OBSERVED BEHAVIOR (FROM NONVERBAL COMMUNICATION)

Photography is capable of recording most of the emotional and action expressions of an individual, although not necessarily in the sense of the nineteenth-century investigators of human behavior.  In their accounts of expressive behavior, such pioneers as Wundt and Darwin used sketches and still photographs to illustrate body posture, gesture and facial expression, but failed altogether to take into account such considerations as those of social context and the role and position of the human observer.  It is well to keep in mind that any kind of observation of behavior – with the exception of behavior observed through one-way screens – occurs in two-person or group situations.  The very fact of being observed changes, through feedback, the actions and emotions of the observed individual; actions formerly intended for self-consumption then become a statement to others.

Juergen Ruesch and Weldon Kees, Nonverbal Communication, Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1956

Charlie McCoy: My Baby's Back Again (Link) 
 

THINGS TO DO IN DUSSELDORF (FOR JANE)

DECLINE AND FALL

Your sleep sounds are level.

Afterward everything swivels and falls.

Clifford Curry: She Shot A Hole In My Soul (Link)

MERGANSERS

Mergansers
       fans

             on their heads

Thoughts on things
      fold unfold
             above the river beds

Poem by: Lorine Niedecker (1967)

LAST OF THE FAMOUS INTERNATIONAL PLAYBOYS

A small chance exists, just possibly, that I might be able to grasp and comprehend Post-Post Modern.

(I already missed -- completely misapprehended or misperceived -- Post-Modern.)

Listening to “Little Steven” Van Zandt’s radio show on his Sirius XM Underground Garage channel yesterday, the host carried on at very great length and approvingly about Hugh Hefner and his so-called “Playboy Philosophy.”  He read in his distinctive voice from Hef’s interminable hoary vanity writing tracts, which in olden days uselessly crowded out Playboy magazine’s pictorials, and were clearly  exercises in "boss's prerogative."

For as long as I can remember (dating back to the Modern era and certainly extending through so-called Post-Modernism), Hugh Hefner and Playboy were considered retardataire, sexist and beneath contempt by feminists and other cognoscenti, i.e., the uptight, supposedly enlightened cohort with whom I was expected and encouraged to peer-bond.

The stiffs had a point, of course.  Hugh Hefner was essentially an uber-successful pornographer -- never the most esteemed profession -- but a filth merchant with zeitgeist marketing imagination (for me, limited to the electronic revolving circular bed) luckily born into the right zeit.

But Steve Van Zandt, the most “politically correct” man ever to walk the earth, was definitively and actively embracing, extolling and promoting Hefnerism from a self-identified progressive/feminist point of view in March 2014. 

His relaxed demeanor and easy delivery clearly showed that he wasn’t  intending on making waves either, but because like television, radio is a passive audience medium, the artist/proprietor was simply palliating his audience with the latest market-tested idée donnée et reçue.

Little Steven, Hugh Hefner, unfunny comedian Bill Maher (a prefect, I believe, at the Playboy Mansion) and most recently the distasteful Duke University freshman porn star Belle "I'm a slut who needs to be punished" Knox.  A "Murderer's Row" of Post-Post Modern feminists?  

These slugs do not define or even relate to the concept of feminism for me, except to demonstrate further (i.e., Beyond Ban Bossy, beyond the ruins of N.O.W.) that the concept is either dead or bereft of any current meaning or significance.  (My idea of feminism was always absolute gender-blindness in terms of conferring professional or personal advantage based on sex, but I’ve been told off and rejected on that score so many times.)   

The Post-Post-Modern Worm has turned (and that isn't a disparaging remark about Little Steven’s personal appearance) and withered in the earth. 


Cognitive dissonance confronts The Hum (Link) and cognitive dissonance rules and reigns.

By the way, Little Steven runs a wonderful radio network and presents a very good show. 

Proof positive: "Playboy" by The Marvelettes (Link)

PITHED

I remember learning in 10^th grade biology about pithing frogs, i.e., killing the animal by piercing its brain, instantly disqualifying it from life by nullifying its animating, electrifying core. 

Last night’s pithing began over cocktails and continued, astonishingly, all through dinner and finally coffee. 

Our hosts, an old school friend whom I see too rarely, and his wife, both busy distracted people, either keep in mind too few distinguishing details about us between encounters or like us too little, because the primary social focus of the evening became their recollection of our affiliation with the political party and point of view “opposite” to theirs.  

This, they concluded and announced, was a fault of ours causally related to racism. We found this difficult to fathom because: (a) it isn’t; and (b) no conversation among us has ever included the discussion of race, a concept, for what it’s worth, that neither of us believes in.  (We think it’s an invalid classification, a taxonomy mistake, and that humans are basically like dogs in our almost infinite variations of appearance, character and temperament.) 

Like dogs, cats and, I imagine, frogs and bats, we see shadows all around us and try to penetrate them as best we can through quiet attentive observation.  It doesn’t always work, but it’s the best we can do.   For what it’s worth, although we are a happy, devoted, long-married couple, we are not the change we have been waiting for (or however that garbage-y cliched expression goes), and we will never ever see things that way.

Sly and the Family Stone: Everyday People (Link)