The enlargeable Jerusalem photo beamed to us by Todd Bolen via bibleplaces.com. We are probably looking at the Christian or the Arab quarters of the old city. Comfortably reclining under the sun are the square and symmetrical wattage of the solar panels, the high-strung, cross-like “traditional” TV antennas, the voluptuous water barrels painted black to appear thinner and to trap heat, the breathlessly perspiring condensation boxes and of course the attentively detached, confidently dominant satellite TV dishes. That house in the middle got more disks than apartments, perhaps a radio signal outpost? What the dude on the broadcast minaret is thinking when he dishes the takbir, is the reception as good? The Crescent Moon above the minaret’s green dome wired somewhere down below, it moonlights as a lightning rod for the neighborhood.
Behold an allegorical layer superimposed on the ancient urban fabric. The “dish veil” looks like a foreign fashion. But if you walk the narrow streets facing the facades you will hardly see it. The “dish veil” is easily and quickly removable. To clean the dirty dishes off the table slate grab the four corners of a magical tablecloth…abracadabra there is no trace of the feast for the senses, the buildings appear au naturel circa 18th century – naked, pure and innocent like Adam and Eve. Yet there is the claustrophobic, choking, uneasy apprehension that all the gadgets are permanently anchored, dialed directly into the brains of the inhabitants, the tubes of the information life support IV dripping into the blood stream of imagination. You can picture the wires snaking down the soft, apple rotten crevasses of the pale, pinkish limestone, plugged and soldered into the human conscience circuit. A reversal along the metaphorical vertical access, the flip of the modernity flop played out on the most stubborn of stages. Traditionally the submerged dark mystery is below ground in the proverbial basement, the hidden foundation, while the persona emerges above ground lit by the sun. Here the captured sun energy descents from the soaked with revelation firmament to energize and illuminate the concealed subterranean layer of dreams and desires. The Jerusalem roof is the new spiritual catacomb. The Jerusalem of Gold glistening with shadows of the parabolic reflections.
John Frederick Lewis, Two horses pulling a plough, viewed from the back, c. 1820
We can’t define an intellectual by the volume of his database. Not even by his or her ability to reason. Alain de Botton writes that “a wealthy family in England in 1250 might have had three books in its possession: a Bible, a collection of prayers and a life of the saints”. They are not less intelligent than a college graduate in humanities after reading a thousand books. So intelligence is not a familiarity with the contemporary European philosophy, comparative fluency or ability to memorize. Intelligence is curiosity. This curiosity in turn fuels the exploration of a subject or an object.
I meet many people who have an enormous mental database covering a vast filed of knowledge. Yet they became jaded and lost their curiosity. It’s hard to describe these people as “intelligent”.
There are the current laments about the lack of intellectuals among the modern orthodox here and here (and not even an expectation about the other streams). This is unfair to people brought up or converted to the dogmatic culture. You can’t hold people responsible for the lack of curiosity if they are indoctrinated into a system that presumes and postulates more answers than questions. Centuries of breeding out the curious and curiosity as an undesirable trait are finally paying off.
Images licensed courtesy of Picture Library of the Royal Academy of Arts
Pope Paul II by Cristoforo dell'Altissimo
So I am hearing about all the “Tsars” in the Obama administration, what’s with the name and the authoritarian implications?
Let’s start from the pivotal time in history. Thomas Palaiologina (1409-1465) was a brother of the last Byzantine Emperor Constantine XI (slaughtered by the Turks after the conquest of Constantinople). Thomas Palaiologina technically ruled over the Greek province of Morea and had the tile of “Despot” (not a bad name in those days). Thomas was eventually kicked out of Morea by the Turks and with his family found a refuge in the Papal Rome. He even converted to the Catholicism before his death. Zoe Palaiologina (1455-1503) was the daughter of the Despot Thomas. The Byzantine royal orphans, Zoe and her brothers, were looked after by the Pope Paul II.
Russia, at the time under the rule of Ivan III (Ivan the Great, 1440-1505), was emerging as a superpower. The Pope had a brilliant idea that proved to be the worst political move ever. In hope of bringing about the reunification of the Russian and the Catholic Churches, he sent Zoe Palaiologina to the widower Ivan III as a bride, together with the Cardinal Johannes Bessarion as a persuader. Ivan took Zoe as his wife and promptly discharged the Cardinal back to the Eternal City (Popes should stay the heck away from the matchmaking business).
Marble plaque with double-headed eagle in Mystras (birthplace of Zoe in Morea, Greece), marking the spot where the last Byzantine emperor, Constantine XI (Zoe's uncle), was crowned.
Zoe, who changed her name to Sophia while in Rome (Софья (Зоя) Палеолог), had an enormous influence on her husband and on the entire Mother Russia. She initiated Ivan III into the ceremonies and traditions of the Byzantine, more importantly she told him to have fewer consultations with his “parliament” of boyars. Zoe planted in Ivan’s head the idea of Russia as the Third Rome. This was the time when the Russian kings re-branded themselves as Tsars (Csar), a corruption of Caesar. Caesar was originally just the last name of Julius Caesar (ironically caesar being the Latin for hairy) but it became a royal title in the late Roman and Byzantine empires. The name Tsar in Kremlin was intended to solidify the symbolism of Russia as the Third Rome (same as the future German imperial Kaisar). The Double Headed Eagle, the ancient Byzantine symbol, was then introduced as the state seal.
Comrade Putin under the Double Headed Eagle
Ivan III groomed his grandson from his first marriage Dmitry to succeed him as the king. Zoe outmaneuvered Dmitry, convinced Ivan III to install their son Vassily as the Tsar (and had Dmitry and his mother imprisoned). Now, Vassily’s future son was the infamous Ivan the Terrible who was, if are you still following, the grandson of the Byzantine princess raised by the Pope.
At the time in Russia there was the Sect of Skhariya the Jew. Zacharia ben Ahron ha-Cohen from Lithuania was a scholar and translator of scripture who moved to Kiev and then to Novgorod (1470), he was successful in preaching Judaic religious and political concepts to the prominent church authorities and the feudal lords. His sect (Жидовствующие) had powerful patrons including the presumed future king Dmitry and even had the ear of Ivan the Great. (“…this heretical movement spread over Moscow. In 1480, even Ivan III himself invited a few prominent sectarians to visit the city. The Grand Prince’s seemingly strange behavior could be explained by the fact that he had greatly sympathized with heretics’ ideas of secularization and the struggle against feudal division. Thus, the Judaizers enjoyed the support of high-ranking officials, statesmen, merchants”). With the loss of protection from Dmitry, after Vassily’s succession, the Judaic sect was dismantled and some of the heretics burned at the stake (this incidentally might be a factor in the institutionalized monarchical antisemitism in Russia). It’s entirely in the realm of possibility, that if not for the intervention of the Pope’s gift of Zoe, Russia under Dmitry would have become a Judaic state (like the Khazars). Instead, contrary to the Papal political interests, the Great Matriarchy was strengthened as the ideological center of the Greek Orthodoxy and carried on the traditions of the fallen Byzantine Empire.
Zoe's grandson Ivan The Terrible
Back to the New World and the etymological somersault of the term Tsar in America, specifically the executive appointment of a “Drug Tsar” during the Reagan administration (1982). Naturally it made the perfect sense with Russia officially still “the evil empire”. And of course the logical “King” title is historically inappropriate in America. The throwback usage of the intimidating “Tsar” or “Csar” is understandable since the Ceasar(s) brand was relaunched in America as a casino chain, not to mention the crunchy salad that smells of garlic and the Parmesan cheese. The Ceasar(s) American undertone alludes to the hedonistic Rome, inviting the getaway good times and the carnival debauchery, rather than the overtone of the Tsarist, Kremlin-like domination. And the “Tsar” trademark is pretty safe, never to be confused with a salad. It’s like – “Can I have a little “Ivan the Terrible” with extra onions, cucumbers and the Italian dressing on the side?” Don’t think this will catch on.
Following “the best documentary ever made” The Century of the Self, in 2007 Adam Curtis produced the three part BBC series The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom. The weakness and the strength of Adam Curtis is that he uses the broadest of the strokes. But he is the master of zeroing in on personalities pivotal for the history of ideas. In the third part of The Trap – We Will Force You To Be Free (Google Video) Adam Curtis describes the central ideological confrontation of the post WWII 20th century. On one side was Sir Isaiah Berlin who believed that the terror and the slaughter inevitable in revolutions should be avoided at all costs. Isaiah Berlin argued that a society without coercion, even if it negates progress and promotes inequality (welcome to America), is better than any progressive violent revolutions. On the other side was the inheritor of the French revolutionary tradition Jean-Paul Sartre who preached terror as just and required for progress. The idea was the underpinning of the African revolutionary Frantz Fanon, Yassir Arafat, Pol Pot in Cambodia, Ali Shariati and Ayatollah Khomeini and many “national liberation movements”. ( BTW, the description of the Lubavitcher Rebbe as existentialist is a severe misreading (The Rebbe and French Existentialism by Ephraim Rosenstein). Just the opposite is true (see my post The Offbeat Biography of the Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson). This is the classic case of confusion between the rhetoric and reality. The Rebbe for sure sided with his relative Isaiah Berlin, but his revolutionary rhetoric was just that. In fact the Rebbe never failed not take sides in any argument, let alone believed in the active and violent overthrows).
At the end of then film there is Tony Blair and the American neo-cons who imagine a revolution without a revolution, without the terror, etc., the position that proved to be unrealistic, especially in Iraq.
P.S. Today Slavoj Zizek is the most visible proponent of the violent revolutionary ethos (video Žižek on Robespierre and la Terreur).
Prof. Robert Sapolsky grew up orthodox in Brooklyn; he rebelled against the religion when he was 14-15 and went on to become a Professor of Biology, Neurology and Neurosurgery at the Stanford University. He received the MacArthur Fellowship genius grant in 1987. This is the long lecture on religion by Robert Sapolsky delivered at Stanford. Especially interesting is the definition of the Schizotypal personality, the latent variant Schizophrenia and the analogy with Tay-Sachs. The fascinating definition of the Metamagical Thinking. ►►►read more
To take my review Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans by Werner Herzog, a notch deeper. Freudian Death Wish is not a death wish at all. A good rule of thumb with these concepts is to turn the obvious reading on its head. The Death Wish is the desire to control the most uncontrollable event, to become a master of own destiny. Freud’s Death Wish is an attempt to reach for the eternity, to become transcendent, to live forever and ever.
The Bad Lieutenant Terence McDonagh (Nicolas Cage) is the latest in line of the characters who can only become good by being bad. This mirroring of good and evil classically played out between Al Pacino and Robert De Niro in the 1995 hit “Heat”. There Al Pacino is faced with the eternal dilemma – to catch the bad guys he must enter their world, become as bad as the bad itself. Can he stay human in the process?
Fast froward to the Werner Herzog’s take on the subject. The Bad Lieutenant Terence McDonagh descends to the dark side, till he becomes indistinguishable from the criminals, he actually partners with the dealers and killers. He is a gambler, a junkie and by becoming part of a murder he solves the crime. Can he still remain a human? This is an open-ended question but there is hope also involving a symmetry and a reversal. In the beginning of the movie the Bad Lieutenant unselfishly saves the life of a prisoner and sustains a life long injury. The same former prisoner appears in the last frames of the film to save the Bad Lieutenant’s life, again a symbolic reversal. Also in a reversal the killer Big Fate is dreaming of being ” good”, of turning the town around, of a legitimate businessmen as he disposes a corpse.
But there is another character, the Jewish gangster Eugene Gratz (Marco St. John) who seems without any redeeming qualities whatsoever. We know he is a Jew because the writer William Finkelstein (of LA Law fame) makes him say two Yiddish code words – shvantz and punim. And true to the symmetry he must be the very goodness in the evil disguise. In an unscripted moment Werner Herzog shows his swirling soul dance after he is murdered, he is the transcendent. Growing up in the postwar Bavaria, Hertzog knows a thing or two about those hovering souls.
On the subject of Horizontal Axis in Religious Worship. One of the greatest creative achievements of the Kabbalists following Moshe De Leon was the multidimensional vision of the universe. Even the word sefira implied a sphere, a circle and gematria is of course geometría. Kabbalists poetically imagined the geometric structure where the smallest part contains biggest and hiskollelus or inclusion and interconnection form the kabbalistic cosmos. After the eruption of the vision, it was inevitable that just few centuries later the science would articulate the same idea. Compare the kabbalistic cosmos and the discovery by Galileo Galilei.
Sefirot in Kabbalah, Moshe De Leon 1250 – 1305
The phases of Venus, observed by Galileo in 1610
The catholic apparatchiks couldn’t care less if the earth was a flat rock or a ball. But the spherical cosmos deprived them of the earthly hierarchy, of the top and down, the low and high. This was a management problem. The Pope needs to be on top at all times and that requires the flattened subjects.
Chassidim, especially Chabad, did their best to downplay the complex multidimensional cosmology of Kabbalah and substitute it instead with a pure vertical axis. The geometric metaphor repeatedly evoked in Chabad (and especially during the communist/fascist era) is up and down, high and low. For the same reason that the Catholic apparatchiks preferred a flat earth, Chabad commissars saw the world divided into high, low and not low enough (bittul). “And yet it moves!”- Galileo.
I have been thinking about this film for a couple of days, a serious work of art. This is not a nostalgic flick, nor is this a sugar flavored tale set in the old country. This is a very personal film about St. Louis Park, Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis. The film is set in 1967, the year the character of the movie Danny Gopnik and the older brother Joel Coen had his bar mitzvah. Although 1967 is not mentioned in the film, the brothers are very specific, in an interview they said “if it was 1966 or 1968 it would have looked differently”.
There is this idea promoted by Tyler Cowen (another misspelling of Cohen?) in his blog and in his latest book. He speaks of the new Internet Autism. Tyler says that autistic people channel the world, they ignore and block-out vast areas of human experience and instead focus intensely on a specific channel. Hence the new Internet Autism that enables all of us to channel and remix the news and the information stream hyper locally and super narrowly and autistically ignore the rest. Perhaps now I have the key to the body of their work. The Coen Brothers are autistically sensory, they recognize the smells, the images, the sounds, the faces, the tension with the goy next door, the village hottie, the inevitable uncle with an intestinal problem, etc. And this is the reason their (and Tarantino’s films) resonate so viscerally today when this sensory range is at the forefront of the contemporary culture. But the curse of the Jewish is in the Text, it autistically ignores precisely the sensory range so dominant in Coen’s (and Tarantino) films. This is in a nutshell is the age old problem with Jewish education and tradition, sometimes mislabeled as the problem with the “Jewish Religion” (although it’s hard to separate the two).
And so the Coen Brothers created a personal epic, the most meaningful film about suburban Jewish America. Granted I see the film through the eyes of Danny Gopnik, not his father Larry who is the main character of the movie. After all this is the personal vision at the heart of the story.
Larry Gopnik in his class
“A Serious Man” is the most amazingly textured film that condemns the textual. The horror and the dull ugliness of a Midwestern suburbia recreated with the vividness of a sensitive teenager. The minor characters bulge to the screen as grotesque exaggerated caricatures with comic bodies and movements. Those minor characters hold the film together, the story is framed in between the visits to the three Rabbis. And then there is the musical channel, the Jefferson Airplane song “Somebody to Love” takes turns with a Yiddish song. In an interview the brothers said it was the musical backdrop – “rock ‘n’ roll and the Cantorial music”. And this brings us to the channel that is autistically tuned off by Danny Gopnik, the day school and more broadly the textual. He sits in his Hebrew class with a secret radio plug in his ear and goes through school, and specifically through his bar mitzvah ceremony in a pot induced daze.
The film opens with a rashi quote: “accept with simplicity everything that happens to you”
( תמים תהיה עם ה’ אלקיך (דברים י”ח : י”ג
התהלך עמו בתמימות ותצפה לו, ולא תחקור אחרי העתידות, אלא כל מה שיבוא עליך קבל בתמימות, ואז תהיה עמו ולחלקו
Larry Gopnik, the father, enters a Kafkaesque plot preempted by the five-minute Yiddish mini-film. An episode with the Dybbuk somewhere between Lvov and Lublin. And although there is no obvious connection to rest of the story, I see it as an announcement by the Coen brothers that the film is about Jews who call themselves ivrim because they are m’ever, from the other side of the river and everything they do is connected to what happened elsewhere, i.e not here. Ethan Coen said “it feels right”. The paradox of this film is that you are not really sure if this is a comedy or a horror. I am leaning and landing on the horror side of the river.
Danny Gopnik meeting Marshak
P.S. Notes from the nitpicking department (blame Scarsdale Rabbi Dan Sklar, the consultant):
- If you are in Poland don’t mix Polish and Litvish Yiddish dialects.
- Dybbuk is the Amercan projection on the Polish Yiddish culture (even though the original movie Dybbuk was produced in Poland), you could do better to authentically evoke that time .
- In Poland they wouldn’t call the holy town of Lemberg, Lvov (this is the Russian name of the town after the Ukrainian Lviv).
- Mrs. Gopnik, not having a get doesn’t mean you are an aguna.
- The character of the 3rd Rabbi Marshak. My guess is that the prototype was Rabbi Jacob Twerski? I doubt he had an open Sephardic style Sefer Tora with a human skull lodged in it, nor is Rabbi Jacob Twerski going to have a reproduction of the 1601 “The Sacrifice of Isaac” by Caravaggio on his wall. But knowing the Twerskis, he indeed could have had some strange animals in formaldehyde around.
- The suede yarmulkes (and those metal clips) were not yet invented in 1967.
Caravaggio, "The Sacrifice of Isaac" 1601 -1602, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence
The Caravaggio published with permission from the Web Gallery of Art
Human Stature of Liberty. 18,000 officers and soldiers at Camp Dodge in Des Moines
The BBC series The Century of the Self created by Adam Curtis, first screened in 2002. Top reason to watch the series:
- Probably the most significant TV documentary ever made.
- It sheds light on Sigmund Freud’s American nephew Edward Bernays who created PR as we know it.
- The rare video footage of Sigmund Freud.
- It explains the obscure but powerful undercurrents of the American and world history.
This is a film of unprecedented significance. I don’t think I ever watched a documentary that is so enlightening and far reaching. Truly life changing in a meaningful way. ►►►read more
Andrea asked me to write about selling. I am just an observer of this space, I don’t claim the expertise.
An art is a mixture of myth attached to an object [see my post about myth and books]. Myth sells the object but the ratio varies. Sometimes an inspired myth follows a benign object and sometimes an outstanding object can’t find its myth. In the past an art required an unquestionable skill and art preceded the myth. Today the ratio is trending towards the myth and myth alone.
In the past art and books were created by and for the literate gentry, so there was the sophistication and culture that could recognize object almost independent of a myth. Mass forms of expression like radio, TV and film superseded the traditional art as an artistic outlet of the post industrial middle class. So not only art appreciation is a challenge but the myth mongers of the modern art criticism deliberately advanced the idea that any art is just a myth. Tom Wolfe wrote a definitive small book about it – The Painted Word. The unintended expression of the Jewish tradition claims art is an abstractly defined mythology. Bunch of Jewish art critics anointed as the high priests of modernism decided who is rich and famous depending on a prophetic dream. As it became more difficult to get noticed the shock value of an object has increased. One needs to shock to get noticed. Of course the carpet image bombing desensitized people, even to most shocking “art”.
The ubiquitous innovation of the online world is that you can get noticed without an intermediary but there is a catch. People who started blogging ten years ago indeed could get noticed, but the blogosphere is so saturated now that we are back to the dominance of the retched middle man, even online. Someone with authority must link it, even above the noise of the social media.
There is also a perception that you don’t need that many fans to sell, the advance of the hyper-local blogging and the notion that as long as you have even a narrow base you can sell to it. I am not sure about this. Hugh says you don’t need that many fans, but he is really a copywriter that creates catchy jungles attached to simple illustrations. His art is all myth propelled by the early adopter status. I don’t think it’s impossible to get noticed online, but most people don’t realize how much work it requires, especially today, perhaps always.
I know this is not much of the a practical advice. But I believe in these truths. People create art because it is how they think and experience the world. True artists do this because they can’t help themselves, this is an unstoppable force and addiction with unexpected reward. A true artist is ahead of his or her time by the McLuhanian definition. Be patient, preserver online and do go to all the parties. The purveyor of luck will have no choice but to smile upon you.
The enlargeable Jerusalem photo beamed to us by Todd Bolen via bibleplaces.com. We are probably looking at the Christian or the Arab quarters of the old city. Comfortably reclining under the sun are the square and symmetrical wattage of the solar panels, the high-strung, cross-like “traditional” TV antennas, the voluptuous water barrels painted black to appear thinner and to trap heat, the breathlessly perspiring condensation boxes and of course the attentively detached, confidently dominant satellite TV dishes. That house in the middle got more disks than apartments, perhaps a radio signal outpost? What the dude on the broadcast minaret is thinking when he dishes the takbir, is the reception as good? The Crescent Moon above the minaret’s green dome wired somewhere down below, it moonlights as a lightning rod for the neighborhood.
A Virtual Community is an Oxymoron
by Ben Atlas on 02.5.2010.10:30am · 0 comments
Every single thriving online forum is an outlet of a community or an interest that already exists off-line. People who like a certain team, etc. naturally extend the actual interest, a hobby into a virtual community. So the online forums are the reflections of the ideological, religious or national tribes. Online forums complement a niche but they never create a niche (some idiots who claim there are no communities online, they are blind to the fact that online communities only mirror real social and ideological groups).
The cutting edge ideas or the proverbial out of the box thinking gets little traction on the internet. People seek distraction and confirmation not an intellectual disturbance (I wrote about this in The Tension and Pretension of Blogging). This is by the way why I turned off the comments. I reflect about the eclectic mix that has no real life base and is not narrow enough to generate an uber abstract, pointless chatter. But the bottom line is that the people who imagine that they can reverse engineer a community from online into real life, they are delusional liers.