Grandson of Psychoanalysis

You know you've missed something sometime somewhere when you are reading a newspaper of a beloved or at least well-known figure, and there is a steady use of verbs in the past tense. And it's not an obituary--what's going on here...

Such a thing happened to me the other day, when reading about Lucian Freud, the British figure painter known for jarring portraits, obsessively detailed and full of impasto, paradoxically. Included in any  paragraph about the painter, usually set within the first sentence, would be the note that he was Sigmund Freud's grandson. When I wikied him, I didn't feel too weird about his lateness, seeing that he had died only a year ago.

 (It wasn't like others, such as Ed Bradley, 60 minutes newscaster, who had been gone for eons before I found out about it. As an expat I sometimes experience holes of knowledge, being somewhat removed from my culture, even though I am fairly plugged into the world.)

What jarred me, more than missing the younger Freud's death, was reading that he was 88 years old! My word... I had been laboring under the idea that he was part of that younger generation, the rock stars that had reshaped the world--Beatles, David Hockney, that sort--the mod squad. Sure, all of them are getting older, Mick Jaggerish in their leathered skin... but getting up into the late 80s? The upper years, wherein grandmas survive tenaciously? This age seems more fit for Sigmund Freud's son, but his grandson already? Is the father of psychoanalysis so far back there in the grainy era? Are we not still enjoying all the things Freud made possible or informed--Alfred Hitchcock thrillers, cartoons, surrealism, (photoshopping) Sci-Fi B movies... Time is really marching on!

Rodney King

Rodney King takes me back to NY in the early 90s, when a feeling of martial law engulfed the city during one evening. The city was battening down the hatches, as were other cities, fearing contagion of the riots then incinerating LA. It turned out that NY remained calm, with nary a fatality. I seem to remember one Korean shop worker was killed, but that would have been a standard statistic, when the city was a rougher place than it is today (homicide rates were around 3,000 per year.)

The King riots might be the last of the great racial/class riots of the US. Though still breaking out in Europe (remember last summer's U.K. hoody mayhem) this phenomenon has cooled down much stateside, since it began in the 1960s. In one way the King riots signaled the end of an era, but in another way, his video-captured beating brought in a new era.  The ubiquity of camera phones and Youtube have probably altered police behavior.

I was surprised to read of King's death. Just a month or two ago I had heard an interview with him, when he was publicizing his memoir. He seemed a happy man, mellowed by time generously compensated, thanks to a civil suit. His swimming pool death is eerily familiar--seems that many LA celebrities, or their spouses, die this way.

Rich history of childhood ghouls

Recently I read Kirk Demarais' wonderful book, Mail-order Mysteries (Real Stuff from Old Comic Book Ads) and was jolted to see several artifacts long forgotten. Perhaps the best was the Ghoul, a mask not thought of for perhaps 40 years.

This book explains dozens of fascinating things I only imagined--because I was a kid of too modest means, never being able to afford anything in the advertisements at the time. (Heck, I couldn't even afford the comic books in which these ads were printed, relishing the one or two comics my Grandma would buy for me each summer, before a camping trip!)

But some of the things in this book I actually saw and touched in childhood, finding treasures in my grandparents' basement. This place held a tremendous, intoxicating pull for me, for it offered a window into the world of of my uncle and father's childhood or teen years in the 1960s, a rich place. Literally rich, apparently. They evidently had had access to resources enough to have purchased things like this Ghoul Mask in their youth.

I had a good childhood, but in retrospect I see that it was probably more puritan, more modest than the generation before me. (This perhaps steeled me for the age of austerity that grinds on endlessly year after year, thanks to factors of globalization and technology. Are we hapless zombies or potato sack-wearing somnambulists, stumbling in the great "race to the bottom?") 

Not only were my means more modest, I suspect that my mother would have forbade much of the grotesque and muscular expressions, the monsters of the early 60s youth culture. A perfect example is this mask, the Ghoul, made by Topstone Company of Connecticut. Holy Mackerel--can you imagine something like this coming out of CT today?

Though I can't recall the exact moment I discovered this mask in the basement, I can imagine that I probably thought it first a slightly crusty rag, as I withdrew it from the corner of a drawer of closet, sharing the sweet dust of Outer Limits cards or gumball charms. Unfurling the rubber, I would have discovered this thing was a ghastly mask, a magical thing. It was scary enough just to handle, with its texture of mummified skin, in some places flaccid, in others, crusty, the latex aging. I think I scared the bejezuss out of my younger brother when I wore it (or was it the reverse, when he wore it?) Who knows what happened to it?

Thanks to books, the Internet, and eBay, I can see it again, rekindling a moment of wonder and horror long dormant.

Dick Clark

Here's a rare collector's item from yesteryear, inspired by the B-movie spate of "I was a teenage" movies of the 50s/60s.

I heard of Dick Clark's death last week, and was propelled into the multiverse, experiencing Art Bell's  phenomenon of the Nelson Mandela Paradox. (The experience of being sure that such and such a person is dead in one's familiar universe; when hearing that the person is alive, or has just died, it gives you a jolt,  giving question to your firm place in time and space.)

This phenomenon happens most relative to personages with whom you have little strong association--just neutral bits of culture. Such is the case with Clark, representative of tribal youth culture and its  artifacts.

THOMAS KINKADE

Above is an illustration I photoshopped just now, after reading that Thomas Kinkade died. I combined one of his typical posters with a waif painted by Keane. Before Kinkade assumed the mantel of kitsch-master sometime in the 1990s, Walt/Margaret Keane had dominated this genre in the U.S.

My illustration serves a few different points that are interesting to me:

• Kitsch is transitory.  While Kinkade's sugary landscape looks familiar (part of our time, betokening CG films, Disney, etc.) the big-eyed waif looks foreign. Once a staple of popular visual culture (seen in millions of homes, and stacked in any thrift shop or garage sale), the Keane waif stands to be forgotten. Something of her sweetness, however, lives on in the Japanese esthetic for cure big-eyed products. 
• Kitsch knows borders. Living as I do in Norway, I was startled to hear of Kinkade's death more than a week after it was common knowledge in the U.S. Kinkade is virtually unknown in Europe. His style apparently appeals to a certain conservative puritan attitude only within the US. (Keane assiduously avoided any whiff of natural forces, keeping his scenes free of weather, predation, or nudity.)

Thomas Kinkade was a CEO, a procurer for what the populace wanted. Therefore it fits that we know not his face, but only his style. He's different from the likes of the Keanes, who aired their laundry in the public courts for decades, battling each other like characters in a Tennessee Williams play. In contrast, the Kinkade family is tight-lipped, offering a controlled statement to the press as to the CEO's passing, allowing us to only speculate as to the cause of death at the relatively young age of 54.

It is interesting to study American kitsch relative to other powerful versions, such as Communist Social 

Realism (Soviet, Chinese, N. Korean), or Fascism (German or Italian.) American kitsch is bottom up, the artist procuring for the wants of the masses. The other cited versions of kitsch are more top down, driven by authoritarian didactics, rather than mass market forces.

Norway's most famous living painter, Odd Nerdrum, has yet more interesting ideas on the nature of kitsch.

Governor Gloom Still Alive

When I was in college at the University of Denver in the 1980s, Richard Lamm, governor of the state of Colorado, was making national news. “People who die without having life artificially extended are similar to ''leaves falling off a tree and forming humus for the other plants to grow up”, is an example of one of his frank statements, earning him the nickname, Governor Gloom. I was assuming that he had died, but when I googled him I found he is still very much alive. According to Wikipedia Richard Lamm is currently a professor at my alma mater. He is a novelist and occasionally writes controversial articles. Why haven't I heard about him for so long?

The simple answer is that he no longer holds such a high profile office. But the more interesting answer can be found in the meditation on how times have changed. While Gov. Lamm was unique in his time, doom and gloom has since become the coin of the realm, the standard rhetorical currency of our time. Right or left of the political spectrum, we hear it constantly.

Republican candidate Rick Santorum invokes old-time indignation often. Lucifer is incarnate, his minions eating away the morals in literal ways. Stalinist legislations from the White House force abortion drugs, bought by employers under the onerous, monolithic Obama-care. An evil pall lies over the land, legacy of J.F.K., whose vile speeches are enough to cause Santorum to actually retch.

Less on the explicitly moralistic side, and more on the fiscal side of Gloom and Doom, was last year's great “chicken” game over the rise of the Federal Debt Ceiling. When Republicans took control of the House in the midterm elections they felt empowered to deny Obama's tax increase proposal alongside spending cuts. It looked like the U.S. was about to default on its debt, but at the last minute they agreed on some spending cuts and a debt rise. It was a white-nuckler.

Forever there is a gnawing fear about the astronomically, incomprehensibly high national debt, and what it portends for the future of Social Security and Medicare: an uneasy sense of doom somewhere out ahead. The same uneasiness can be felt in the EU, when similar “chicken games” play out, such as the recent agreement over Greek debt and bond holders' final haircut.

Doom and Gloom is equally important, perhaps even more important, on the left of the political spectrum. Climate Change policy is full of Doom and Gloom. The planets' population spirals forever upward, while resources dry up. Cities and countries crumble and flood, from New Orleans to Haiti, to Fukashima. Tsunamis, rising sea levels, and increasingly volatile weather patterns cause disasters or “reverse miracles” that could have been described in the wrathful prose of the Old Testament.

Back to Governor Gloom, here's an interesting predictive quote: "The U.S. economy will be debt-ridden, with structural unemployment nearing 20 percent. The U.S. will have the lowest percentage of capital investment and lowest growth in productivity and savings of any major industrialized country. The middle class will be wiped out by these inter-related economic predicaments. …”

Davy Jones

Hey Hey We're the Monkees!

The decade of the 60s hung in the air still, but only in the form of flotsam and jetsam. In the early 70s we kids didn't know what it all meant. Strange chemicals lay as chem trails in the cultural ether--Agent Orange, LSD, PCP, THC--and the ferrous-smelling molecules of recent assassinations, a heavy aerosol of blood droplets from RFK, MLK, Manson, and Kent State. Before Commercial News Network took over, the three old TV network ushered into our family rooms graphic scenes of  the marching carnal house that was Viet Nam, as presidents LBJ and Nixon painted themselves into corners.

Relief was at hand Saturday mornings when The Monkees took over.  Playing in a slot sandwiched by cartoons, this program was a zany adventure featuring a wholesome boy band, whose driving force, apparently, was Davy Jones. The style of filming was inspired by the proto-music videos of Beatles    zaniness. Jones and his Monkees, however, were not as testy as the original four, hardened as they were in habits from the underground years in salty districts of Germany and England.

After interest in 60s psychedelia ebbed, team-player Jones parlayed his career into a successful second phase as a valuable character in Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. Disney's ride at Disney World featured a roller coaster passing through a world of automated skeletons, spawning a model-building craze for the macabre. Concurrently, the works of H.P.Lovecraft gained sway, offering a cosmology lead by the tentacled one, Lord Cthulhu, crypt-keeper of the cosmos.

Medical technology offered Jones an unusual opportunity around the in the early 2000s when cyclosporine, a imminosuppressive drug derived from a Norwegian fungus, was discovered. This allowed Jones to have one of the first human-cephalapod partial facial transplants. He thrived with his new role and look, bringing a prehensile realism to his role in the Pirates movies. Despite his unorthodox look and physical state, his recent death appears to be natural.