Parking the car this
morning a song came on I hadn’t heard in years:
“Obscene and Pornographic Art” by Bongwater. It is a rambling, erotic stroll by Ann
Magnuson through the Metropolitan Museum of Art that electrifies the otherwise
stayed middle-school tour destination with a Dionysian, unveiling of
art-through-the-ages. The scintillating
progression builds to an anthemic climax, of course, that had me doubled over
laughing in our rather public, garage in the basement:
And how 'bout those plump maidens?
Those hot cherubic babes being
presented to Apollo, Dionysus, Neptune or one of those other well hung Gods
huh?
What about them stripped
bare-assed naked like the day they was born
With their hands bound by garlands
and wet dewy budding blossoms ripe and tender to touch
Just like the lesbians in that
16th century tapestry
The one over the harpsichord
looking just like California blondes
Mmmmmmmmmmmmm
Just then three suffragettes
descend from the sky
On an old fashioned wooden deus ex
machina, singin'--
I ain't wearin' any underwear
I ain't wearin' any underwear
I ain't wearin' any underwear
I ain't wearin' any underwear
The Met should put this tune on the audio tour headphones
for singles night. I never knew much of
Bongwater’s other material from their brief career from 1985-1992. I’ll have to dig in. I miss the Met. There is nothing even remotely like it in
Beijing.
I finished Thomas More’s “Utopia” yesterday. He wouldn’t have approved. Though the Utopian’s might have. It’s hard to imagine how, without the
contrivance of satire he could have hoped to get away with a disruptive vision for
human society in the early sixteen century.
The depiction of the Utopians is relentlessly positive. They have, essentially figured it all out,
with the exception of Christianity and here too, they have taken to the Word,
rather quickly. I wonder which was more
shocking for its time: Bongwater’s erotic
trot through the Met in 1990 or Thomas More’s suggestion that the ideal society
would sensibly allow for thorough male and female naked body checks, yes,一丝不挂[1], prior marriage. Here is a passage on the Utopian’s approach
to premarital evaluation.
In choosing their wives they use a
method that would appear to us very absurd and ridiculous. But it is consistently observed among them
and is accounted perfectly consistent with wisdom. Before marriage some grave matron presents
the bride naked, whether she is a virgin or a widow to the bridegroom and after
that some grave man presents the bridegroom naked to the bride. We indeed both laughed at this, and condemned
it as very indecent. But they, on the
other hand, wondered at the folly of the men of all other nations, who, if they
are but to buy a horse of a small value, are so cautious, that they will see
every part of him, and take off both his saddle and all his other tackle, that
there may be no secret ulcer hid under any of them; and that yet in the choice
of a wife, on which depends the happiness or unhappiness of the rest of his
life, a man should venture upon trust , and only see about a hand’s breadth of
the face, all the rest of the body being covered, under which there may lie
hid, what may be contagious, as well as
loathsome. All men are not so wise as
to consider the body as that which adds not a little to the mind: and it is
certain there may be some such deformity covered too late to part with
her. If such a thing is discovered after
marriage, a man has no remedy but patience.
They therefore think it is reasonable that there should be good
provision made against such mischievous frauds.
Somehow I find it refreshing that a man who was prepared to
have his head removed for his faith could not only write something so
provocative but cast himself within the story, initially at least, as a man who
gut-laughs before deigning to comment on the relative decency of anything. It is, first and foremost, funny. He set it up in the tale, first and foremost,
to be funny, as well. As I suggested two
posts back, rich British humor is there in bloom, four hundred and fifty years
before Monty Python. But the sense of
imperial entitlement is still pending.
And to the point yesterday, Utopia is certainly a new
world. Perhaps it would only have been
possible in place and time when horizons were being expanded so quickly. One could go somewhere new, over the sea and
try to build a perfect society. The ”New
World” would of course become the canvas for centuries of such efforts,
journeys originally undertaken to reach the China and its goods, which they
knew were out there.
With the exception, perhaps, of the introduction of the
Buddhist tradition, China had no compelling evidence, causing them to think of
themselves as anything other than the apex of human civilization. All of this self-centered satisfaction left
them open to a rather profound comeuppance in the middle of the nineteenth
century. Thomas More is an intellect of
Western Civilization during early sixteenth century. He’s a faithful Christian and a student of
ancient Greece and Rome, but still, he seems to think there is something
better, out there, somewhere. Something
better is possible beyond the tradition.
China wouldn’t really feel this way ever till the mid-nineteenth
century. As I said, if they wanted to
find something better, they looked back.
And the West, once the world is explored and mapped, and all the other
of the earth’s civilization’s are subdued, begins to become comfortable with
the notion that it is the apex of human civilization. And this has continued, largely, as a subtle
default till today. And it may be that a
decisive comeuppance, wherein we commence to desperately envy another
civilization’s ability to drive modernity and the power that comes with it, used,
perhaps, to our detriment, is looming in our time.
This is a brief section from the “Invidia” chapter of “The
Seven Deadly Starbucks” (7DS) set in my neighborhood Starbucks. Envy is the metaphor to explore driving
around that neighborhood in my Honda Odyssey.
Envy sloshes about our suburb like
it does around the region. China lives
in a vexing neighborhood with little trust and lots of disruptive
momentum. Envy as it concerned most things
traditionally flowed in one direction, from the periphery, into China. China was clearly the center of the civilized
world. What else could be so big, so
old, so refined? The vicissitudes of
this dynastic cycle or that might make the Middle Kingdom a rather less than
enviable place to be from time to time, but even the conquerors, the Mongols,
the Liao, the Jurchens, paid the vanquished the ultimate conceit. They tried, largely, to become Chinese.
The Chinese and their neighbors had
no reason to doubt Chinese preeminence till about 1839 or so. The modern world then forced China to
reconsider everything. Suddenly it
became clear that there were many, many things that China didn’t have and
needed, immediately. China would not be
able to defend itself if it didn’t learn from outside. China wanted to leverage these foreign forms
and imbue them with Chinese spirit. And
this proved impossible as the handling of the forms began to alter the nature
of the handler’s essence. For the first
time envy began to flow, convincingly, outward. Wholesale cultural envy was new. A bitter, grinding envy for a
tradition-bound, continental giant, ever more aware of what it required, but
unable to do anything about it, quickly.
[1]
Yīsībùguà: not wearing one thread
(idiom); absolutely naked / without a stitch of clothing / in one's birthday
sui
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