Author Archives: Michael Happy

Frye at the Movies: “The Phantom of the Opera”

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgiPXFVY0T8

Full movie at this single link

It’s Halloween weekend, so here’s the original 1925 version of Phantom of the Opera, which haunted Frye as a child, and which he would have seen in one of the two movie theatres that still stand in Moncton.

Frye later acknowledged that the fascination of the film for him was his own childhood affinity for katabasis, or theme of descent. From Bob Denham’s Frye Unbuttoned:

Everybody has a fixation.  Mine has to do with meander-and-descent patterns. For years in my childhood I wanted to dig a cave & be the head of a society in it — this was before I read Tom Sawyer. All the things in literature that haunt me most have to do with katabasis. The movie that hit me hardest as a child was the Lon Chaney Phantom of the Opera. My main points of reference in literature are such things as The Tempest, P.R. [Paradise Regained], [Blake’s Milton], the Ancient Mariner, Alice in Wonderland, the Waste Land– every damn one a meander-&-katabasis work. (29)

Mallick: “Talking points for a young angry Occupy Toronto”

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4RAp-MFOLI

I’m just going to make it easy and reproduce Heather Mallick‘s column in full. The above clip from Occupy Toronto of young men and women articulating their concerns and priorities once again puts the lie to the conventional wisdom that they do not know what they’re doing or why.

The Occupy Toronto demonstrators don’t have a coherent point? How risible. Our economic system is so skewed that they have too many to articulate easily. Here’s a baker’s dozen to start:

1. You can’t get a degree without sinking into debt, or being told that your degree is worthless because it won’t get you hired, even though you know in your heart that a degree in anything, particularly history, will make you better able to understand, cope with, and vote against the life the 99-percenters are stuck with.

2. You can’t get a job, not one that sounds sane and pays. You want something between tree-planting or freelancing — ooh, you’re an entrepreneur, a sweatpanted typist without benefits — and a job for life.

I read, entranced, about veteran Toronto cop Const. Susan McConnell, who was charged with faking a medical note, getting a job at The Brick after getting the leave, crossing the border off-duty with her gun, getting drunk in public, and altering a salary letter for a mortgage. Demoted for 18 months, she is still a cop with an 11 per cent raise. So you could be a cop. Or you could work at The Brick. People always need furniture. Not at Occupy though. You don’t have furniture, you have tents. So go buy a new tent. There’s probably a sale on. Now Is the Discount of Our Winter Tents. If you got that reference, you have an arts degree, as do I, and I just bought a new coffee table.

3. The federal government is cutting jobs. They’re aiming at fields tracking complex things like ozone depletion or population. It means Canada will have a permanent footnote in the world league tables, *HICK. The clock will tick backward in ultra-conservative Harperland until we vote him out or it’s 1952 again and we are the Mississippi of nations, Mississippi being the state that always saves a grateful Lousiana from coming dead last.

4. Canada will not be attending Expo 2012 in Korea, no pavilion, no nothing, claiming it can’t afford it. What other nation isn’t attending? Greece. Heritage Canada says nobody notices us at these things anyway unless we have Cirque du Soleil. But everyone goes to Expos. It’s how countries get attention and their architects/designers/artists get international commissions. But Harper hates creative people and their show-offy foreign friends — he secretly suspects conventions are where people do the sex — so making other Canadians stay home and watchMurdoch Mysteries is a big win. It is not a CBC show.

5. The CBC is being chipped away by little hatchets. The much-loved CBC, dumbed down and Rex Murphy-ed as it may be, is our only true means of tracking our own country. Also, it might have hired you.

6. Mayor Rob Ford is sitting on Toronto. From transit to libraries to jobs, the man who screams at 911 operators is squishing the living breath out of us. Who is this ridiculous person and why isn’t he selling furniture? I hear there’s a vacancy at a The Brick in Barrie.

7. Retirement isn’t mandatory. Older people won’t leave their jobs to make room for the young. They sit at their desks voting down your pension rights and trying to stuff an entire egg salad sandwich in their mouth at one go, and then getting mad because they can’t get the hang of the neck scarf as worn by the young people, which is sad because it would be a really good look for them. They don’t get enraged at injustice, they just trail away into “the narcissism of minor differences,” as did that last sentence.

8. You have no voice. Nobody speaks for your generation. Take a good look at the newspaper columnists in this country. A bigger bunch of cranky Andy Rooneys you have never seen. Also they never admit that their mug shots are so heavily doctored that they’re unrecognizable in real life. I didn’t mess with mine but then I’m pretty spackled at the best of times.

9. You’ll never be able to vote online. It’s not going to happen. Young people are digitally connected and they won’t let you use that for power till maybe 2068.

10. WikiLeaks is dying from the financial blockade imposed by huge financial firms like Mastercard and Visa. Knowledge is power and you can’t have any. Money is power and you have none. Boycotts are difficult to organize. I would boycott Tim Hortons for one rural outlet’s alleged treatment of lesbians but they won’t miss me. I drink Red Bull full-time.

11. Ottawa — the government voted in by the Angry Pajamas bloc — is killing the Canadian Wheat Board, the national long-gun registry and your right to strike. I won’t get into why you’ll never own your own farm now. I’m just hoping you don’t get shot. But the subtext of all this is the move to destroy your right to do things in groups. Next up for death: parties, healing circles, twin-sets. And face it, Harperites don’t like people with breasts.

12. Sex will be riskier, you fertile youthful types. I don’t mean that you won’t have the means to support your children or a daycare to put them in even if you do. You won’t. I mean that abortion rights are on Harper’s list of To Go items. He has an anti-sex social agenda to mirror his economic one, and it’s pure Tea Party.

13. Never ever judge your moral worth by a dollar. No one is better than you because they earn soccer star salaries or work on Bay Street. You, young person, are lovely (I am whispering this in your personal ear). I’m with you.

And so I say, fight on, young people! Quebec, home of the École Polytechnique massacre, has just told Ottawa to get stuffed on the long-gun registry. Find the fierce prideful Quebec in you and never surrender.

Video of the Day: Scott Olsen Shot in the Face

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It’s difficult to watch this video and not be angry. Scott Olsen is an Iraq war vet who did two tours of duty. As this video demonstrates, he appears to have been deliberately shot in the face with a tear gas canister by Oakland police. The people who were trying to rescue him were obviously the targets of a concussion grenade thrown by an identifiable police officer. Both of these assaults by police upon demonstrators were also clearly unprovoked. This is a reminder that the police and the officials responsible for them too often appear to behave like a praetorian guard rather than servants of the public as a whole. It is almost a guarantee that no police officer or public official will face any charges or even be held accountable for this incident. We see every day that this is not how it is done. It is, however, a guarantee that there will be a campaign to blame the protesters and even Olsen himself for the injuries he suffered. We see every day that this is how it is done.

Olsen is currently in hospital awaiting brain surgery.

Frye on “Pastoral Anarchism”

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News report on Marine sergeant and Iraq war veteran Shamar Thomas facing down NYPD officers for assaulting and arresting peaceful demonstrators.

Frye in Notebook 19, c. 1967:

There were always two sides to anarchism: one a pastoral quietism, communal (Anabaptist, Brook Farm) or individual (Chaplinism). Its perfect expression, in an individual form, is Walden, in a communal form, News from Nowhere. The beats & hippies with their be-ins and love-ins, the “Dharma bums,” are the faint beginnings of a new pastoralism. The hysterical panic about organization, full employment, keeping the machines running, & the like, is now waning as it becomes possible to do other things than work. (CW 9, 99)

Occupy Police Violence

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Video showing police taking close aim and directly firing upon protesters coming to the aid of someone wounded in the head by a tear gas canister. This is a very dangerous thing to do. It can kill.

After the violent assault on Occupy Oakland — tear gas, rubber bullets, high impact bean bags, percussion grenades, sonic cannons — that left a Marine veteran, Scott Olsen, representing Veterans for Peace in critical condition in hospital — it’s clear that excessive force is now in play. Since Oakland, Occupy protests in other cities and in other countries are receiving ultimatums.

Because the use of overwhelming force to clear public spaces of peacefully assembled citizens has become an option for the authorities, I will now post video of it.

The reason the footage above and below is raw is that police ordered a local television film crew to shut off their cameras before moving in.

Video depicting heavy tear gas attack and injury

“V for Vendetta” and “Demonic Modulation”

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oWs_voUPkk&feature=related

V for Vendetta: “Words will always retain their power”

“First they came for the rich, and I said nothing. Because, you know, fuck the rich.” — Oral graffiti currently making the rounds.

The clip above is V’s pirate-radio speech to the people of London in V for Vendetta. V’s sardonic Guy Fawkes mask is now a favored icon among the disaffected, hacktivists especially. This movie is a hopeful relic from the Bush years, which, at the time of the film’s release, seemed they would never end.

Regarding V and his Guy Fawkes mask — as well as the repeated refrain of “Remember, remember, the fifth of November,” the day of the failed Gunpowder plot of 1605 — the literary principle involved is what Frye called “demonic modulation.” With demonic modulation Frye makes a much needed distinction between “the moral” and “the desirable”:

The moral and the desirable have many important and significant connections, but still morality, which comes to terms with experience and necessity, is one thing, and desire, which tries to escape from necessity, is quite another. Thus literature is as a rule less inflexible than morality, and it owes much of its status as a liberal art to that fact. The qualities that religion and morality call ribald, obscene, subversive, lewd and blasphemous have an essential place in literature but often they can achieve expression only through ingenious techniques of displacement. (AC 156)

Demonic modulation manages this by way of “the deliberate reversal of the customary moral associations of archetypes.” For example, in literature, whatever the current status of received moral standards,

a free and equal society may be symbolized by a band of robbers, pirates, or gypsies; or true love may be symbolized by the triumph of an adulterous liaison over marriage, as in most triangle comedy; [or] by a homosexual passion. . . . (AC 156-7)

In other words, exactly the sorts of things that oppressively “moral” forces in society get most nuts about, usually with a commensurate rise in rhetorical violence, sometimes outright threats of it, and occasionally tragic instances of it.

The traditional Catholic villain Guy Fawkes of seventeenth century England becomes in this film by way of demonic modulation the dark force of wrathful resistance in a somnolent dystopian Britain of the near-future. The movie does seem to possess the power of at least some short-term prophecy; it had picked up on something that was roiling just below the surface of the daily nightmare that was the Bush administration. The silent, simultaneous uprising of the people of London nicely prefigures what seems to have been the spontaneous generation of the Occupy movement; and, more ominously, the death of the tyrant High Chancellor Sutler doesn’t look all that different from the recent death of Muammar Quadafi. To cite another instance of oral graffiti that pops up here and there, “When people on the inside of their glass palaces are mocking the people on the outside, it never ends well for them.”

Video of the Day: Amy Winehouse

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The autopsy results today reveal alcohol poisoning.

I thought I’d give a pass on any comment on Winehouse because her life and career were so tragic. Whatever might be said could only be trite. She had an immense talent and behaved as though possessed by demons.

But I discovered this performance at Austin’s SXSW festival in 2007. Everybody should know about it. Hear it once, you won’t forget it. When you see the expressions on the faces of the audience members, you’ll realize that’s probably how you look too.

“As the World Turns”

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ggtt7cODZd0

Wallace on humor, irony, advertising, entertainment and Infinite Jest

Frye in Anatomy: “The novelist sees evil and folly as social diseases, but the Menippean satirist sees them as diseases of the intellect, as a kind of maddened pedantry” (CW 22, 290)

This seems to be evolving into the go-to excerpt from David Foster Wallace‘s last unfinished novel, The Pale King, but let’s slip it in before it becomes overly familiar. Here’s Wallace’s rendering of the spiritual awakening of college student Chris Fogel:

I was by myself, wearing nylon warm-up pants and a black Pink Floyd tee shirt, trying to spin a soccer ball on my finger and watching the CBS soap opera “As The World Turns” on the room’s little black-and-white Zenith. . . . There was certainly always reading and studying for finals I could do, but I was being a wastoid. . . . Anyhow, I was sitting there trying to spin the ball on my finger and watching the soap opera . . . and at the end of every commercial break, the show’s trademark shot of planet earth as seen from space, turning, would appear, and the CBS daytime network announcer’s voice would say, “You’re watching ‘As the World Turns,’ ” which he seemed, on this particular day, to say more and more pointedly each time—“You’re watching ‘As the World Turns’ ” until the tone began to seem almost incredulous—“You’re watching ‘As the World Turns’ ”—until I was suddenly struck by the bare reality of the statement. . . . It was as if the CBS announcer were speaking directly to me, shaking my shoulder or leg as though trying to arouse someone from sleep—“You’re watching ‘As the World Turns.’ ” . . . I didn’t stand for anything. If I wanted to matter—even just to myself—I would have to be less free, by deciding to choose in some kind of definite way.