the challenges.  He articulated what we all felt in “who would voluntarily eat rotting squid guts?”. It kind of flies in the face of the honouring the ones who seek fame. Rogan was quoted as saying after the show ended that “”it was a dumb show that was fun to do and the money was good.”

These shows, the Idol types, seem to say that because you want to be famous, you are special.  And they never revel in anyone’s failure even though the shows are as much about failure as success, but grieve deeply with loving camera closeups on the tears, of the spurned ones.  And at the end of the talent shows, where the person comes back with “what do you know, I’ll show you”, you wonder why they came on the show in the first place if they didn’t think those opinions meant anything.

But that ties in with the thing I hate the most on these shows, the false emotional roller coasters, the soap operas which are unfailingly petty, the sorts of altercations that indicate an extreme lack of any gray matter, or at least any level of maturity beyond the age of five.  And if it isn’t altercations its the waterworks on Extreme Home Makeover (I may have that title wrong), where everyone is crying all the time.

But I do watch some shows.  I am attracted to ones where people have relatively uncommon skills such as in Hell’s Kitchen.  I like to cook and I like to see people who do it better than I do.  Stylistically I find it interesting that the show has the same slow fast slow heavy camera movement as Fear Factor uses.  And though its not quite as infantile as many shows, it still assumes that you have forgotten everything that happened just before the commercial and replays it.  If these were every shown without commercials it would be like that part in Teletubbies where they replay the seven minutes over again (you feel like you must have inadvertantly ingested some drugs).  And because Gordon Ramsay veers between genial host and tyrannical sadistic overlord that enough insanity is already on board so the contestants can be fairly even keeled.

Finally, and there is always more to say on this topic, it is disconcerting to see shows like Rock of Love. This is perhaps the worst of all the harems competing for the affections of one man shows. You’ve come a long way, baby! I thought we had gotten past most of that but apparently not. Maybe some of these people think this is just a strange form of speed dating but what for most of us would be unbearably humiliating is presented as ennobling. I will watch this show again because for me it is like watching Martians; I really do not understand these life forms.

But I won’t write the genre off. From the respectable Amazing Race to the puerile Apprentice, there’s room to move, and room to evolve.

Finally saw Julie Taymor’s Across the Universe. I had worried about whether this movie would be good or not and though I had not seen Frida, Titus took me to strange new places and that should have been sufficient to dispel any concerns. This film is brilliant. The interpretations of the songs, the casting (except for Dana Fuchs as Sadie), the freshness of how Taymor solved various narrative problems and the engaging set pieces were all great.

Among the thoughts that went through my mind as I watched this were 1. was there any group other than the Beatles who had the back catalogue to have fulfilled all the requirements of this film (out of the roughly 200 they used about 10) and 2. how clean these voices were.

(I must admit that knowing that this actress, Evan Rachel Wood, is going out with Marilyn Manson had me off in a parallel universe imagining this scene with him as the boy, and that somehow was just not as affecting).

To return to the one reservation I have about this film, the character of Sadie was apparently added after Dana was seen performing and I have to say that that was a very bad move. She plays a professional Janis Joplin type singer in the film and her histrionic style jars with the rest. The others, like T.V.Carpio here sing as though the songs matter.

Its refreshing in this day of where too many singers feel that if you have room for five notes why just sing one. For a more dramatic example of this see Joan Osborne channel these Motown classics.

I just don’t take to mannered singing all that well, whether it is the throatiness of opera, the subdued version of that in jazz, the twang of country, (or its odd cousin, that odd drony singing that seems to be gaining ground in mainstream radio right now), the nasality of English folksongs, or the mock weak whine of bluegrass. Its why I like much of rock and roll where half the plainness comes from lack of experience, much folk (though I’m not a big fan of the actual genre) and the blues where nothing ever veers too far from true.

As well as the clean delivery, the arrangements tend to be sparse as well. And I was struck again, as I am from time to time, by the song writing genius of that short lived group. For here were the songs rather than them. Their songs always seem simple but most certainly are not.

The other thing that crossed my mind is that the Beatles were essentially prophets of social cohesion unlike many of their contemporaries. The message in almost all the songs is one of the worth of the everyman and the foolishness of fame; rather Buddhist really. (Actually quite a few religions follow that line but the Buddhists garnered the spotlight on this attribute). And this takes us back to that singing style again. The problem with much modern singing other than mimicking others who do the same is that it places the person above the music. The singer feels compelled to demonstrate that the attention is on them, not on the music. Or as George Harrison put it “all through the night I me mine I me mine I me mine”.

Derek Abbott over at the University of Adelaide has constructed a chart of how different languages express the sounds that animals make. (You can find it here.)  Japanese creatures seem an odd lot with bees going boon boon, cats meowing with a nyaa nyaa and purring goro goro, and ducks quacking ga ga. Thanks to SwissMiss for finding this one.

And then over at MilitantPlatypus was this involving revolver. The rotobull.

Good news today in the LA Times on the demise of the Humvee, Hummer or whatever else you want to call what most of us already thought was the most idiotic vehicle on the road.

The article is titled Requiem for a Heavyweight but requiem is much too kind; this is more in the territory of putting a stake through the heart of demon spawn, of gleefully dancing on the grave, of that pleasant feeling upon hearing of the death of an enemy.

I’ve written previously about these masculine compensators (see I Scream You Scream We All Scream for Big Screen) along with castigating big screen televisions. And interestingly enough there is a nice picture of Arnie and his toy.

Which leads us to a trailer for the upcoming Bigger Stronger Faster. Not a great trailer but still makes me want to see the film. And there you go, a vehicle with steroids, unnaturally grown and unfit for polite company. And though I would not say this is homoerotic, there is little doubt that this is done to impress the other boys much more than the girls. Which in my book is a lot of effort being put in entirely the wrong direction.

I’ve always felt that making cars out of metal was a really bad tradition. If they were more like either bumpem cars, or actually more like Fisher Price toys, you would save so much money, not to mention lives. Soft and fairly absurd looking brightly coloured vehicles that could run into each other full speed with no injuries, and soft big wheels would mean fewer road repairs, no injuries and no need for worrying about drunk drivers. And it would entirely remove the dick factor out of driving.

But I just had another thought. Imagine if from the beginning our culture had had a distaste for paving over ground and tried to keep all roads as narrow as possible. You would still have vehicles but they would have remained small. The savings in all ways over the century would have been phenomenal. Right now we are the terrible position where even despite the rising oil prices, and despite little signs like the discontinuation of the Humvee, big vehicles are still rolling out of the factories, roads are being made wider, and the system more extensive rather than pulling back a little.

A couple of weeks ago, there was a letter in the local paper from a woman who thought that the city needed to make all the parking spaces bigger to accommodate the larger vehicles. A good example of backward thinking.

Moving on from the cockbanditry of late, and isn’t it odd how unusual things seem to suddenly be everywhere, to being roundly cock-eyed in Southern Europe. This little article of cultural dickery (in its entirety) comes via DerSpeigel.

The Annual Phallus Festival in Greece

Each year on the first Monday of Lent, the people of the tiny Greek town of Tyrnavos go crazy about penises, singing lewd songs and urging passersby to kiss their model phallusses. The pagan fertility festival is one of the most famous parties in Greece.

A resident of the town of Tyrnavos in central Greece participates wields a model phallus at the town’s famous pagan phallus carnival.

If you want to eat phallus-shaped bread, drink through phallus-shaped straws from phallus-shaped cups, kiss ceramic phalluses, sit on a phallus-shaped throne and sing dirty Greek songs about the phallus, then you should visit the little Greek town of Tyrnavos each year on “Clean Monday.”

The one-day pagan fertility festival in this town of 15,000 people near the central Greek city of Larissa marks the beginning of Lent, the fasting period before Easter, and is one of the most famous carnivals in Greece.

Come prepared. Passersby tend to be grabbed and rocked over a pot of boiling “bourani” spinach soup while a ceramic penis is placed between their legs. They must kiss the phallus, then drink tsipouro — a strong local spirit — from its tip, and then stir the soup before they’re let go.

Phallus-kissers are rewarded with ash-streaks on their face, which presumably absolves them from having to go through the procedure again, unless of course they would like to.

The festival is in honor of Dionysus, the Greek god of wine, madness and ecstasy. While the men, women and children of Tyrnavos celebrate the penis, the rest of Greece marks the beginning of the pre-Easter fast more modestly by flying kites and eating octopus, olives and unleavened bread.

If you want to come prepared, find some ceramic phalluses and dangle them from your waist. But make sure you come on the right day because this town is perfectly normal the other 364 days of the year.

The raunchy, lewd songs that echo round its streets on “Clean Monday” aren’t sung at any other time either.

Phallic worship was popular in ancient Rome, Egypt, India and Japan.

Until the 1940s, the penis party was reserved for the town’s men folk. Over the years women gradually joined it and even children enjoy it these days, along with many tourists. But the local church isn’t especially keen on it.

Used to be that daydreams of Greece consisted of images of white buildings against pristeen deep blue seas…

And its not just the Greeks…here is a shot from the Hounan fertility festival in demure Japan

and from the side of a building in Bhutan, and I hear these are everywhere there:

After this, yonis, yonis and yonis only, unless there is more of this crazy news..