FArt Smellers, Jun Fellers, and Self SPLODERS?
Last night, I found the Farside Music website. I'm not sure how I found it or what my train of thought was, but I'm glad I did. I had known about this guy or group or whatever they are (I think it's one guy in the UK) for a while through the Farside Music Youtube channel, but it was great that I happened upon their site. They operate a store that ships Eastern music from various Asian countries to Westerners. I especially love websites that specialize in the sale of niche things like music from a specific region or a specific kind of music. While I was browsing their catalog, I found a lot of interesting things. My favorite so far is definitely this compilation of "sounds of Tokyo" from 1959. It even includes church bells from Nikolai-Do, which I visited last year while on honeymoon with my wife!
While I was browsing, I happened upon a Best Of CD collection of Jun Togawa's works from her self-titled songs, songs from Yapoos, and other things that she hand-selected. I had never given her much thought, I was familiar with Suki Suki Daisuki, her famous wacky 80's hit, but I decided to give her a listen. I must say, I love her stuff. It's energetic, goofy, and very Japanese, not to mention well thought-out. I'll be thinking about this live performance of hers for quite some time.
After listening to her work for a bit, I decided to look into her a bit more, and I found out that her lyrics tangentially connect her with some of the ero guro scene. Now, I really dislike gore and violence. I try my hardest, of course often failing, to uphold Paul's maxim in Philippians 4:8:
Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.
This did, however, intrigue me. I've been acquainted with someone in the past who was fixated on very violent art, and I had the ganas to try and suss out what's going on with it. I haven't really been able to, but I did find some interesting things.
Ero guro (erotic grotesque) themes in art are something I won't be treating here in full, you can read about what it all encompasses on your own time if you wish. In fact, I really didn't read much into it, it was simply the next step in my path that led me to what I want to write about tonight. I read a bit about Sada Abe; a tragic, femme fatale figure who, in the Showa period, murdered her lover and carried his severed genitals with her while she ran from police.
She wrote a memoir which I'd like to read sometime, and she was very sensationalized in a way that is itself grotesque and an indictment on Japanese postwar society. Besides that though, I found a photo of her and an interesting Ainu-looking man.
I've sinced learned that this man is named Tatsumi Hijikata who, it turns out, was close with Yukio Mishima! Quite the circle. He created a style of dance in the 60's called Butoh dance. The snippets from this particular dance were quite haunting and cool.
Side note, lately I feel like my vocabulary is getting worse! And I also get impressions and ideas sometimes that I feel should have their own words to describe them. I'll look into soon and if they don't have words, maybe I'll make them up. Future blog post idea!)
I decided to look into this style of dance more, and I found this video from a Westerner who, I guess, is a Butoh practitioner. In his description of aesthetics, he outlined quite a bit of Butoh philosophy as well, and this really is the whole reason I decided to write this blog post. When looking at the world, one might see all of the different philosophies and religions and worldviews and think to himself, "Wow! There are thousands upon thousands of paradigms!" Lately, I feel like there are actually maybe five or something. This man spoke about the idea of the "empty body," so based on the bizarre movements from the dance I had seen, I assumed he was speaking of some kind of shamanism. He then began to describe how the Butoh dancer is supposed to bring forth some kind of authentic expressive form in the body of whatever thought or impression he's trying to convey without any sort of imposition of tradition or rules. Oh wow! This again? Maybe this is a Westerner's interpretation of what the tradition teaches (he did cite a few things if I recall correctly), but this is just honestly absurd. I'm getting bored of this same idea I keep seeing pop up everywhere. It's in popular interpretation of religion, it's in gender theory, and it's in all kinds of art and apparently in dance too. Paul Vanderklay has a really good term for it: the "Secret Sacred Self." For years, I've been encountering this idea and I myself used to believe it too. Is the official global religion right now this idea that there is some kind of "authentic self" that only you have access to and all forms of cultural and social norms prevent you from expressing it, and the point of basically everything is for you to self-formulate this self and then express it without boundaries? It certainly feels that way. It's just disappointing to see something cool and when you try and dig into what it is, someone tells you, "you just gotta like, find out what it means to you, man..." Hogwash.
This is just pure solipsism. My biggest issue with a lot of systems of thought, and especially this one, boils down to this main question: What is the point of other people? If our life is just about self-gnosis through self alone, why are there even other people around them? What's the point of you, reader? If I want to pick my nose and eat a booger but I don't do it because you're watching me and I feel too embarrassed to do that, aren't you infringing on my path and purpose in life? After all, I had an impulse to eat my booger, and I must do so since the purpose of everything seems to be "self-expression without limits." Now some might say, "this is just art, art is a special place where this can be done but only in this space." Ok, that's not how this guy sees it, and traditionally, nobody understood the theater that way. This compartmentalizing idea is brand new, and it has a pretty short shelf-life too. Whatever people love the most, they make a religion out of it, that is, they form rituals and patterns around it which order their life towards the end of participating in what is loved. This is an inevitability of human behavior. You will never meet a person who has no patterns in their life and just spontaneously does something different every day, and even if such a person were to exist, the "principle" of spontaneity itself would be "ordering" them. So another person may say that the audience is participating in the performance. Ok, sure. Here's the problem, nobody knows what is going on and it's not for lack of trying. If there is a form of art that has no tradition and no set of agreed upon symbols but is just pure "self-expression," then it collapses into solipsism because the viewer interprets the work based only on their own arbitrary impressions, so what is the point of the viewer? The viewer is not "participating" in anything with the creator, but is instead engaging in their own individual exercise. You may as well have somebody look into a dumpster and ask them to interpret it. The interpretation has no connection to the referrent except the fact that it is the matter they're commenting on. No meaning is actually being revealed. I would go as far as to say that this is not art, but I'll have to think about a proper definition of art, which would also be a good blog post.
Anyways, this idea of the self-generating self is a huge mistake that I've seen a lot over the past decade, and I will likely write more blog posts attacking it in all of its absurdity. I might not have done that good of a job making my point, but that's why this is a blog on my personal site and I'm not publishing a research paper or anything. You could always email me (when I put my email on here finally) if you want me to clarify something or just tell me I'm wrong. This was a bit of a chore to write, it's almost 1 AM now, but I had a really relaxing bath and shower, groomed my beard, and I'm ready to have a nice, long, Friday night sleep. I hope you had a great day, and God bless you, reader. Remember, don't just think of yourself!
Sat, 25 May 2024 07:05:44 +0000
