Throwback Thursday

I missed getting my newsletter out yesterday because I was so tired. Imagine I said “so tired” as though I were the tortoise in the fable slowly approaching the finishing line. I’m tired because, let’s face it, I’m old, or at least feel old after staying out until 1:00 a.m. on a Tuesday night (aka Wednesday morning). So let’s celebrate old stuff. From oldest to least old, here’s some old stuff for you to enjoy.

Let’s start at the beginning of the universe, or as close to it as we can possibly get. Please take a second to experience this Guide to the James Webb Telescope on your biggest screen. The light from stars created billions of years ago is now viewable to us on our phones. It would make me angry that the known universe has been reduced to that tiny scale, except that the pictures are among the most beautiful I’ve ever seen.

Now, let’s slip forward through millions of millennia to 1969 and spend an hour reading Ways of Seeing by John Berger, a remarkably democratic art history critique that I first encountered in college. I re-read it this week after finding it on our bookshelf. Some observations: 1) my marginalia handwriting is unreadable but the sections I underlined are ones I would underline again today; 2) the essays largely stand the test of time as a way of considering how we consume art. Because that’s what we do with art: we consume it. 3) This is one of the few books I read in college that I feel confident I understand better now.

The second essay in the book is considered to be the progenitor of the idea of the Male Gaze.

One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object - and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.

Is this still true? Certainly, it’s true about social media. It might be the reason that social media is so toxic for young women. Women are constantly turning themselves into objects to be viewed rather than subjects who act. No matter how “empowering” girls act about their social media presence, the reality is that their social media presence is itself what is disempowering.

Berger’s essay on publicity is also prescient, particularly on the topic of social media presence as personal branding.

It is true that in publicity one brand of manufacture, one firm, competes with another; but it is also true that every publicity image confirms and enhances every other. Publicity is not merely an assembly of competing images: it is a language in itself which is always being used to make the same general proposal. . . It proposes to each of us that we transform ourselves, or our lives, by buying something more.

The increasing sameness of young women’s clothes and hair and home goods is being reinforced by the pictures they take of themselves. They are simultaneously competing to be the most influential while also being the most similar. They are competing to be the brand ambassador of a product called Young Woman, which all the other young women must buy to have happy lives.

The last thing I did this week that wrangled the past into the future was to go to the Lauryn Hill and The Fugees show last night at the Oakland Arena. Ms. Hill has caught a lot of guff for her late show starts and the fact that she isn’t recreating Miseducation note for note. The haters can go suck eggs. The show was billed to start at 7:30, sure, and the DJ didn’t start until 8:48, but Lauryn was fully onstage at 9:20, which is no later than most headliners at a stadium concert, and rocked until 11:45. The song arrangements were different than the studio tracks but to incredible effect. Songs were punk, they were gospel, they were rap. One song had a new ska beat. Miseducation could never be stale, but backed by a 30+ member band (orchestra?), the new arrangements were fun and fascinating and still approachable. When Wyclef and Pras (the other two Fugees) joined Ms. Hill, the songs from The Score were more straightforward but the lights and video filters were incredible. It was seriously one of the best shows I’ve ever been to. The mix wasn’t perfect, and Lauryn seemed to be changing the arrangements on the fly sometimes, but that gave it an improv jazz feeling, but not in an annoying way. Trust me on that last part.

A word about Ms. Hill’s style last night: she wore a huge, gray-with-black-polka-dots suit that was reminiscent of Cruella DeVille (if she won), David Byrne, and with the shrugged jacket, James Brown. She wore a tall hat reminiscent of the Nefertiti bust and sunglasses that had a string of beads in the middle of each lens like they were tasseled pasties. The whole look was amazing.

Finally, a look back at last week. A few readers commented to me that their tradition is to say “Rabbit rabbit” as the first words of the month, i.e. repeating rabbit twice rather than three times. The first noted reference to this custom is in 1909 and it turns out (at least according to Wikipedia) that either formulation works (or doesn’t work, I guess). You could say Rabbit just once and it would have the exact same effect!

One reader noted how similar our Catholic rituals are to magic. Here’s his edited note.

Knocking on wood, praying to St. Christopher before boarding a plane, it all comes back to Catholic upbringing which leads to quirks and spasms our whole lives. My mother-in-law showed me a container of dirt in her Florida condo that held a buried upside-down St. Joseph statuette - the same one she had buried in the yard of a house we sold twenty years ago.  She can't bury things in the mulch bed of her condo, so she adhered to the belief by having this odd container as she sold her condo - which she successfully did.  

Do you have any favorite sanctioned rituals that are, let’s be honest, just as effective as saying Rabbit Rabbit on the first of the month?