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Provencal is the loving tongue.Some aspects of the scene may seem vaguely familiar; scores of long haired young men roaming the country with stringed instruments under their arms, singing songs against authority and proclaiming liberty in its many facets. Urbane, immensely influential songs that catapult some of their authors into the ranks of the rich [...]
French artist Jean Dubuffet( 1901-1985) said that he was not a revolutionary but a permanent subversive. His work. however, coincided with attempts in other fields to dispute the accepted values of Western culture.The ethnologist Claude Levi-Strauss had convincingly shown that Western society is not superior to so called primitive societies and that there is nothing [...]
To some Jean Buffet had the greatest influence on modern art since Picasso.” My art,” Dubuffet had said, ”is an attempt to bring all disparaged values into the limelight.” In the 1950′s Dubuffet’s fascination with textures absorbed him completely; the earth moved upward on his canvases, pushing out both sky and people, leaving ”landscapes of [...]
“Personally, I believe very much in values of savagery; I mean: instinct, passion, mood, violence, madness.” — Jean Dubuffet, 1951.Jean Dubuffet ( 1901-1985 ). A visionary of modern anti-culture. He had a private Art Brut museum, where the world’s largest collection of paintings and sculptures by the mentally ”ill” and other raw artists was kept. [...]
In a sense it was an ideology of corporatism. Horatio Alger was attributed a philosophy which was whittled down to its commonest denominator in mass media. Success manuals touted bourgeoisie values: hard work, frugality, loyalty to employers. If a man failed, the fault lay within himself, not society. The rich were virtuous by definition. ”The [...]
Rejection as a virtue. Horatio Alger. His fable of the noble orphan who found a rich Daddy appealed to boys of all ages. The question is how did it ever get mixed up with the American myth of success? There is a myth embodied in the name of Horatio Alger, Jr. It is of course [...]
“Ya know, ya know I was wondering if. If you could keep on because…the force, it’s got a lot of power. It makes me feel like…..it makes me feel like…..WOOO! [1st Verse] Lovely Is The Feelin’ Now Fever, Temperatures Risin’ Now Power (Ah Power) Is The Force The Vow That Makes It Happen It Asks [...]
In Marcel Proust’s ”Remembrance of Things Past”, there is a strong sense of familiarity making the narrator lose the sense of ecstasy he felt when the Faubourg was out of reach; that impenetrable social enclave on the right bank of the Seine. He becomes aware of the malice and foolishness that exclusiveness conceals. He test [...]
Almost all of Marcel Proust’s novel ”Remembrance of Things Past” takes place in Paris. The presence of the city saturates the novel the way moisture saturates the air and determines its atmospheric pressure. There is likely no other city as present in a modern novel except for perhaps James Joyce’s Dublin. But unlike Joyce, who [...]
Marcel Proust’s Paris aristocracy: perpetually engaged for dinner, decorative, idle and dangerous for social climbers. In Proust’s ”Remembrance of Things Past” , what lent the aristocrats of the Faubourg Saint-Germain their luster was precisely their ”famous and poetic” names , whose poetry derived from the narrator, Marcel’s, youthful reading of Jean Froissart and other chroniclers [...]
