Rethinking the Reverend

Can the acceptance of Christianity (the religion of the enslavers) by slaves in America be considered a symptom of Stockholm Syndrome?

Crowded and Cold

Sometimes it's too black to drink. Like when the sifting becomes too heavy or the waves lap over pictures of those who become themselves in the receding water. Who said it: That when you start to think you stop writing? Pushkin said that; or Tolstoy. No, Gramps said that in a moment of lucidity. But maybe he was just plagiarizing. I plagiarize too, you know.

It's those kids. Those two beautiful kids. I could have wept right there. But it's my cynicism - it's why I don't weep; I should. And those kids, brother and sister. They're caught in this Brazil'ian system, knowing the waiting, the patience it takes to be digested. They've seen it: Fights, foster care, bringing little cousin milk because his mama doesn't keep any in the house. And they'll make it somewhere, maybe with each other. Maybe not. But what if they were from somewhere else? Somewhere where you're smart and you're beautiful but you're not damaged.

When god is out of the picture, everything is permissible.

Sometimes it's too cold to think. And sometimes it's too hard to wait.

And sometimes, Selfish is the only way to be.

Sometimes you write to make yourself feel. And sometimes you write because you feel. But mostly, comfort is the hardest fitted skin.

Schadenfreude, Part III

Of all the posts on the topic this one is probably the hardest to write. And that likely explains why I've been extrapolating (procrastinating) all the different aspects of Amadeus and not essentially getting to the point that I set out to make. This one requires some of the 'digging' I've been talking about (see? I'm still doing it) to hone in on why these seemingly insignificant parts are so poignant.

At first we were consciously moved by the scene of the young Salieri signing away his feral ghost (it's funny how classically, pacts with God require one to give up everything that makes life actually worth the trouble [selling your body] and pacts with the Devil require that one give up everything that connects you with the next world [selling your soul]. I'm not sure, but a progressive, modern individual might consider God to be the more shrewd/conniving merchant in this scenario [a character trait typically assigned to the Devil]) to reach immortality through music. Next, we figured out that in actuality our subconscious was moved by the scene with flamboyant Mozart and voyeuristic Salieri (and the whole giant, floating metaphor for the movie itself - blah, blah, blah). Anyway. So why the anticipation for these scenes in particular?

It's been written and thought about ad nauseum but really, what can we learn from the juxtaposition of these men's situations besides complete, arm-dropping despair? Not to be gloomy (though invariably that's the only way to reasonably talk about this), but when taken to its logical boundary this train of thought stops (I'm so sorry. I swear I'll never drop something like that ever again) at futility and meaninglessness. It's really hard to grasp this, I mean really digest it, unless it's personalized. And there's nothing easier than "understanding" someone else's misery when you don't have to live through it. It's probably why most people think sympathy and empathy are interchangeable. I had a futile moment like that not too long ago. It was at a club (of course) and it involved a girl (of course) and a distant acquaintance who is much taller/handsomer/smoother than I am. It wasn't tragedy, I mean it was for that night, but it left a really ugly taste. It was just a small inroad to the pandemic powerlessness that pervades (ok really, I'm going to stop now) us with the ultimate Why? It's the Southern blacks who had to watch their own get lynched for whistling at a white woman and then see the perpetrators walk. It's the Soviet Jews who were categorically denied seats in the University despite being smarter and more capable than their gentile peers.

I think Salieri - who prostrated himself before the Universe and then was forced to watch another devour everything he ever wanted, and more, without desire or effort - was Camus' 'absurd man;' the Sysiphus who hauls his rock ad infintium without hope or end in sight. What meaning can we derive from the meaningless, our constant chore in a world that recognizes neither need nor effort, only the luck of the draw.? Camus says "the struggle itself is enough to fill a man's heart."

I can't agree with Camus' conclusion that the only way to live is to embrace the hopelessness, to acknowledge it and make it fully conscious; that truth will conquer it. But maybe I'm not old (cynical) enough for that yet. Nor am I convinced of the fate of the absurd man in Dostoyevsky: The recognition of futility but with a glimmer of hope embodied in faith and God (this probably becomes more relevant in reference to the aside about selling one's soul/body. Who knows, maybe the makers of Amadeus saw Salieri's celibacy [I'm not doing this on purpose] as that glimmer of hope, the reward at the end of the ride).

What I do know is that between the absurdity of this world and the uncertainty of the next is the thin, sticky realm of Art; a higher threshold that makes irrelevant concepts of meaningless and also hope. Art is beauty. Beauty is truth. From that it must follow that art is truth. So it seems that Camus, in a way, was right. "One must imagine Sysiphus happy."

Schadenfreude, Part II

So last time I started talking about why I'm such a homo for that scene in Amadeus where Salieri makes his pact with God and is on his way to becoming one of the most famous composers in Austria. When you think of that scene on its own you say, 'So what? Big deal.' And you're right. But what makes it so striking is the context. You see this young kid swearing off everything - women, booze, anything that can bring you pleasure in this life - just to play music. And almost immediately after that we see a teenaged Mozart, effeminate, flouncing around with a train of beautiful squealing young girls, drinking champagne and playing piano upside down (imagine a Victorian Dennis Quaid [a la Jerry Lee Lewis], with powder and matching wig); meanwhile the not as handsome/talented and shy/withdrawn Salieri looks on at the whole show like a hateful specter.

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it's this scene that really gets me and not the one I espoused on earlier. Or to make an analogy (in SAT form), maybe this scene (Mozart and entourage) is to Salieri is what the earlier scene (Salieri's pact) is to Mozart. In other words, to go back to the filmmakers' clever device I talked about in the beginning of part I, while the "pact" scene is the one that makes you consciously recognize it (i.e. - naming the film Amadeus and ostensibly making it seem like the movie is about him), what really has the effect on you is the flamboyant Mozart scene (i.e. - Salieri being the quiet driving force of the movie and having the strongest impact subconsciously where Mozart is the outward/conscious lead). [Nota bene - Though my two analogies really have nothing to do w/each other per se, they really just encourage a deeper look into what we think motivates us on the conscious level versus what is actually moving us from a subconscious standpoint. Most times you really have to do some serious digging to find out why you do the stupid shit you do and where the lunacy that triggered the actions came from.]

This is turning out to be longer than I thought. Believe me when I say that when I started this thread I had no idea I'd be writing about the subconscious effect of an effeminate Mozart prancing around drinking champagne. But it is important and in the next post (lord-willing, the last in this series) hopefully you'll understand why it is important and why the scary German name for this topic. That's all for now. Try to get a grip on those nightmares.

Ctrl + Alt + Del

Can you ask Windows Task Manager to use it on itself when it's not responding? Isn't that like forcing it to suicide bomb itself?

Schadenfreude, Part I

Saw Amadeus again. Always loved the concept. How ostensibly the whole movie is driven by Salieri, who's the narrator/main character, how it's really his movie but it's the prodigy, Mozart, who ends up appropriating the movie for himself. They even named the damn thing after him. And it took me a while to even realize this blatant device by the filmmakers; that Salieri was essentially playing second-fiddle (no pun) in his own film and, on a grander scale, his life. But then again, I always surprise myself at how increeeeeedibly slow I can be sometimes.

There's one scene though that every time I watch the movie really gets me. You know the one scene in certain movies that completely floors you the first time you see it? And then every subsequent movie is just anticipation for that single scene? (When I was younger most of these scenes involved female nudity in one form or another. For those who remember, I would like to introduce Exhibit A, Total Recall. The scene in question of course involved the beautiful alien lady w/the 3 breasts. That scene perfectly embodies the "anticipatory moment," as I call it). In Amadeus that scene for me is where Salieri makes his pact w/God. The whole thing is comically absurd to a degree and probably as close to campy as the movie gets but for me it sums up the emotional character of the film. And despite the fact that it is slightly campy, the scene finds a way to be incredibly poignant and - if you look at it in the context of the entire film - devastatingly sad.

What happens in the scene is that the young Salieri, a boy of about ten it seems, wants more than anything to be an accomplished musician. But his father isn't having any of it. So Salieri stands there, looking to the sky, and prays to God to grant him his only wish. He swears that he's going to be celibate and sober and every other thing that Christians believed God wanted them to be. Next thing we see is Salieri's father, who's been standing in the background the entire time, dropping dead. Literally. Just like in a bad SNL sketch (which is most of them nowadays).

Why is it always these idiotic things that come through the hardest? I'll try to explain my best but I feel a long session coming on so I'm gonna reserve that for part II. So as long as I don't keel over myself, I'll see y'all (and by y'all I mean, me, the only person who reads this silly thing) in a few.

Clinton Portis

You ever notice how he looks like an evil, bizarro-Carlton from The Fresh Prince? No? Not a sports fan, huh.