“People on horses look better than they are, People in cars look worse than they are.”
Marya Mannes
Guernica by Pablo Picasso 1937
There are these magicians who can tell what we are thinking. You know the ones I mean, not like a David Blaine type, but a guy who reads what’s in your pocket or what you will probably eat for dinner. Its disquieting to think that our consciousness reflects like a calm lake exactly what is in our environment. That our personality might just be a fiction or our thoughts might simply be cobbled together from our living room. Like a newspaper on the table for example. The Mentat Derron Brown of England would do this. Sit folks down at a sofa and then read their chaotic mind. They wouldn’t realize that the chaos was right there in the news.
This is how the Burmese meditation practice Vpassana works. Take ten days and remove yourself from stimulas. Not even eye contact. No pencils. Then you get to see what your mind dredges up. I, or what I thought of us as I, was just constant sex as it turns out; just riddled with pleasure by Day four. But, some folks get really upset in that room. They demand urgent and sensitive interaction with the teaching assistant or they fucking get out. They see monsters. Like Goya for example:
The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters Francisco Goya 1798
Goya here suggests that it is the somnolence of our reasoning that produces the nightmare. He is a romantic looking around at the arrival of the 19th century and realizing a civilization ripe with superstition was choosing madness and war and destruction out of gut reaction. This.. a society anathema to reason.
I was thinking about this and then about horses.. and the pretension of a man on a horse. Even the criminal injustice of riding on one, and how really ridiculous it can look, thought sometimes people just look magnificent on horses. This all comes to context. You see, I for one, would like to ride a horse as long as I could wear a nice uniform with epaulets. Epaulets really set off the shoulders nicely and make a man look big and important. I would want a really big horse too. I think it helps the proportions of the whole thing. The messaging.
Napoleon Crossing the Alps Jacques Louis David 1800
How brutally daft we are in regard to, not even subliminal messages, but Jesus Christ, just messaging. For example, The Spin Doctors debuted on SNL with Jimmie Olson’s Blues in 1992. I was enraptured by this band. Obviously, I love super hero comics and acid and pop culture and all that, and so these darling hippies had me in their palm. Sitting there on the living room floor I was actually quite convinced that they were all extremely tall. They looked like giants. ‘They might be giants’ I whispered to myself.
This mindset is a result of framing. The frame of a thing puts that object in a special place. Like the Vi in Vinyasa puts the nyasa—to put in place just so and here in a special way. Frame is an old German word Framian. And it means to be useful. A frame then is exceedingly useful. And the tv and the set and the lights and all that make a platform for the Spin Doctors. They are elevated. And in turn are elevated in importance in our mind and in particular due to my peculiar relation to the band and the topic in my consciousness. They are now important to me. They have import and have literally imported themselves into my thoughts. And, this is the context of the text. The tv show presents a musical guest and makes those persons “ready for use.”
“Well, I don't think I can handle this
A cloudy day in Metropolis
I think I'll talk to my analyst
I got it so bad for this little journalist”
Jimmie Olson’s Blues Spin Doctors
So now we have consumed this poem. And the use here is the importation. Brand recognition is this. It is how the brand sits in the mind. You hear Exxon Valdez and you feel the brand, no? You hear Trump Tower and have an association. Importare its called in Latin. To Be of Consequence.
So what do we do with our leaders? We put them on Horses. To frame these mammal as a being of consequence, useful to us. If you do not pay attention to a being of consequence then, yes, there will be consequences. So we frame things. We ennoble them.
Don Gaspar de Guzmán (1587–1645), Count-Duke of Olivaresca. 1636 or later
Attributed to Velázquez (Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez)
Ennobling may seem like a quirk from a bygone age, a silly product of an all-too-rigid social structure that we’ve transcended. Here, we see this in Netflix’s the Crown; that these unfortunate captives and completely useless creatures are constantly in fret regarding their use and their continuity. Likewise, they are also regarded by the public and queried for their missives to every important issue.
Crown Staring context
But it’s worth thinking about the way ennobling functions today. After all, to use a prosaic metaphor, is ennobling a human being and their kids with fancy hats all that different from placing a locally grown carrot on a rough-hewn locally sourced driftwood board at a Michelin star restaurant? Or deconstructing an old family recipe for taco and filling it with organic wagyu beef and heirloom tomato and gochu jang pico de gallo? Or sprinkling gold leaf atop, well, anything?
RYLEIGH NUCILLI from Atlas Obscura April 27th, 2018
When it comes to food and social status, context is everything. All these things carry credibility, from the latin credare—to believe, from their historical parampara. They gain, from the Sanskrit, credential from historical relation. Framing is everything.
Please see this link on ennobling garlic. An elevated peasants food not unlike lobster.
This is what a spin doctor does. The kāyamāne spins the news cycle into an aggregate benefit for her client. This term exploded into culture in 1992. It was like Bill Clinton and George Stephanopolous invented the term and suddenly we needed a band that could encapsulate the zeitgeist. Say in the way the Rolling Stones had the perfect catch phrase and band and band name for the time. In 88’ we had witnessed the failure of a toxic news cycle. What ever decimated Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis’s campaign for president, whether it was his height, the Willie Horton affair, or this beast of burden--an M1 Abrams tank it needed a campaign manager that could refurbish the news and the man into legitimacy.. some ineffable quality we Americans call “presidential.” And, I too would have encouraged the manager, Matthew Bennett to elevate his client and make him a man of consequence. Unfortunately like Ferdinand VII it really depends on the control of the photographer and certainly the steed itself. I didn’t like John Kerry on a motorcycle, and I didn’t like Dukakis on a tank. I liked Bill on the end of sax tho. It was just cool, and therefore ineffable. Cool is elusive. Kim Jung Il isn’t cool either. But, no matter how discomfiting the North Korean dictator actually is he photographs well. His artists photograph under pain of death you see.
Transformation is what the Spin Doctor does though. She takes material and spins it conically, like a spinning top or a dreidel. She incepts the thought into the mind of the viewer and transforms it. Herbie Hancock famously described Miles Davis this way. He was a musician, but really a magician who turned sound into music. He transformed wrong notes into right ones. Hancock here is describing a flubbed note in Stuttgart in 1963: (And I adore his pronunciation of the word.)
Hancock says “to experience situations as they are and turn them into medicine. Turn poison into medicine.. that’s what I learned from Miles” This, myself is all that I have learned from yoga and yoga practice. It is this transformation of framing that I learned from enduring a contortion with equanimity. Molecularize it. What is the thing? We call it pain, but at the physical level I feel throbbing. That’s not bad. I feel warmth. That’s just heat. I see blood, but the blood doesn’t hurt leaving the body. Its just flow.
This is the job of the Spin Doctor. And the artist, and the Yogi.
Ferdinand VII Goya 1808
To think this painting was made after Napoleons. It is a comical travesty, not unlike what was done to Dukakis. What I want to do with Goya (this an irony considering his immense critical insight into humanity) is give his paint clarity. It’s all so soupy. I believe his Pintura Negras period fixed this issue. And the Prado is a treasure that allows us to walk from one decade to the next a decade where Goya went deaf, Napoleon invaded his country, he lost his job, and had a disabling stroke, and worse than all that lost his line on good painting materials.
Just to say that back when times were good his paintings are soupy and I really just want to take newspaper and cover them (to tonk them) and get all the fucking oil out of it and the whites and tell him to go back into now that his darks are present and just, like Degas say, or especially his forebear Velasquez, hit the fucking highlights. Make it real. That’s what his black period does and it saves him. His whole life gets meaning. Who would give a shit about Goya without these giants? These Giant Monsters. Monster from the Latin monstro—to look at.
(Duelo a Garrotazos), Fight with Cudgels, 1819–1823
And, I think actually it’s just the surface that is different. And the surface makes the light and dark work and now his colour harmonies have depth. Everything works in fresco for him.
I do not completely understand why Goya’s patrons the Bourbons didn’t have him executed for treason. For all time this how we will remember a distinguished and noble family. It is no less a treason then the treatment of the English press of their own royal family. Though, if you are a Socialist, then I suppose it is safe to refer to you the English Press as a freedom fighters and not terrorists—as the IRA dub themselves. And so count Diana, executed as surely as Montebatten, a victory.
Rebecca Front , desperate as Minister Nicola Murray in The Thick of It
Relieve yourself from the Prince’s Trust Rock Concert for just a moment though and come back over the pond to the 88’ campaign again. This campaign manager should have been fired. This is not an appropriate frame for our freedom fighter, our democratic socialist, Michael Dukakis:
CBS Backfire, How to Destroy a Presidential Campaign
If you compare this image of a man in combat gear campaigning v. Bush to another Bush for just a moment:
Something completely different. Bush’s package is thrilling. Helmet off, George is letting his free flag fly. Whereas with Dukakis he looks like he needs to be put in a safe place. The framing here is extraodinary, especially given that Bush here is at the nadir of his defeat as president. This is the mission accomplished moment. A mission in the middle east still not accomplished.
Dukakis doesn’t belong in a tank, and Bush belongs in a fighter jet. That is the long and short of it. It is evidence that context isn’t everything and sometimes quality wins through. By quality here, I mean only in the most limited scope of the term—charisma. Dukakis is a man I want as Prime Minister. He is a man to organize state and pass a balanced budget that works for all the people. Bush here though is a president. And in America, president is both king and state. This is the benefit of a monarch. Divorcing the ennoblement from a man, allows that man to administrate. In fact no one even cares if that man is a woman. When the Head of State is also Head of Government then he is always also a kind of deity. And needs a frame adequate to hold him. Or her. I’m with Her actually.
P.S. This is a beautiful example of the Harmonizer, Jacob Collier making sense out of discordant minor chords: An exquisitely beautiful example of how useless spoken words are to describe music. Wait for the end when Collier and Hancock just speak to each other in sound