Re: War, Confucious and the CBD -- Mondrian and Kafka
> >May I ask what Mondrian has to do with Kafka? The Kafka-[ab]world >is all too much with us (I've spent much of the past year in a >couple of the less extreme places where it is flourishing today >on earth). It's a long time since I read Kafka and almost equally long since I last viewed a Mondrian. I must admit that I'm not sure of the relationship either, though perhaps it is that both attempted to show us how we make ourselves accept the absurd and irrational as sensible and rational. The Mondrians I recall seeing consisted of straight lines, right angles and flat colours much like the land- and city-scapes we have built. Whether this portrays the absurd or sensible is of course a matter of judgement. During the 1970s I spent a lot of time in the little Indian villages of northern Canada. Generally, the layout of these villages appears somewhat random but on closer inspection makes a lot of sense. For example, if the village is on a lake or river, it's not too difficult to get to the water. People who are closely related live near each other so that younger people can look in on the old. With the exception of one or two streets, the layout is not based on straight lines and right angles. I recall flying over the Canadian prairies after spending some time in these villages and noticing how absolutely straight and right-angular the landscape was. A north-south road every few kilometers; an intersecting east-west road every few kilometers; all the land between bounded by straight east-west or north-south fences. Every so often the pattern was interupted by a lake, river or slough, natural features of the landscape which seemed odd and out of place. Viewed from above, and after the Indian villages, it seemed an absurd landscape. Yet it too makes a good deal of sense when, as a farmer, one is down in it and has to work on it. I'm not sure of what this is supposed to tell us other than that what is absurd to one person makes perfect sense to another -- something the Chinese probably recognized 4,000 years ago. Ed Weick
Re: War, Confucious and the CBD
>And I would guess that in xxx years from now people will look back on the >commuters, subway riders and busy busy people and say what? You mean people >went into a Kafka/Mondrian environment and parroted the party line just to >get paid. No wonder there is so little incentive to break the work/income >nexus. > >arthur > -- Was it not always thus? People do not recognize that they are living in a Kafka/Mondrian environment nor are they likely to in future. Occasionally they catch glimpses of it, but they quickly look away and focus on the steady and comfortable. Kafka is something they had to read at university, if they got that far and took arts, and Mondrian is something they see at the gallery, if they ever go there. Besides, given the horrors the world has lived through since the one wrote and the other painted, they are both really very tame -- hardly contradictions at all. And why should people want to see the work/income nexus broken? For most people, both are tolerable if not comfortable, and the nexus is deeply imbedded in our traditions. As workfare, it has now become deeply imbedded in our politics. The day of letting those snotty little welfare cheats take our hard earned tax dollars without pretending to work is over. Ed Weick
Re: War, Confucious and the CBD
Ed, I am a private entrepreneur who must examine everything in order to survive, however you could help on this if when you say: > Hi Ray, > > I won't comment on Marx or Keynes except to say that your library book has > wronged them both. 1. you explained what you meant about the economists(Marx and Keynes) since you are one. I realize how arrogant it is of me to do this but please accept a civilian's questions. What form of massive government spending is sustainable over a number of years at great cost to the average citizen and yet remains popular? A defensive war perhaps? Keynes = government spending and where does the government spend more? in a war that demands life and death loyalty or prison? Not many would be as blatant or passionate in their questions as we civilians, but perhaps there is a bit of peasant good sense at work here. yes? 2. on the other hand, I want to share a story I was taught in college. My music history course in college taught us that all music began in monody (single melody) evolved through a parallel melody called parallel organum and became counterpoint and then melody and harmony. It began with church chants and ended with symphony orchestras moving out of tonality and into the brave new world of complicated atonality. It makes perfect sense if the world is only Western and began to sing 1500 years ago. Out of one million years of human music and expression, no body questioned that this history made ancient music out of music that was less than one thousand years old.But then the world got smaller and all of those communist universities began to explore the lead of Bela Bartok who became an expert in Hungarian "folk" music and wrote his own modern music around aesthetic ideas found in the folk music. These same ideas were atonal and polytonal and thoroughly up to date but they were truly ancient. The communist universities went out into the back country and listened to peasant women singing and improvising atonal music while they cut the hay in the fields. They played games that were as sophisticated as the most sophisticated modern music and they had been doing it for God only knows how long. But the point here is that although the official story made sense in the limited context of Europe and the church, it was inaccurate. They didn't even acknowledge the gift from the Gypsies with music that traveled with the Jews and blossomed into some of the 19th centuries most interesting and complicated scores. No, instead you got the simplistic jargon that ultimately made both Jews and Gypsies simpletons and parasites on the "true" aryan musical tree. But that wasn't true either. In fact they found those original church chants being sung in Yemen by Jews that had been separated from the rest of the world since before 2,000 years ago. So the chants were Jewish!After WW II the Jews became the excepted international group in the West while the Gypsies were outcasts. (They had to register with the police in New Jersey simply to travel and their banks were constantly raided and robbed by the police in the U.S., see the "Romany against the city of Spokane" over this and other issues of prejudice) Even though the Gypsies lost 75% of their population in Dachau, there is only one Gypsy representative to the Holocaust museum in Washington and they had to fight for that. On the other hand, although many of the original Communists were Jewish in Russia, the Russians embraced the Gypsies and made outcasts of the Jews. Gypsies had their theaters and were found in all of the performing arts organizations. They also were able to travel freely from one country to another while the Jews were actually prisoners in their own homes if they wanted to leave the country. My point to this story is that it was based upon models in the minds of people in the East and West and very little of it is based upon historical fact. Wish, but not fact. Now let us take your economic story. I can give you a lot of facts on this because I found that my research didn't match the official stories and so I had to dig. Both Lawrence W. Levine and Richard Crawford have written studies on much of this and I would recommend them for their erudition into the social contract that has created the current mess. I don't have time to fill it out and they have done it better than I anyway. Levine's Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard are called "Highbrow/Lowbrow, The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy In America" Harvard pub. and Crawford's work is described in the latest issue of the NEH Humanities magazine. He is editor for the NEH for the forty volume series of Music in America and is just finishing an earthshaking new American musical history textbook for University use. It will churn the butter. What I, of course like, is that he has documented the same discoveries that I have also made, but not from the place of the performer but of the scholar.
Re: War, Confucious and the CBD
And I would guess that in xxx years from now people will look back on the commuters, subway riders and busy busy people and say what? You mean people went into a Kafka/Mondrian environment and parroted the party line just to get paid. No wonder there is so little incentive to break the work/income nexus. arthur -- From: Ed Weick To: Ray E. Harrell Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: War, Confucious and the CBD Date: Thursday, July 22, 1999 1:09PM Ray Evans Harrell: >It is inconceivable to one who has ridden the "can" down 800 >feet into the cold earth never knowing when a stone would come >loose from the cribbing and meet your head leaving you dead >before work even began, that this work would be glorified. >It is inconceivable that there is the glory in the hard monotony >and danger of the factory Hi Ray, I won't comment on Marx or Keynes except to say that your library book has wronged them both. However, I can't seem to above two sentences out of my mind. They capture or suggest something essential, but I'm not sure of what it is. I keep thinking of Stalin's Stakanovites (sp?), workers who were totally committed to production, risking everything so that they could exceed quotas which the state had set for them. They were glorified, made the subjects of speeches and songs and given medals. In retrospect, we see this as a cynical and false glory, but at the time and place, ever so many miners and factory workers believed that building socialism was the right thing to do, so glorifying the pace-setters does not seem so strange. I think too of the generations of people who did work long hours, indeed lifetimes, in mines and factories simply because they had to. There was no other way of making a living. Many of these people died accidentally or of occupational diseases, leaving wives and children to fend as best they could in a system without much social support. I agree that there was no glory in it, but there was something very much tougher -- an acceptance and gritty perseverance, and a recognition that there was no other way. Eventually, this grittiness and toughness led to the formation of powerful unions, an improvement in working conditions, and the passage of widely beneficial social legislation. As well, with the passage of time, older technologies were replaced by newer and more efficient ones. Both because of unions and the achievement of higher levels of productivity, incomes rose and ordinary people could afford to go see movies and plays. Entertainment became popularized. It was no longer the preserve of the rich. Perhaps, if one views it this way, there was some glory in it. We are the descendants and beneficiaries of the people who spent their lives sweating in the mines and factories. Yet not many of us would even give this a passing thought. We are much too busy zipping around in our minivans, chattering on our cell phones or playing with whatever other gadget fate seems to have thrust into our hands. Where all of this came from is not something we are very much bothered about. Ed Weick
Re: War, Confucious and the CBD
Ray Evans Harrell: >It is inconceivable to one who has ridden the "can" down 800 >feet into the cold earth never knowing when a stone would come >loose from the cribbing and meet your head leaving you dead >before work even began, that this work would be glorified. >It is inconceivable that there is the glory in the hard monotony >and danger of the factory Hi Ray, I won't comment on Marx or Keynes except to say that your library book has wronged them both. However, I can't seem to above two sentences out of my mind. They capture or suggest something essential, but I'm not sure of what it is. I keep thinking of Stalin's Stakanovites (sp?), workers who were totally committed to production, risking everything so that they could exceed quotas which the state had set for them. They were glorified, made the subjects of speeches and songs and given medals. In retrospect, we see this as a cynical and false glory, but at the time and place, ever so many miners and factory workers believed that building socialism was the right thing to do, so glorifying the pace-setters does not seem so strange. I think too of the generations of people who did work long hours, indeed lifetimes, in mines and factories simply because they had to. There was no other way of making a living. Many of these people died accidentally or of occupational diseases, leaving wives and children to fend as best they could in a system without much social support. I agree that there was no glory in it, but there was something very much tougher -- an acceptance and gritty perseverance, and a recognition that there was no other way. Eventually, this grittiness and toughness led to the formation of powerful unions, an improvement in working conditions, and the passage of widely beneficial social legislation. As well, with the passage of time, older technologies were replaced by newer and more efficient ones. Both because of unions and the achievement of higher levels of productivity, incomes rose and ordinary people could afford to go see movies and plays. Entertainment became popularized. It was no longer the preserve of the rich. Perhaps, if one views it this way, there was some glory in it. We are the descendants and beneficiaries of the people who spent their lives sweating in the mines and factories. Yet not many of us would even give this a passing thought. We are much too busy zipping around in our minivans, chattering on our cell phones or playing with whatever other gadget fate seems to have thrust into our hands. Where all of this came from is not something we are very much bothered about. Ed Weick
Re: War, Confucious and the CBD
Robert, My library book on Keynsian economics says basically the same thing. If your economy is in trouble start a war. (I can hear the apologist's keyboards rattle, "Marx wasn't an economist and Keynes didn't mean it.") One of the things that no one would consider (because it doesn't fit, into the "exploiters as progressives" mode), would be to return to the greatest use of Iron in the 19th century. Turn those swords and old automobiles into piano frames! We have such "ideas" about giving (or not) money away to that 40% or so of the population, that will not have the regular (exploitation and pollute) jobs, that we would rather argue about the meaning of drudge work than to come up with work that delights the eye, caresses the ear and makes the idea of tearing an eye from the socket or an arm from the shoulder acceptable only in a play. Better crime in the street from abused populations or war to lower that population and offer puberty rites than to have a play and self reflection on that brutality. Better to have a burial then have Wilfred Owen rise at the end of his poems and take a bow. Yes Brad, these are sacrifices that are like the ones you deplore. But the real sacrifice would have been to have this poet home writing about culture in the way he wrote about war. He could have written the 20th century version of Blake's economic observations: "Where are thy father & mother? say? They are both gone up to the church to pray. Because I was happy upon the heath, And smil'd among the winters snow: They clothed me in the clothes of death. And taught me to sing the notes of woe. And because I am happy, & dance & sing. They think they have done me no injury" And are gone to praise God & and his Priest & King Who make a heaven of our misery." == Brutality is not legislated away or solved by repression in children. It should be played out on the stage, not the stage of life, but the stage where people, both professional and amateur, can act the great lessons of life and explore the meanings of the composers and poets, the great ideals of their history, their present and their dreams. Since no one seemed to like my last post on this, I will let it go. I have much to do but I find this all very discouraging and more than a little cowardly on the part of those who are at present doing the "naming of the valuables" in society. So I go into lurking with a little Chinese wisdom from a dialogue with that great futurist Confucius: If it happens that one entrusts you with the government, what would you do first? "I would begin with correct definitions!" But that is far afield, Why should the Government bother? "When the names are not correct, then the language does not fit. When the language does not fit, then the actions will not be complete. When the actions are not complete, then civility does not blossom. When civility does not blossom, then authority falters. And when authority falters then the people do not know were to put their hands and feet. Therefore the wise scholar gives names such that language becomes possible, And uses language in such a way that wise action becomes possible. " == "Giving meaning to words is a creative act leading to manifestations in the real world" Winfried Dressler == A public leader needs to be > 1. ...in possession of the cultural inheritance. and needs to be qualified to > 2. ...participate in the contemporary world. > 3. ...contribute to the civilization of the future. John Warfield === As for Michael's Brain Drain, (CBD) America is currently filled with Canadian Culture and performing artists bringing millions of dollars back into the economy of Toronto in particular and Canada generally.It has worked for America's balance of trade payments, I suspect that a smaller country and a smaller population will benefit even more. However Canada has decided to go on the same "profit as the only value" binge that is currently infecting America's heart and brain. So the Canada Council, that jewel of North America, is probably on the way out, in which case you had better be prepared to compete with the giant to your south in the entertainment market place. Remember what happened to that wonderful Canadian "share the profits between projects" producer Garth Drabinsky. He met American "profit is the only value" shareholders and they crashed his empire. It isn't pretty. There are a lot more of your people working in Nova Scotia and around your country in the culture industries than ours are here, primarily because of what was an enlighted attitude on the part of the Canadian people. Where America gives less than a dollar per person to subsidize the arts, the last time I looked, Canada gave several dollars per person and Hollywood
