Note: I wrote this post earlier today on the spur of the
moment. When I came back to post it tonight, I read the news that David Bowie
had just passed away due to cancer. Now I wish I had said something more significant,
but I’m posting this in its original form anyway. The world has just lost another
of its great voices, and this loss hits hard. David Bowie’s first studio album appeared in 1967 and 49
years later we have his twenty-fifth. Fans and critics are hailing Blackstar as some of his finest work, and
this not quite three years after The Next Day won similar acclaim. As an on-and-off-and-on-again Bowie fan since his
Tin Machine days, I was quick to download Blackstar.
Yes, I had good taste even in 1989 when Tin Machine’s first
album came out, just not good enough taste to know who David Bowie was apart
from Tin Machine. I didn’t really get
into David Bowie until I ran across the three-disc version of Bowie at the Beeb, which includes a
number of BBC Radio sessions from 1968 to 1972, plus a concert from 2000.
The earlier recordings capture Bowie as an affable and earnest young man with
one leg in Dylanesque folk music. This Bowie was more approachable for me than
his later more wacked-out material, but it got me headed in that direction.
The rest of Bowie’s career would see the rise of Ziggy
Stardust and any number of personas and musical styles that I’ll probably never
be able to fully explore. The changes can be frustrating since one album
is often completely different from the next, making it difficult for listeners to
find their footing, and leaving new listeners without a clear place to start. For
those with patience and intrepidity, however, there is always something
incredible to discover. Some of my favorite Bowie, for example, is on the 2002
release Heathen:
And now there’s Blackstar.
I’m still getting to know it, but here’s an early impression. It’s dark and digital,
raw and electronic, jazzy and rocking, strange and melodic, and filthy and funny, with many songs weaving among these characteristics with a fluidity that is
sometimes missing from the more experimental Bowie. Much of “I Can’t Give Everything Away,” for example, is a blend of slewing saxophone and guitar solos with a smooth drum beat as Bowie repeats the words of the song’s title, drawing them out mournfully. It’s an unusual noodle of a song, but the results are eminently listenable.
The first single is a good summary of Blackstar’s mood,
but perhaps a little on the album's darker side:
I suppose that video could be off-putting for some, but I’d
encourage anyone to begin their own exploration of Bowie’s music, if they haven't already. Start with Bowie at the Beeb, or The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, or Blackstar, but give it a shot
and find the Bowie style that strikes a chord with you. It can be powerful
stuff.
Back in August of last year, I tried to initiate a slowdown
of my blog, but it didn’t go so well, so I’m trying again. I need to make time
and mental space for other things, including other writing, so The Gleaming Sword
must retreat into a corner. However, once an idea grabs ahold, I can’t move on
until I get it out, so this is another attempt to spit out some quick summaries
of ideas I've been kicking around.
In Defense of the Star Wars Prequels
J.J. Abrams has given the people what they wanted. Star
Wars: The Force Awakens has been a success among critics and fans, and as a lifelong
fan myself, I too found it immensely satisfying. However, it also reminded me
of what I loved about the prequels.
Many said Episodes I through III just didn’t feel like the
first movies. With its goofy aliens, slapstick humor, and even scatological
humor, The Phantom Menace was childish. Attack of the Clones subjected us to a dorky adolescent
romance that actually included frolicking in a field. Then Revenge of the Sith was daaark. However, I always saw this as part of George Lucas’s genius. He
was clearly more interested in grooming a younger generation that would carry
the franchise through the coming decades than he was in pleasing the original
trilogy’s older fans, and it worked.
The subsequent changes in tone match Anakin as a maturing
character on his way through all the usual life changes, plus some truly awful
ones as he becomes a Sith Lord. Meanwhile, Lucas’s new audience was also
growing up, perhaps not as quickly, but quickly enough for many to identify
with the changing themes of the series. This is a metalevel to the films that
fascinates me.
I also liked the epic nature of the prequels, which many
considered too complicated. Whereas Episodes IV through VI focused on the
adventures of a ragtag band of rebels, the prequels paint on a broader canvas
that includes political intrigue and massive military campaigns actuating
change on a galaxy-historical scale. Throw in the usual mythological themes, only
amped up, and the prequels take the radio-serial style of the original movies
and enlarge it to the scale of a Wagnerian cycle.
The Force Awakens, on the other hand, comes off very much
like a film of its time. It’s a very good one, but there must be other viewers out
there who feel something is missing, namely George Lucas’s vision and style.
On Feminisms
In Modernism and Nihilism, Shane Weller argues that instead
of one single philosophy of nihilism, there are many, sometimes conflicting,
nihilisms plural. While reading the shojo manga Revolutionary Girl Utena the
other day, it occurred to me that we would benefit from viewing feminism the
same way.
In one spectacular sequence in the manga, Utena is playing
basketball against the boys and beating them as a series of captions states her
philosophy:
“I want to be a prince. A prince is much better than a
princess, who needs protection.”
Accordingly, Utena dresses like a boy, uses a masculine first
person pronoun for herself, and is confident and physically fit. Later, when
she joins an order whose members follow a mysterious code from beyond, she rescues
a peer from an abusive relationship and assumes a strong position within the
group. When she was a child, a typical handsome “prince” saved her, but at least as
of Volume 1, there are suggestions that she herself is, in some magical way,
her own hero. The male characters’ only chance of holding their own against her
lies in treating her as an equal.
This is one style of feminism with roots that go back much
further than the Nineties, when Utena was published. It is the feminism of
Princess Leia in A New Hope (1976), who talks back to Sith Lords, greets her
rescuer with sarcasm, and snatches a blaster from a space pirate so she can
shoot her way to freedom. It’s the feminism of Greta Garbo in Queen Christina
(1933), determined to walk and talk like a man but accept no man as master (previous post). Both Utena and Queen Christina further their gender-bending with an
affection for women that hints at the romantic and sexual.
This style of feminism reminds me of statements by Camille
Paglia in Vamps & Tramps. Paglia writes that what she and other feminists
in the Sixties wanted was to do what men were doing, so they went out and did
it, accepting the risks and responsibility. Paglia has nothing but scorn for feminism
that turns victimhood into an occupation. Reading Utena, I couldn’t help
but see how different Utena’s pursuit of “strength” and “nobility” is from
hyperfeminism online’s whining and bullying.
General education teaches us about the suffragists of the late
19th and early 20th-Centuries and the Sexual Revolution of the Sixties and Seventies.
Many remember how feminists in the Eighties were often portrayed as bra-burning,
butch, man-hating radicals. I remember reading around the turn of the
millennium how feminism had softened to embrace women who wanted to be powerful
but also feminine. Now, Third Wave feminism is inescapable and anyone active
online is bound to have run across terms like third world feminism and first world
feminism.
Thus, feminisms plural isn’t a hard idea to grasp, but learning
to be mindful of it and speak accordingly is harder. Yet I’m convinced that
more of us doing so would help the current debate about feminism be more
productive. I’m always saddened by the discourse of people who appear to feel feminism
is one thing to be championed or rejected whole. We might find ourselves
agreeing more if we were specific about exactly which of the many feminisms we
are praising or condemning.
Hermann Hesse’s Demian and Jungian Psychoanalysis
The first time I read Hermann Hesse’s novel Demian, I didn’t
know who Carl Jung was. When I dug out an old paperback recently and reread it,
I realized it’s informed by more than a little psychoanalysis, and the mystical
tone suggests Jung over other theorists.
Demian tells of Emil Sinclair’s process of developing his
true self, a process Jung calls individuation. An interesting cast of
characters aids this process, from his childhood enemy Franz Kromer, to his
spiritual teacher Pistorius, his close friend Max Demian, and Demian’s mother
Eva. Some or all of these represent psychoanalytic concepts. Is Demian Emil’s
Shadow? Is Eva his anima? Are they all psychopomps?
But all I have are intimations of hypotheses that need to be
tested by rereading Demian and brushing up on my Jung, and I don’t have the time.
Oh, I could Google what I want to know, but this is a train of thought I would
prefer to flesh out for myself. Like my planned series of posts on Joseph
Conrad, maybe I will someday.
I can tell already that these summaries aren’t going to satisfy me,
but 2016 calls for a break with old lines of thought so I can pursue new ones.
