Part VII Dance
My child convinced us to play a game of Pokémon that he had invented with LEGO, a board of watercolour paper, crayon, and his favorite scintillating cards. He convinced me to play, dragged me from my basement studio with promises that we would be role playing like characters in my favorite: the Dungeons and Dragons. However sadly, we were reduced to rolling dice against each other in a sad pastiche of the Pokémon card game which is in its own right, much more sophisticated. In that the rules are not made up arbitrarily as we go along.
“He is making up the rules arbitrarily as we go along, Harmony.” I said.
“It’s a protoype.” She said.
His self-glossed posturing irked me.
Every time he won (and the game he designed was severely tilted in his favor) he would dance and pop and sing.
“Ooh ya. Ooh ya.” He crooned as he itched and grabbed at his tiny little cock.
But, we are Stoics I thought to myself. Nice Canadians.
Even I had explained to little Jed the other day that when compensating his Kung fu Shifu, and this is the kind of thing we do to build independence in him, that waving the cash in ShiFu’s face is actually very rude. (Though I do struggle to find the plastic multicolored Canadian bills credible as currency)
“Present monies low not high. It is polite.”
Left unsaid is the essential hypocritical and arbitrary notion behind cultural morays as preferring low versus high or ornate handshakes over efficiency or Godlike superbeings versus Humanist consciousness.
I thought about this tension of the poor winner and the good loser. What is this? What is this cultural hypocrisy? Are the Huckabees not correct to gloat that if the president does it that it is correct?
Gloating
The gratuitous self gloss.
In 2017 Kevin Durant saunters away from his three point shot in game 3 of the 2018 NBA finals ending Lebron James attempt at a fourth title. Forever probably.
“You could hear a pencil drop in the arena” said Green standing behind Durant.
His obdurate contemplation of his own act like a plaster cast of Myron’s Discobolus. The discus thrower holds the tension of extreme tortion in his post and conversely an extreme stoicism and an unearthly irregard in his complexion.
“No thing has happened here.” Noman says.
KD has accomplished the unbelievable by defeating the Lebron Goliath. He has simply turned and walked away as his teammates surrounded and laud his heroism. The cheek of it. This stoicism here in this moment. He robs us of a syncretic thrill. And, so he is mobbed by his team like maenads mobbed Orpheus. But with Durant here, the seven foot giant who plays like a small guard; the ungaurdable crossover, the archaic and previously obsolete mid range jumper, KD hired for one purpose. This moment. The final seconds.
What we all want, more than any success, as a paying public is for these men to display a denuded and sincere relief and joy though we will settle for shameless weeping sorrow. We are paying for displays of emotion. This is all the more wryly disappointing when the Warriors achieve the obvious. Klay like stoicism could be at least humorous here. We could gape in amazement if they simply like Durant strolled off the floor in dispassionate detachment. So we do.
But there must be something ineffably satisfying by finishing first after a nine month campaign?!? Surely we say. What will Boogie do? That surly giant. So cool.
Cool operates under the pretension that horror is unimportant to the strong. For a gangster or a God or the Goddess Juno to coolly nod her head and effect change be it genocide or murder in the ring is to admit that the change occurring, the consciousness extinguished or the bank robbed is of only slight importance to this being.
We who value the life of the Hero as Christ it is we who are impressed by the coolness of the act. We care about the effect. The affect of cool is to pretend you do not care. When obviously walking away having made a championship hitting shot is utterly life altering.
Shooting a competitor for the gangster is not life altering whatsoever. His life was irredeemably changed by the time he arose to middle school. The death of an underling or a Sunny Corleone is simply a business transaction as when a grocer sends a boy to pay a tab to a butcher.
The event has weight and pathos and epic poetic narrative only to the vegetarian.
Compare this to the god Ryan Gosling who when penetrating the atmosphere and coming back from Heaven to Earth says only “yep”. And exits his chariot.
A similar kind of God is Muhammad. I believe under a veneer of affectation of gloating and his self posturing is a clinical cool and collected clinician.
A natural poet, Ali’s Parkinson’s has turned him into himself.. a Stoic.
About Architecture
Gore Vidal had the genius to write of two Supreme Court Justices named Chase. Samual Chase an antagonist to Aaron Burr and Salmon Chase, Lincoln’s Secretary of the Treasury and very much a stoic himself. JP Morgan has merged with Chase Manahattan christened after Salmon: a Stoic.
The Stark Classic lines of Chase Manhattan Milwaukee seen above, a people’s Bank, a refutation of the waste and Racaille excess of the NeoClassical.
Mies Van der Rohe said of his buildings: "skin and bones" architecture.
So I have presented some ambiguities here. I have said that I like sincerity. I like also civilization. With some restraint I enjoy NeoClassical Twee tropes. And I am fascinated by what is Hick and I dig that which is punk. Please remember that I am disgusted and revolted as well by that what I like. As a young lady with a squid and ink and suction betwixt her legs might also be disgusted by the act of her pleasure in stereoscopic reflection.
I do sincerely seek a post apocalyptic society with small numbers and equal speech and effort though I also like my iphone and other trappings of Empire. And I like my children alive and not dying of measles. These are contradictions and ambiguities. What I seek here is self awareness. What do I mean when I use words? Only that I seek for all of us to delve into our language more deeply… to have meaning. This indulgence is an ask for time and space.. multitudes.
“I am not interested in the history of civilization. I am interested in our civilization. We are living it. Because I really believe, after a long time of working and thinking and studying that architecture...can only express this civilization we are in and nothing else.”
Mies Van der Rohe
The Idyll is a call out to a time nostalgically when we all could make love and fuck and dance in the sun. and then we would all cuddle together in the night and dream. The vision presented by Lennart is an epoch thwarted by greed and moneylending and taxes that go to the acquisition of a horde of bonded branded armored horned horseman. And then all the local pastoral is enslaved and pregnant with foreign seed. The defense of one’s family is complicated and suggests that the holocaust and the ragnorak will lend itself ultimately to a flurry of sub prime mortages before the cataclysmic rapture.. This is the pinnacle of civilization. The moment before it all ends. And so Lennart looks back.
At times in this Lexicon I have commented on the African American experience. Our culture depends wholly on the AA viewpoint and experience. Our music, our money, our railroads, and airport baggage claimants depend on a branded back to stand on. So I like to use the dichotomy available to us to parse understanding. This is the essential post-structuralist disquisition.
So then.. one last item on basketball.
Watching the NBA draft in 2018.
The young draftees, now bonded men and their fathers engaged in balletic patterns and exchanges of gestures. One hand up and then down and palms sliding back and then forward and like a bird flying up and then landing. The new African American handshake. Interesting and ornate always hid an essential insecurity. And that.. says Madonna is why she wanted to be famous. There was something wrong with her.
This handshake’s racaille ornate decoration hides a crack in confidence. The minimal dap is more confident and like the Baroque eschews color and columns. A Modernist bank doesn’t need this. Today’s bank cannot appear to be ostentatious. Not like in the old days when our Cabinet rotunda sought leverage against the individual.
What was the soul handshake? The soul brother.
Soul is a word like white trash that is implicitly racist. Of course we don’t need to qualify trash. Trash is understood to be Black or Puerto Rican or ‘an American Indian waiting to kick your ass.’ And so to say poor white trash is to suggest that we must qualify trash as to understand “white” trash different from normal trash. Soul is similar. The word itself implies that white people are to be considered soul less. White as ghosts. White cubes. White sheets of bread. Discoloured.
I am interested in the dap. The fist bump. Obama’s genius cool. As cool as Clinton’s saxophone. Our second black president. The Knicks with John Starks and Patrick Ewing and Larry Johnson and the just the sheer machismo of Charles Oakley. All these surly men with no use for a racaille handshake. For them the elegant and neatly baroque fist bump. No frills.
https://www.reddit.com/r/sports/comments/2p39ci/scottie_pippen_dunk_on_patrick_ewing/
These arcs of transformation in the brothers handshake mark transformation in a home made and familial tribal and organic interaction. When the balletic Bulls started copying the fistbump they were considered inauthentic. (Always struggling and striving to prove their manhood those Bulls, such a queer contradiction in hindsight. Their “softness.”) That’s not them folks said. They are not braggadocio like that. Though no man was more dominant then Michael Jordan. Still the Jordan Rules demanded that Michael be physically punished. By Bad Boys of Detroit and successively the very manly New York Knicks.
Spike Lee in his film She’s Gotta Have it 1986
In the audience of these wars. The genius Spike Lee. Sitting Courtside. Like Basquiat a King. His film She’s Got to Have it describes a beautiful black debutante like an Audrey Hepburn and her many competitors wooing for her maidenbed.
“Beautiful Nola Darling (Tracy Camilla Johns) can't decide what kind of man she wants to date, so she decides to date three at the same time. (Bare with me) The first is Greer Childs (John Canada Terrell), a rich, handsome narcissist. Then there's Jamie Overstreet (Tommy Redmond Hicks- my cousin!!), a stable, overprotective alpha male. Finally, there's Mars Blackmon (Spike Lee), a timid geek with a heart of gold. Unfortunately, while each suitor has his virtues, Darling just can't seem to make up her mind.”
Jamie is offered a deal from Mars who is threatened by these alpha males. He says you can have Nola four days of the seven.
“That’s mighty black of you” Jamie says.
Which itself might certainly be a callback to Dirty Harry’s line to the VFW troupe “That’s mighty white of you.”
It is a shocking line. Shocking that it is said out loud at the Very Few White’s organization. Whats it mean exactly? What does it mean when Mars inverts it? Is it Mars’s generosity? Is that he would offer to share his bitch? What does this mean?
In the end Mars says he gets weekends though. This is a tactical retreat in the face of certain destruction.
“Please baby please, please, please, please, baby please.” Mars repeats and repeats through and through.
That, I believe, helpfully describes the African American experience.
Of course I am open to the most wide spray of fusillade criticism in that that I do not know the AA experience. Oh my step mother was black I might argue . Oh my four step brothers were all incarcerated for crack cocaine I say. I am a white boy though. Though not even as sincerely lower class as M&M or White Boy Rick my fellow inner eight milers. Yet it is better to speak to my separate understanding then to ignore it and pretend that the AA experience does not color every aspect of American culture.
Much in the same way that for the Gauls to sack Rome was for Rome to teach the French something about everything. To sack civilization was to become themselves civilized for the Franks. We have learned.
Soul. Or.. he’s down.
Modernism is as shut from the past as a person who has had their history raped from them.
The Neoclassical pretense is that what we are doing now is Classic by God’s grace himself. And, so what is conservative has moral traditional value. When in fact it’s value is if anything arbitrary, relative to choice, and at worst (and honestly is) steeped in violence.
Should I hold to tradition? Or is it a betrayal to hold to the previously clasped choices?
Dance by Henri Matisse The Hermitage 1910
Dance.
Classical Ballet is called Dance. Where does it come from? Is it Russian in birth? Who invents dance? Humans dance, no? And Lovers.
At a nudes only rainbow fest in the Upper Penisula of Michigan announced at a the Isle Royale National Park just weeks before the event should occur. We all arrange to meet there and we overwhelm the forest rangers and the police with our legal right to assemble. We are all just strangers camping on the same day. Twenty Thousand.
And as high as I have ever spent a weeklong trip in the woods. (Though not as high as I have spent in a Chicago Brownstone) I sat on the sides of paths and namasted travelers and smiled at them for free asking for nothing and received only joy in return. There was a spontaneous wedding and a young woman asked a drummer nearby to pause for the celebration and she received in turn this grim admonishment “Men drum, girls dance.”
There is no answer to this except a slow painfully awkward retreat.
Which is what the young lady did and I suppose I was complicit as your reporter.
Humans throw balls back and forth. People depict sienna horses on a rock somewhere and mouthspray paint at their hands and dance around a fire. And some are very good. Schools are started. Institutes parade and indoctrify a tradition. Look how we do things right. Inevitably the girls are starved to perfection like rats and prostituted to the purveyors of amateur idealization. Degas, and Matisse, and Nureyev, all dancing. Dancing for love. Observers of form still and moving. Lennart’s dream of an ideal female utopia has round lovely women. It is a saving grace really. Like his three graces. Like Matisse’s round lovelies. A more perfect world. A rubenesque world. A world becoming racaille.
A world where perfection is put to one side in favor of happiness.
Picture of the 3 graces by Lennart.. At bottom his beloved basset hound named “Sargeant” after the painter
Erstwise, we have an asceticism to such a degree as to try and perfect a thing that is impossible to perfect.
The body. Who has a classic yoga body?
What is that?