Fellow Observer Pam Grossman presents a talk on the grotesque that sounds rad:

The Grotesque In Art: A Discussion With Dr. Nancy Hightower

*Please note, this event will be taking place at the ISE Cultural Center in Manhattan: 555 Broadway between Prince and Spring.  Press buzzer for entrance and proceed to basement gallery.

Date:  Saturday, November 20
Time:  5–7 PM
Admission:  FREE

Presented by Anagnorisis Fine Arts and Phantasmaphile. In conjunction with the exhibit “Another Roadside Attraction: An Exploration of the Neo-Grotesque,” Dr. Nancy Hightower will lead a discussion on the grotesque in art as it relates to the artwork currently on view at the ISE Cultural Foundation:

“Modern contemporary art, film, TV, and literature embrace the bizarre in a way never before seen. Many might term what they see and read as ‘grotesque’—used pejoratively to mean that which is strange, unsightly, obscene; in some cases, even funny. The grotesque as a scholarly study, however, is something different. It’s not altogether different, mind you, for certainly the grotesque always includes elements of the bizarre. Yet many authors and artists have used the grotesque—this elusive intersection of humor and horror—to question the strongest rhetoric that holds our society together.

“The grotesque has a rich and long history, beginning in antiquity. It was simply ornamental back in Nero’s time, as we see in the “grottoes” of his palace, the Domus Aurea. Human forms blended into plants and animals, with a playfulness that delighted the eye. That ornamental version of the grotesque turned darker when Bosch incorporated it into his Garden of Earthly Delights and Bruegel in The Triumph of Death. Both works give us insight into the paradoxes of the artists’ cultures Over time, the grotesque grew to include an aspect of horror along with a humor that moved beyond an intellectual sarcasm. The purpose of such transgressive humor and horror addresses the paradoxes, hypocrisies, and binaries seen in our post-modern society.”

Dr. Nancy Hightower is an instructor in the Program for Writing and Rhetoric at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where she teaches courses on the Grotesque in Art and Literature.

I have recently been wondering: Is the body grotesque because it is profane (not divine, not the spirit)?

…The mortal body is gradually assimilated to the mass of things. Insofar as it is spirit, the human reality is holy, but it is profane insofar as it is real. Animals, plants, tools, and other controllable things form a real world with the bodies that control them, a world subject to and traversed by divine forces, but fallen.

In theory the body is a strictly subordinate element which is of no consequence for itself—a utility of the same nature as canvas, iron, or lumber.

—Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion.

Check out this short essay on the question of self as posed by V. S. Ramachandran, one of my favorite writer–scientists (along with, recently, Carl Elliott). In the post: morality and dystopia.

Some Rama-sentences I admire:

…Maybe the solution to the problem of the self won’t be a straightforward empirical one. It may instead require a radical shift in perspective, the sort of thing that Einstein did when he rejected the assumption that things can move at arbitrarily high velocities.

When we finally achieve such a shift in perspective, we may be in for a big surprise and find that the answer was staring at us all along…

There are curious parallels between this idea and the Hindu philosophical view that there is no essential difference between self and others or that the self is an illusion.

Are discussed vividly and concisely today in the New York Times. I suggest you indulge (both by reading the article and eating something spicy). The highlights, for me:

“Humans and only humans get to enjoy events that are innately negative, that produce emotions or feelings that we are programmed to avoid when we come to realize that they are actually not threats,” [Dr. Paul Rozin] said. “Mind over body. My body thinks I’m in trouble, but I know I’m not.”

…As Paul Bloom, a Yale psychologist, puts it, “Philosophers have often looked for the defining feature of humans — language, rationality, culture and so on. I’d stick with this: Man is the only animal that likes Tabasco sauce.”

Read the review on The Outlet.

In this review:

• A quotation from Benjamin Franklin
• Brief review of Mishima’s powers as poet and logician
• Lust and death-lust* (*”Death Lust” = good band name, sans hyphen, perhaps sans the A in “death,” so making it “DETH LUST,” probably all caps)
• EVEN MORE

In this blog post:

• BONUS image of Mishima Yukio, looking like a pensive young genius:

Read the review on The Outlet.

The most terrifying aspect of The Murderess—Alexandros Papadiamantis’s famous psychological terror-fable—is the calm and lyrical nature of its prose. As others have said, Modern evil is rational: “Murder [or some other evil] simply must be committed; there is no other logical option [according to my limited human worldview]. Let me tell you why…”

The second-most terrifying aspect of the short, episodic book is its description of a bad-ass Greek sea-eagle:

…In the forest that crowned all the western slopes… there it was said that a sea-eagle had nested for three human generations… In its abandoned nest was found an entire museum of monstrous bones of sea-snakes, seals, dogfish and other marine monsters, which the huge, powerful bird, with its blue hooked beak and is vast cinder-coloured wings, had picked out of the seas…

WTF. Remind me not to mess with a bird that eats seals and sea-snakes. (Or, per the rest of the book, killer grandmamas…)

That’s Jeff Vilencia’s first art house movie, made in 1992, courtesy Hugh Raffles (Insectopedia). Says Raffles of the whole intriguing philosophical quandary of squishing living things:

The Supreme Court decision of April 20, 2010, voiding HR 1887, the so-called “crush video law,” by an 8-1 majority, provoked an intense and immediate response, summarised in this article in The Huffington Post. Mary Tieffenbrunn wrote this piece in The News-Gazette.

What is unknown or is fragile is erotic. I can imagine a whole compendium of fragile-skinned, differently-insided squishables (and therefore objects-erotic). Sushi, meatball, eclair. And of course the the grape, the furry animal, the easy stand-in for the organ…

Gross, but who doesn’t love to squish stuff? Think of Burroughs’s exterminator tragic heroes… Roach-stamp, bubblewrap-pop, tomato-burst: These are the uneasy loves of some universal, unconscious imp with big feet. A new supervillain: SQUISHOR.

…Or Stimpy. Maybe we all are a little Stimpy in taste, somewhere in there…

The phone books are here! The phone books are here! Er, uh, I mean—the Suspicious Anatomy book launch is here! My first book! Check it:

Not since Galen’s De Elementis has been set in ink a single compendium of medicological knowledge so extensive & practicably useful as SUSPICIOUS ANATOMY Workbook No. 15: The Human Cranius. Having intrinsic value to all persons—piratical, mysterious, upright, or otherwise—The Human Cranius is a PEERLESS GEM of uncanny truth. If you are a living human, you should make frequent, unabashed forays into this field guide to your hideous secondary body—the cranius, an organ-matrix & carnival of fangs which is trying to destroy you even as you read this sentence…

From the genre-chainsawing minds of the Hollow Earth Society (Ethan Gould and, moi, Wythe Marschall) comes “the definitive guide to the horrifying world inside you”—finally available in lush, illustrated paperback!

In the tradition of John Hodgman, David Cronenberg, and H. P. Lovecraft, The Human Cranius explores an alternative anatomy at once mesmerizing and deeply unsettling. Gould and Marschall ask: What do we know about our own bodies? The answer: Very little…

In many ways, the art and human studies of modernity have given us the keys to our unconscious minds, but have left entirely to dry science (fixing plumbing, testing drugs) the workings of our bodies. What does it feel like to have guts? To face disease, age, mutation—in short, a self that is not only not whole but not even on its own side?

The SUSPICIOUS ANATOMY series seeks to address these physio–psychomological imbalances by producing, for your benefit, the entire unconscious of the body, the shadow-self, in words and elaborate images.

The official Human Cranius book launch, at Observatory Room in Brooklyn, will feature a lecture, medicological film snippets, and a live human dissection. Join us!

Rap covers, more than rock covers, allow for the voice to take full prominence. The music is the same, pure karaoke. The orchestra is empty, and the great singer alone prevails. Or, in this case, the highly adaptive Mighty Mos Def brings his inexplicable magnetism—his jazzy nonchalance? his smiley-ness in the face of everything?—to the masked world of DOOM and Danger Mouse, two stars both less street and less pop than Def, but perhaps more engaging, at least for me.

DOOM raps the way Lovecraft writes: Both could give a fuck who’s paying attention. Both deny the real, without reason, without ideology, and proceed from there to construct a new, iller real—Sur-real. Imagination somehow frees these writers to face real terrors, to use the lingo of science to question our reliance on it, our devotion toward futurity in the face of an amazingly fucked up past.

Still, it’s nice to see Mos bring DOOM back to planet earth here. The silly mask, the faux-Asian smock, the unpracticed eliding of a few key DOOM throwaways (which elision only heightens the effect of the great couplets like “[caesura] Slip like Freudian, / you first and last step to playin yourself like accordion”)—all these only add to the mystery of the original.

DOOM, like Lovecraft, creates the basis of a new mythology within his medium, a new blend or mode of story, bravado, self-deprecation, Gothic body-signs (”This one he wrote in cold blood with a toothpick”), and scathing material objectivity about, well, the human predicament—doom.

Well-written as well as immaculately said…

I love bizarre groups of old things. So does, I take it, Joanna Ebenstein, who’s just launched a site for The Secret Museum, her “exhibition of photographs exploring the poetics of hidden, untouched, and curious collections from around the world.”

Ebenstein (Morbid Anatomy, Astropop Productions) has an eye for the macabre-elegant and the hideous-awesome. Her blog and the events she puts together have several times blown my mind, and the Secret Museum is no exception. I especially give her props for aiming to capture the mystery and wonder of “liminal spaces.” (What is science, what art? What spectacle, what education? What grotesque, what natural, &c.)

The Secret Museum is on view free of charge, IRL, at Observatory Room in south Brooklyn through Sunday, June 6.

History never effaces what it buries; it always keeps within itself the secret of whatever it encrypts, the secret of its secret. This is a secret history of kept secrets.

—Derrida.

From TED: “Questions of good and evil, right and wrong are commonly thought unanswerable by science. But Sam Harris argues that science can—and should—be an authority on moral issues, shaping human values and setting out what constitutes a good life.”

Stephen Davies rocks the house in “Locating Ourselves Historically: Why We Are Not Living in Western Civilization.” And earns an Honourable Badge Of Merit.

The official version, for those disinclined to watch a bangin, dryly funny lecture about modernity without a heads-up:

A crucial part of the self-consciousness of individuals and the way they define themselves socially is a perception of their location in a historical narrative, however vague. For most people in North America and Europe the narrative in question is that of ‘Western Civilization’ - this is true for all parts of the political spectrum and includes those who see this narrative as one of triumphant success and others who perceive it as a much darker story. However, the picture that emerges from historical research does not support any of these accounts. Rather they lead us to the conclusion that historic Western Civilization no longer exists but has perished or been transformed. This should make us think about how to understand our historical location and lead us to see past, present, and future in a new way.

This post is tagged as “Adventure” because the future will be an adventure. We hope.