Michelangelo’s David

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On this date in 1503 Michelangelo began work on his statue of David.

Frye in “Design as a Creative Principle n the Arts”:

In reading Cellini’s autobiography we can see how the well-trained artist of that day was ready to switch from a commission in the “major” arts to one of the “minor” ones and back again, with no loss of status or feeling of incongruity.  We think of Michelangelo as dwelling on the loftiest summits of the major arts, but Michelangelo too had his handyman assignments, such as designing the uniform of the Papal Guards, in which he acquitted himself indifferently but not incompetently.  (CW 27, 228-29)

Quote of the Day: “Do we think no Muslims died in the towers?”

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Alissa Torres, a 9/11 widow, on the “Ground Zero Mosque” in today’s Salon.

Money quote:

What did I think about the decision to construct a “mosque” this close to ground zero? I thought it was a no-brainer. Of course it should be built there. I sometimes wonder if those people fighting so passionately against Park51 can fathom the diversity of those who died at ground zero. Do we think no Muslims died in the towers? My husband, Eddie Torres, killed on his second day of work at Cantor Fitzgerald while I was pregnant with our first child, was a dark-skinned Latino, often mistaken for Pakistani, who came here illegally from Colombia. How did “9/11 victim” become sloppy shorthand for “white Christian”? I wish someone would put out a list of all the ethnicities and religions and countries and economic levels of the victims. For all the talk of “remembering 9/11,” I wonder if we’ve missed the patriotic message entirely.

For the record, hundreds of foreign nationals from 90 countries died in the twin towers; Canada alone lost two dozen citizens.  It doesn’t mean that this was not primarily an American tragedy.  It simply means that this was a shared tragedy.  No one included in the loss should be excluded from the possibility of reconciliation, whatever the shouters who wrongly insist that “3000 Americans died that day” have to say about it.

Saturday Night at the Movies: “Triumph of the Will”

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

This past week we’ve had a look at some of Frye’s observations on fascism, and tomorrow is a couple of Hitler-related anniversaries, so tonight is a good time to post Leni Riefenstahl’s propaganda extravaganza Triumph of the Will (with English subtitles).

Here’s another excerpt from Frye’s remarkable, unfinished 1943 essay, “The Present Condition of the World,” where he once again considers analogies between Nazi and North American society; in this case, the incidence of propaganda.  As before, the relevance of these insights to current events is startling:

. . . .[R]eliance on sense experience emphasizes the receptive and passive aspects of the mind and minimizes its active and creative power.  Hence America is a happy-hunting-ground of all forms of advertisement, propaganda, and suggestions.  Advertising and “publicity” are based on the fact that sense experience is involuntary and on the assumption that the mind does not possess enough selective power to resist a large number of repeated impressions.  The synthetic entertainment provided by the radio and the movies is based on the normality and predictability of the public responses to certain stimuli.  Education is loaded with an apparatus of magical systems and methods which are supposed to inscribe significant patterns on the students’ tabula rasa.  It is important, too, to notice what a superstitious belief the average American has in the power of Nazi propaganda over the German mind: that is, he thinks of it as a mysterious poison which has seeped into the brain and is now impossible to remove, rather than as an unnatural hysteria kept up artificially by a continuous external pressure.  It is important too, especially in Canada, to notice how closely this passivity of mind is associated with political apathy, a tendency to think of the government, not as the paid officials of the people, or even as merely a few more average and indifferently honest Canadians, but as an anonymous “they,” a group of Norns who sit in Thule waging war and rationing coffee.  There is much less of this in the United States, but the impact of peace may revive it; and if it does, the danger that propaganda in favour of democracy will be reversed to propaganda in favour of inspired leadership is by no means a mere intellectual’s nightmare.  (CW 10, 212)

Seven Minutes of Silence

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rO3F6mZUaE

This is of course a terrible anniversary.  Above is Michael Moore’s recounting of the seven minutes of silence which captures both the negligence and the ineptitude of the Bush administration on all fronts.

Remember: the administration’s national security team, Condoleeza Rice most especially, spent that entire spring and summer ignoring repeated and increasingly urgent warnings. As then FBI Director George Tenet put it, “The system was blinking red.”  Just a month before the attacks, Bush dismissed his CIA briefers after being presented with the infamous August 6, 2001 President’s Daily Brief, saying, “Okay, you’ve covered your ass.”

What were the priorities of the Bush administration between January and September 11, 2001?  More than a trillion dollars in tax cuts heavily favoring the richest 1% of the population.  The convergence of those tax cuts and the events of 9/11 led directly to an unfunded “war on terror” which has left the U.S. staggered and a significant portion of its population on the verge of blind rage for the hardship that has befallen it.

This is why non-partisan reporting matters.  You’d be unlikely to know any of this if your primary source of information were Fox News.

TGIF: Tina Fey

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__M7G3qxCcE

“The Sarah Palin Network”

You know how people always say that they find intelligence and a good sense of humor sexy, but then it turns out that they don’t?

Here’s some much needed proof that it can happen.  Tina Fey.  She has got to be, on any given day, one of the funniest, smartest writers and performers drawing breath and delivering the goods.  (Fifth season premiere of 30 Rock — easily the best comedy on network television — is September 23rd.)

Above is her latest incarnation of Sarah Palin, which is still very funny, and while the performance does not include Palin’s cold misanthropic glare, it captures the goofily entitled and unendearing self-assurance of someone who needs to do some serious self-examination.

After the jump, Tina’s classic SNL commercial parody, “Mom Jeans.”

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Quote of the Day: “History repeats myth”

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

All of the Ned scenes from Groundhog Day

I’ve been keeping my eye out for the source of this quote from Frye: “History doesn’t repeat itself; history repeats myth.”

Thanks to Bob Denham’s Northrop Frye Unbuttoned, I now have the complete quote, which comes from one of the late notebooks and appears in Collected Works 5, 164:

Why do people call me “anti-historical”?  I talk about myth, and it’s myth that’s anti-historical.  It’s the counter-historical principle, just as metaphor is the counter-logical principle.  History doesn’t repeat itself; history repeats myth.  (It’s not simple repetition, though: it’s not a da capo aria but a theme with variations.)  As I’ve often said, you never get logic in literature: what you get is what Susanne Langer would call virtual logic, a rhetorical illusion of logic.  Similarly you never get history in literature: you get virtual history, history assimilated to myth.

Henry Purcell

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qjc0qug-1NQ

“An Evening Hymn”

Today is Henry Purcell‘s birthday (1659-1695).

Frye in his 1950 diary records listening to some Purcell on the radio and suddenly encountering something he did not expect to hear:

Stayed around indoors all day, listening to the radio, hearing some good music — a program from Halifax of recorded music featuring Purcell, Boyce & Arne.  At six I heard a most curious noise over the radio purporting to come from some Professor named Frye who was talking about books.  It’s the first time I’ve heard my voice, except for a few remarks in that Infeld programme.  I would never have recognized it as my own voice: that nasal honking grating buzz-saw of a Middle-Western corncrake.  I need a few years in England.  The reading wasn’t as bad as I thought it might be, but Clyde Gilmour on movies was a hell of a lot better. (CW 8, 293)

Fox News North Update [Updated Further]

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Stephen Harper — in office by way of one in three Canadian voters — interviewed on Fox News Sunday

Here are a couple of articles to provide context for this story: Globe & Mail and Toronto Star.

For me, the elements that tell are as follows.

First, Stephen Harper and his then-press aide Kory Teneycke met secretly with Rupert Murdoch and his Fox News president Roger Ailes, a former Nixon/Reagan/Bush operative.  The fact that the meeting was secret — that is, kept off the prime minister’s calendar and not freely disclosed — is disturbing, to say the least.  The prime minister serves at the will of the people.  Murdoch is a notorious plutocrat who in little more than a decade has laid waste to American television journalism.  There was no reason for them to meet without public knowledge, unless of course the content of the meeting was intended to be kept from the public.  In any event, the secrecy was deliberate, which raises legitimate concerns about the behavior and intentions of a public servant (which Harper apparently does not understand: that he is a servant of the people and serves only at their will).

Second, shortly after this meeting, Teneycke resigned his position in the prime minister’s office and joined Quebecor as the point man for the development of what conservatives themselves had been referring to as Fox News North.

Third, Quebecor was allowed to jump the line and applied for a Category 1 “must carry” cable license for which it was not qualified, and which the CRTC recently denied.

Fourth, there are indications that the Harper government has been offering inducements to CRTC chair Konrad Von Finckenstein to resign (something this prime minister has been known to do).  Meanwhile the contract of the deputy chair of the CRTC — who is opposed to the application — has not been renewed.

Fifth, while the always-scowling-and-aggressively-shouting-down-his interlocutors-while-dismissing-any-opposition-as-“all-lies-from-start-to-finish” Kory Teneycke whines in public about “free speech” (as though the application for a broadcast license must be granted or be regarded as suppression of speech), Quebecor is once again being allowed to push to the head of the line and is seeking a “mandatory carry” license, which is very rarely granted and only after an extensive vetting process.  Quebecor is doing this even though the most obvious option available to Sun TV now is simply to change its content to all-news and continue to broadcast while offering its product to an already available market.  But Sun TV can’t turn a profit and the “mandatory carry” license would not only change that, it would also give the station broad access to a market that does not seem much interested in buying what it is selling.  As John Doyle put it in the Globe & Mail the other day, Fox News North is only acceptable “if it’s being jammed down our throats.”

So why exactly should this application be granted?  It’s not a free speech issue, it’s a regulatory issue.  Sun TV already has a license.  Why does it need another?  It can simply change its content if it wishes to.  The answer seems to be that it is gaming the system — evidently with the help of a sitting prime minister — in order to turn around a money-losing business while gaining deep access to the Canadian market for the sole purpose of propagating an aggressively rightward view of the world consistent with the Sun News brand.  Quebecor, of course, has the right to make the application.  But they have no right to expect the application will be granted just for the asking.  And that is what they’re doing.  They already have a broadcast license and a money-losing TV station.  Why then is this our problem?