just jen: essays and guest posts

don draper

I'm going to go pretty far afield here at moments, because, hey this is my blog and I write here for FREE so you know, I can do what I want. But I think you should know that this is all about Don Draper---what's that?  Did you hear that Gentle Blog Readers?  it's the collective clunk of my female readers (and a few of my male ones, perhaps) hitting the floor in dead swoon.  Now.  To head into wandering territory again.  

This article here cites Flannery O'Connor as I have before in relation to anti-heroes in literature, film, and television.  As a kind of semi-adventitious aside--can we come up with a term that includes film television and literature in one?  (And how do you like that word: adventitious.) I know book snobs persist and far be it from me to stop a division that encourages people to read more, BUT we forget that all television and film is written first (except in the case of loons like Mike Leigh who make passable films on improvisation alone--though even those have a pre-written structure to them).  To me literature, film, and television--like the Bard told us of the lover, the lunatic, and the poet--are of imagination all compact.  So what would that word be?  Cinetelelit?  How about this:  stories?  Because even something as annoyingly dense and literary as Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (which--I'll pass my Twitter whisper on GR here: psst!  the Emperor has nothing on!) all comes from the same historic root which was an oral tradition and therefore a performance tradition:  telling stories.  

And please note: just because performance PRECEDED literature as a vehicle for telling stories and preserving history does not necessarily mean it is in inferior to the literary tradition.  It is not an earlier stage of development--rather, it's like the village elder of story telling, it's literature's grandfather. Therefore it is a progenitor not a snotty-nosed, unsophisticated kid sibling--ancient, wise, and full of information, some of which it's uppity and less mature forms (like, um, literature as in what PBS and A&E watchers like) miss in it's leap toward bettering itself from the small town of Oral Traditionville from which it broke free, like Irene Cara in Fame (the original I hear the new one stinks, anyone see it yet?). . 

ANYWAY.  

Flannery O'Connor comes up time and time again when talking about the low culture of anti-heroes, because she provides the perfect example of the via negativa in literature--a pet subject of mine in that I think we have a fundamental crisis in mainstream criticism: we can't get our head around the difference between representation and advocacy. Mad Men has come under scrutiny by moralist critics for representing the morally degenerate world of advertising in all it's glory--and again the word, "glamorize" comes up or "glorify"--these are words that popped up all the time around The Sopranos and more recently, my new pet series, Nurse Jackie.  

The thing about Don Draper is not that he is as my friend has said, a "tool" (yet an undeniably, hot tool at that, and boy do we hate to admit that his bad behavior does nothing to reduce our desire for him!) but that you believe there is something about him worth saving, (beyond his hotness) though his behaviors suggest that he is beyond the edge.  They use a device in this show exceedingly well, one that enhances this deep mystery of nobility about a man who goes through women like some men go through Altoids, and lies 13 times before he's had his morning coffee and at least 26 times before his afternoon tipple. I call it the Nick Carraway Effect--in that every character, guest star or otherwise, becomes a Nick Carraway to Don Draper's Gatsby.  We explore him through others perception of him and his reaction to other people.  

I believe that the writers have been reading some of the academic literature that came out around the turn of the century (and by that I mean 21st century--itsn't it fun to realize we live at the turn of the century?) about the post-World War II period and gender identity.  I did quite a bit of reading on gender roles during the Cold War as a grad student and among the ideas that I recognize in Mad Men is Susan Faludi's Stiffed, and David Savrans Cowboys, Communists, and Queers.  But as academics are wont to do I may be putting the theoretical cart before the practical horse--these theories of masculinity were all deeply influenced by The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, a story that showed what happened to the American male as he re-entered culture after having endured the horrors of war.  So it is possible that the cinema and literature of the time period has allowed these deft writers to come up with a character who symbolizes all these two academics (to name but two who write on the subject) theorize on.  No matter.  It all comes together in something vaguely truthful and at least interesting.  

This American Man is one who is neither militarized nor de-militarized, because he is still armed to enter the height of American Capitalism as a warrior and still on alert against the foe through the Cold War.  And one of his most dominating features is his silence.  He is silent for many, many reasons.  He is silent because he has secrets, because his identity is built on lies.  He is silent because he can't reveal the parts of himself that don't match the American ideal of the uber-male.  He is silent because if he speaks he reveals himself a hypocrite.  But most of all he is silent because he cannot speak the unspeakable things he has seen as a man of war.  You get the sense if he speaks them that he will come apart at the seams and all that will remain is a lunacy that lies seething behind the after-shaved, gimlet scented facade.   

What is so completely riveting about John Hamm's Don Draper is his silence--and they continually use his reactions to other character's as the index of what lies beneath. His reactions to other's pain is what defines the possibility of his own emotions--even the birth of one of his children, he remains opaque, except for the way in which he listens to another young father-to-be who is a foil to Don's stoicism, wearing every emotion and every fear out on his sleeve.  

And, again, our eye is drawn to all that is worth saving in Don Draper.  While I suppose that there are many who might watch Don Draper and think he is a hero worth emulating--just as there are those who would ignorantly model themselves on Tony Soprano, Nurse Jackie, or House, MD--you can't really make art for those who will always willingly or ignorantly miss the point.  The idea about Don Draper that keeps most hooked in (aside from his obvious sexual appeal) is that he may in fact find redemption---from the horrors and secrets of his past, as well as the path he is on toward his own assured self-destruction.  

guest post: notes from the underground art world

Guest Poster Kelcey Wells is a poetry and fiction writer.  He blogs at Night Thief Confessional and is @KelceyW on Twitter.  

It's a recurring narrative throughout the history of western art and culture: the vanguard of a particular school or movement become complacent and their art becomes indulgent, self- referential, and it's relevance to the broader culture dissipates. The pool of creative talent and their ideas become increasingly shallow until the number of shunned young artists becomes large and hungry--hungry enough to become a cultural force of its own. 

Though often referred to by the term "Lo-brow", the current form of art insurgency is a fluid, organic conglomeration of illustration, hot-rod & tattoo culture, pop-surrealism, comics, anime, and street art. This new underground tends to have an eye for figurative painting, an acute interest in the lost art of drawing, and a dark sense of humor. Unique to this movement, however, is that there has been no breakthrough moment signaling its emergence in to the establishment. Instead, using the affordable printing and DIY-marketing tools of the internet age, this loose confederation of like-minded individuals has created its own network of promotion, distribution, and finance allowing it to exist alongside--but separate from--the traditional art world. 

Ironically, this success has seen several galleries originally founded in cities less well-served by the established art world migrate to Chelsea, mainstream art's traditional home. One of the strongest of these New York transplants is Joshua Liner Gallery. The gallery began life in Burlington, VT and by way of Philadelphia, opened its doors on 28th street in Manhattan a year and half ago. The gallery's current summer group show is a showcase for the quality and diversity of the contemporary underground scene. Filled with fresh techniques, imagery, and ideas, from the dia de los muertos influenced portraiture of Sylvia Ji to the psychedelic abstraction of Robert Hardgrave, there is an amazing breadth of talent on display.

One of the really eye-catching pieces of the show is "Label Me" by Gregg Simpkins. It is almost a literal exemplar of the pop-surrealist tag. Here are the iconic, cartoon-mouse legs supporting a Warhol soup can, re-labeled with Simpkins graffiti tag "Craola". These over-ripe images are entangled in a hyper-detailed, surrealist mechanism of dangerous orchids, clockwork insects, and decorative flourishes. The result is an unsettling glimpse into the internet-age subconscious where the mundane interacts with the impossible and cultural resonance escapes linear history, generating anachronistic mutations. Simpkins adds yet another referential layer when he chooses to include a dark, unlit background and marble table top, the hallmarks of classic Dutch and Flemish still lifes.  However, here the "still life" is a paradox of frantic motion and rapid progress.   

This is one of the things I find most interesting about underground art of the moment. While most contemporary conceptual art has as much connection to the old masters as a Hannah Montana pop hit has to Beethoven, many of the young artists in the underground draw inspiration from the history of western figurative painting not simply in content but with the fine attention to detail and composition the arts establishment has typically rejected over the last few decades. In the work of someone like Simkins, the entire history of visual art, both high and low,  is up for grabs; not simply as a tool at his disposal but as an essential component in the destabilization of the image as it floats within a hyper-saturated, wiki-enabled, media culture. 

James Roper is another featured artist making peculiar historical connections. Roper is interested in what he calls a visual "peak shift," a neurological reaction that arises from extreme visual depictions. His inspiration for creating these extreme visual experiences is the over the top religious iconography of Baroque painting with it's voluminous fabrics, lofting cathedrals, and super-intense rays of light beaming through billowing clouds. What makes Roper's work really wild is that he is pairing the audaciously exultant detail of the Baroque with the hyper-stylized dynamism of modern Japanese anime. In the two works on display, "Ataxic Reversal" and the captivating "Bound Before The Source," there is a synergy between Baroque and Anime styles. In the work of both styles, the heavy outlines, the insane, hyper-real detail, even the lush colors bombard the viewer with stimuli. The fact that Roper is abstracting the image beyond certain recognition takes the experience over the top.  Roper's paintings draw you in with roiling energy and lush supple textures but once you've given over to the experience you feel woozy. Your brain struggles to matrix a narrative from the chaos but nothing settles, nothing clarifies.   

Chloe Early's "Brink" is yet another standout piece in the show. To me Early is the most Ballardian painter since the surrealists who inspired J.G. himself.  Her choice to juxtapose a dreamy leisure center setting with images of military menace, echoes the horrifying potential of the mundane found in much of Ballard's modernist, fantastic fiction. Here, again, there is something classical at work. It may be a bit of a stretch, but to me these paintings are analogs to pastoral landscapes, albeit atypically crowded and frantic. As surreal as they appear, the image's power comes from a nostalgia for a simpler, more innocent time similar to the work of classical painters like Poussin. However, in Early's work the idyllic images are flattened to two-dimensional, near-silhouettes, degraded and painted with a primal, yet unnatural pallet that heightens the sense of the plastic. The swathes of primary color and thick drips of paint connect the canvas to the stencil and spray can of the street artist while the classic composition and painterly details reflects the breadth of European painting's history.  

I had fears heading in to the summer season that the underground was on the verge of complacency.  I feared that this dynamic movement re-igniting my interest in visual art was in the process of making the same errors the establishment made in casting them aside. But recent shows like this one have been shining examples of artists  hitting their strides and straining for new ideas. These artists are not only discovering fresh veins of creativity; they are simultaneously opening marvelous reservoirs of art's vast history to be re-purposed and re-imagined.

proprius

Proprioception comes from the Latin proprius which means "one's own".  So proprioception, simply put, means the awareness of one's self as a body moving through space and time.  I first became interested in proprioception as an acting teacher who taught movement and I wanted to enhance the sub-cognitive awareness that runs in the background of conscious existence to conscious states so that actors could have a greater sense of motion and control and choice.  Acting is nothing but a series of creative choices, sometimes intuitive sometimes conscious, that allows the actor to express meaning as a character and as an element in a narrative.  The development of actors and their training is simply a process of bringing those choices to a greater awareness and learning to create a deeper and wider variety of choices--some of us like to call it a vocaublary--in bringing a character or performance to greater heights.  

However, in learning about proprioception, one can't help but also think about this element of consciousness as it pertains to being, or as one German philosopher was fond of saying, "being-in-the-world".  How does it feel to be a human being with a consciousness of moving about and experiencing the world? This is the central question that animates a particular school of philosophy called Phenomenology.  Phenomenology was founded by Husserl and has developed several branches of philosophy of its own--and this article here is concerned with a branch developed by Maurice-Merlau Ponty and argues for the primacy of embodied existence.  Which is to say--we must include what it is like to experience reality as a physically sensing being with a constantly sub-cognitive awareness of that state (in the cerebellum) that through deliberate introspection can become a fully conscious awareness that one records and analyzes.  Or even more simply put, it states that philosophy must include with it an acknowledgement of an embodied "I" who does the sensing.  

Meet Walt Pascoe.  Walt actually Tweeted this article and then sent me these pictures of himself painting in his studio which really instantly brings forward the way in which proprioception is involved in art-making, one that I think is similar to the way proprioception is a large part of acting.  

Walt writes eloquently of his experience of creativity here, and he records his experience of creativity with an acknowledgement of his own conscious and physical experience of it.  What he writes about in this short piece is also a part of something else that came to my attention as part of trying to teach and learn about what the actor does.  It's something called muslce memory:

I've been making things for so long that I no longer need attend to my hands and eyes. They hold their own ongoing conversation with the materials, by turns laughing, weeping, speaking with carefully measured clarity, or simply crying out with utter abandon, while my subconscious just seeks,seeks,seeks.....struggling to clean the windshield....determined to keep scrubbing and scraping down to the true new old always present. Hoping to elucidate the dream, and settle at last into what Proust so eloquently referred to as "the repose of enlightenment".

Walt is referring to something that is animated by the cerebellum--that is the sub-cognitive background music of our own existence as a moving body.  It has a specific and unique kind of intelligence.  

One of the paradoxes of teaching actors to become more conscious of their movement is that when it comes to performance I then have to teach them to inhabit their "score" and forget what they made conscious in training and rehearsal.  This is particularly hard for a certain kind of cerebral actor.  I directed a production of The Trojan Women in which we choreographed elaborate physical scores to accompany the action, ones that expressed through something I called "living sculpture" to express how reality in war feels as opposed to narrating a particular action. The actors were required to move from posture to posture without hesitation--because it was supposed to happen in synchrony with each other. One highly intelligent actress could not do it.  Why?  She was using mnemonoch device in order to remember what her next pose was.  You could see her thinking and she was always half a moment behind the other actors who moved intuitively from pose to pose.  

It was a frustrating rehearsal the day I tried to get her to forgot the consciousness of her movement.  I tried to have the other actors explain just how they remembered the movement.  Because they were relying on muscle memory and not on conscious manipulation of their movements.  They couldn't really articulate anything helpful except things like "you just don't think about it."  "you just do it."  "you have to get out of your head."  It was funny--as in interesting--because the actress who was struggling during the concsious act of creation of her self-scuplturing was brilliant.  But when it came to relying on her body rather than her brain to perform what she created she was stimeyed. 

There are things that escape language; there is an element to existing that binds us but seems to escape description and measurement.  The irony is that philosophy, almost since the beginning, has tried to separate that immeasurable and experiential "thing," because since physical reality is, to a large degree, measurable and observable, that "thing," must be something other than the physical and material.  

However, as my experience with actors and Walt's insightful description (and images of) his own creative process illustrate, that "thing" is inherently tied to being embodied and existing in and interacting with a physical plane.    

RIP Patrick Swayze

I almost didn't write this post because, though I loved Patrick Swayze, I couldn't, at first, define exactly what was loveable about him, aside from his impossible and drool-worthy shoulder to hip ratio.  But in thinking about it, I came to a slightly more nuanced understanding that makes me dare to define something I once thought was undefinable.  What was completely and utterly attractive about Patrick Swayze was the contrast between his look and his essence.  Though he played many roles, the ones he will be most remembered for were Johnny Castle in Dirty Dancing and Sam Wheat in Ghost.  In both of these, he was a romantic hero who, though he has plenty of opportunity to do otherwise, takes a higher path and is victorious in doing so.  He had a certain masculine bravado and a bad boy look to him.  His perfectly chiseled male physique, the downward slant of the outer corners of his eyes, his strong chin, and his roughly hewn nose all gave the impression of a contained masculine strength that he used when appropriate but belied the purity and essence of his flaming--and surprisingly gentle--heart.  

His sensitivity of spirit was portrayed through performance in his dance ability which, while not as virtuostic as an Astaire or as otherworldy as a Michael Jackson, was exquisite in its own way, expressive but still masculine, tender but still strong.  And it was portrayed in Patrick Swayze himself in various virtually unmarked ways from his longtime devotion and dedication to his wife to his simple and innocent defense of his friend Mel Gibson during Gibson's seemingly indefensible, anti-semtic, manic breakdown a few years back.  This was the defining characteristic of his Johnny Castle, who was a raw male sexual energy lured into the most base uses of that life-force.  But it ultimately revealed its nature in its desire to be loyal to and hooked to the higher virtue of an innocent idealist like Baby.  In Sam Wheat, the famous "ditto" in place of "I love you" was the pentultimate male stoicism, but it is revealed to be full of passion and virtue in his disembodied state.  Any illusion that "ditto" was a cop-out was fully destroyed by the end of his journey. 

In Johnny Castle, you see the pent up rage against injustice and prejudice, yet he contains it (barely) and is eventually vindicated in peforming his final dance and winning the love of Baby and the respect of her father.  In Ghost, Sam Wheat takes that masculine stoicism and pent up anger (toward Carl the predatory theif who betrayed his friendship) and, unable to realize it through violence against him because he is disembodied, turns that dammed up energy into a flaming heat that manifests in loving Molly, and, in so doing, brings justice far more satisfactorily than if he's been allowed to thrash Carl limb from limb in the first place.  Certainly, these are themes developed first by writers, but it was Swayze whose masculine energy mixed paradoxically with a pure and innocent lover's heart, that made these characters so memorable.  That vulnerability contained within such a sharply male and impentrable physique is portrayed poignantly in his exit line in Ghost:

It's amazing Molly, the love inside, you take it with you. See ya."  

He seems about five years old when he says that line.  And I mean that in the best possible way.  

This paradox in Swayze can be seen in earlier incarnation--in The Outsiders his Darrel Curtis is an older sibling burdened with the care of his younger ones.  Though you can see the pent up energy that makes him desire to live a more carefree and reckless, young, male lifestyle, he forcibly rechannels that energy toward those he loves, selflessly and for their benefit.  He does not assume that role because it is the only choice he has; he assumes that role because he actively chooses to "do the right thing" despite his very real and experienced masculine desires.  

And there is one other poorly remembered role, nestled unobtrusively between Skatetown USA and The Outsiders, in which you see this quality nascent and first emerging as that undefinable something that would later lead to blockbuster roles--in M*A*S*H he had a small role as a young soldier who comes in wounded and discovers that he has a likely terminal case of leukemia. The young soldier bravado melts away and you see the vulnerablity of one facing his own mortality; and his selfless reaction to it is profound.  The contrast between what he projects and what lies at his heart is achingly and almost unbearably moving.  The episode is called "Blood Brothers"  and I'm telling you. Watch it.  And see if you can't identify the quality I try to describe here. 

That quality, I think, is a man who has every thing at his disposal to make the world his own--and instead gives it back.  And not without a struggle that allows us to identify and believe we, too, though we often desire the opposite for our own reasons, could win the battle and give our baser desires up for something more satisfactory and, well, good. 

guest post: jennifer fulwiler on science and religion, part II

Meet my friend  Jennifer Fulwiler.  Jennifer is a must-read blogger, whom I've been reading for years, as she has blogged her way from skeptical scientific atheism to belief.  Her posts are humorous, stirring, moving, and above all intelligent.  You can subscribe to her feed at  Conversion Diary.  This post which she's generously allowed me to share with you, was first posted in October of 2007.  She is writing a book on her conversion experience--you'll be sure to see an announcement here when it becomes available.  (Part I to this post is featured here)

Unapproachable Light

I had a little experience this weekend that was what my aunt would call a "Godincidence", and what I would call "an event that seems like it might have been a direct answer to a prayer but could have just been a coincidence and since I try not to state definitively what is and is not a direct act of God in my life I'll leave it to you to decide". (My aunt's term is better). Anyway, since I know everyone likes to hear little stories like this I thought I'd share:

As I mentioned in my last post, I'm reading Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe. When I got to the part about the fascinating behavior of light I was reminded that, for a long time, it's seemed to me that light might be very closely associated with God. Even when I was still basically an atheist but considering exploring religion, when I read about light and its behavior I thought, very un-eloquently, "that seems kind of God-ish". I would read about things like the fact that time slows down as you approach light speed; or that light exists in an "immortal" timeless/ageless state (as one physicist put it: "the universe ages, light does not"); that the combined speed of any object's motion through space and its motion though time is always exactly equal to the speed of light, etc.; then I would recall that those Christians were always associating God with light, and I'd think...hmmm...is there anything to that?

Anyway, all these thoughts were rekindled Saturday night as I read about light and relativity. The last sentence I read said:

No matter how hard you chase after a beam of light, it still retreats from you at light speed.

Wow! I put the book down after I read that to think about it. I find this concept of not ever being able to approach light so fascinating, especially the potential relation to God, that I cost myself some much-needed sleep lying awake to ponder it. I eventually said a heart-felt prayer asking God to let me know if there was anything to this, and finally drifted off to sleep.

The next day my mother-in-law was feeling down, so I Googled around for some inspirational Bible verses to cheer her up, and I came across the "fight the good fight" line in Chapter 6 of Paul's First Letter to Timothy. In true procrastinator fashion, decided to skim the rest of the chapter. The first thing I saw was verse 16, which refers to God as he "who lives in unapproachable light".

I thought that was interesting.