Spending time on the ugly
Bill Palmer
writes:
>
>I saw an old woman bent over a shopping cart. She dressed in the
>most horrible clash of striped, polka-dotted, filthy, torn
>garments but I found her face most remarkable. It had dignity,
>that face, and pain. Her life shone from rheumy blue eyes so
>nearly blind I wondered how she lived at all on the street. Each
>wrinkle had a place there as though arranged by some mad artist
>to express age best. Stooped and crippled by a dragging leg, she
>trundled along as best she could.
>
>As I came close to see her better, she smiled and said, "The
>beauty you see is everywhere in everything. I had lovers once.
>Many. I danced and sang. I'm old now but the beauty is in the
>memory. Remember that."
>
>I will.
>
>Rita
Good illustration, though the readers might also
wish to consider this in the way of intellectual
juxtaposition. Max Jacob narrated the following
experience:
"When I lived in Naples there was always a beggar woman
at the gate of my palace, to whom I would toss some
coins before climbing into my carriage. One day,
surprised at never being thanked, I looked at the
beggar woman. Now, as I looked at her, I saw that
what I had taken for a beggar woman was a wooden
case painted green which contained some red earth
and a few half-rotten bananas..."
Sometimes we see, yet we don't see at all...
[The text enclosed in quotation marks above
is "The Beggar Woman of Naples", a selection
by Max Jacob that is translated by John Ashbery
and included in THE RANDOM HOUSE BOOK OF
TWENTIETH CENTURY FRENCH POETRY, Copyright
1982, by Paul Auster, editor.]
Bill Palmer
alt.genius.bill-palmer
Bill Palmer
>news:1dsoooq.1u2...@cwa545.bai.ne.jp...
>> >The fact is, people walk right by the
>> > nice things and spend inordinate amounts of time on the ugly.
>>
>> Somebody said this in a recent thread. I forget who - I copied
>and
>> pasted it into a Sticky (TM) to think about.
Well, this subject opens into so many avenues that
it is almost impossible to deal with it effectively
in a post. In the first place, taste itself
is so different. I think much of the furniture
sold in what might be called a middle-class
furniture store is incredibly ugly. Nothing
worse than an overstuffed monstrosity
of a couch, in my view, though I could be
talking about someone else's "dream sofa"
there. Going to a different sort of ugly,
Pier One Imports, is, in my view, a veritable
temple of ugliness. I abhor wicker and
fake antiquing.
An ugly bathtub that frightened me as a small
child lurked in my grandfather's home. It had
those menacingly weird claw-like feet, and it
would make me scream and cry in panic whenever
I saw it, as a toddler. I suppose today it
would be seen as a valuable antique, but I
would not want to be around it because in a
sense it destroyed my innocence as a child
by making a comfortable house seem terrifying...
And look at art. Much of surrealist art was--
and in fact is--considered "ugly" by many
people. Of course, that came about since
one of the things the surrealists were
rebelling against was the comfortable
"niceness" of conventional middle class art.
One of the most complimentary things that you
could tell many surrealist artists was that their
artistic creation was "ugly and frightening".
I think one of the reasons Dali perplexes so
many people is that his work is often stunningly
beautiful and ugly and frightening at the same
time. In other words, the contradictions in
a Dali painting of a certain type can give
the work a dynamism that even viewers with
very little exposure to fine art can feel.
>>
>> It bothers me.
>>
>> Maybe I've been meeting all the wrong people, but in my
>experience
>> people avoid 'the ugly' whenever possible.
I have noticed the same thing. But it's all so
subjective. I mean, if somehow I won the over-
stuffed couch I mentioned above, I would give
it away. It is far too ugly to belong in
my home. Yet someone else might think that
this $5000 monstrosity was a gem of lovely
perfection--that's why you see so many of
them in the big furniture chains. Yes,
beauty is in the eye of the beholder is
a cliche, but that old saw is also well-
grounded in reality.
It's like with people. I have often found
that so-called "ugly" women can be in fact
radiently beautiful. The are called "ugly"
because they don't fit the current media and/
or popular cultural image of beauty. By the
same token, many famous lovely ladies of the
last century (I know because I look at lots
of old photographs) would be considered "ugly"
by lots of men today because the women I refer
to are too pale and too soft-looking for today's
popular taste. They would have to spend a few
months at the health club and the tanning salon
before our gallivanting gallants of today would
deign to to seen with them, though they were
the leading ladies and beauty queens of not
so long ago.
Tastes in beauty and ugliness change all the time,
and race has always had PLENTY to do with what
a specific culture considers beautiful or ugly,
let's not pretend it hasn't. [Baudelaire was
looked down upon for having a black mistress;
as an artist, his eyes were not covered with
the scales of senseless prejudice.]
Or, take the matter of pulp fiction art and
comic book art. Not so long ago, a typical
painting for a cover of a pulp fiction
magazine of the 1930's would be seen as
garish and ugly. In fact, many of the
pulp fiction artists destroyed or gave
away their own work because they were
ashamed of it. Now the best examples of
that sort of pulp-cover art are worth tens
of thousands of dollars per painting and
are sold in some of the best galleries.
I think that sort of "ugly" art is great--
it's far more honest than the work of
hack artists who are trying to be "pretty"
and painting nothing but the same
pictures in the same way that countless
of generations of artists before them
have already done.
The same is of true of Eugene Atget, the
great French photographer. In his day,
most serious photographers tried to
be "pictorial", and the result was often
what now are rather boring photographic
imitations of popular subjects that
19th Century painters preferred. On
the other hand, Atget (who today might
be loosely described as a commercial
photographer) took fascinating pictures
of what--to fine artists of his time--
would have seemed like rather mundane,
even "ugly" subjects, such as wagons,
alleys, or ragpickers' huts (I mean,
essentially miserable huts, not the
sentimental "happy poor folks" stuff
that tourists of Atget's day liked).
People still are fascinated by Atget's
work, though most of the pictorialists
who no doubt looked down their noses
at him are long forgotten.
I've met people who
>spend a
>> lot of time trying to beautify ugliness, or right injustice, or
>correct
>> misunderstandings, but I don't think I've ever met anybody who
>actually
>> seeks out ugliness and walks right by nice things.
But "nice" is such a slippery word. One person's
"nice couch" might be another person's nightmare.
Bill Palmer
alt.genius.bill-palmer
I've met
>people with
>> no taste who inadvertantly create ugliness (but that's MHO), or
>people
>> who, for reasons of their own (usually to do with mental
>health)
>> *notice* ugliness above all - I went through a stage of that
>when I was
>> suffering from culture shock and it was most unpleasant - but I
>don't
>> think, for most people, that this is a normal thing.
>>
>> I suppose such people must exist. The writer has clearly met a
>lot - you
>> (generic) don't write, 'The fact is, people...' in such a
>general way if
>> you (generic) don't mean *most* people.
>>
>> But *I* think that most people want, above all, to be
>*comfortable*, and
>> that means wallowing in 'nice things' wherever possible.
>>
>> Am I hopelessly naive?
>>
>> Molly
>> --
>> He's lost the plot," they say,
>> But it simply isn't true:
>> You can't just lose the plot;
>> It's stuck to you! -Michael Leunig
>
>
Bill Palmer
<artemu...@worldnet.att.net> writes:
[...]
>
> Ugliness is something of an aesthetic judgement,
Much of it is, certainly. Lots of failed art
seems to result from artists wanting to paint
"beautiful" pictures in the style of older
generations, a style that has worn out, as
far as its being able to interest many viewers.
On the other hand, I think surrealism is interesting,
because the leading surrealists often created works
that are arguably quite ugly and still very successful.
Look at "Elephant of the Celebes" by Max Ernst. It's
one of the more famous examples of surrealist art.
Who will call this a beautiful picture? Yet, perhaps
because of the way the artist tapped into unconscious
forces, it is a very powerful picture despite a sharp
departure from classical ideals of beauty. That
is not to say that NO surrealist works reflect
the classical standards of beauty, yet many of
them violate those standards in ways that would
likely traumatize famous artists of older
generations.
hence all my examples
>did not involve direct and real encounters with actual pain and danger
>on the part of the participants. Naturally nobody wants to really
face
>injury and death, but on the other hand people do seem to have a
certain
>tendency to want to show they can witness rather horrible simulated or
>real events where pain and injury and death are inflicted on others.
>
> Ugliness is an interesting notion. Like "violence" it has a lot
of not
>necessarily very obvious cultural baggage.
Sure. There are all sorts of prejudices involved
in pronouncing people and things "ugly". Take
spiders for instance. Many humans consider them
ugly. Why? Because they eat other insects?
Not really. Many insects eat other insects.
Traditionally, humans have considered lady
bugs pretty, if not beautiful. Yet, why is
an aphid-eating lady bug any less ugly than
a fly-eating spider--and, for that matter, why
is not a spider-paralyzing wasp considered
as ugly as its unfortunate spider victim?
We humans are full of silly prejudices about
what is and is not "ugly".
Further, beauty in humans has often had
racial overtones. Groups of people tend to
see other racial groups as ugly. Look at
the Chinese--when they did not see many
white people, they considered the "devils"
incredibly ugly.
Even whites of blonde and dark hair often
express what is really a racial prejudice
about red-haired people, simply because
red hair is less common. I think human
cattle need to realize it's time to open
their eyes and to question their own foolish
prejudices.
Teenage nitwits of both sexes will often
maintain that males who are not as
handsome as Leonardo Di Caprio (sp.?) or
females not as beautiful Pamela Anderson
Lee are "ugly." Yet, looking at it from
another standpoint, what is more "ugly"
than an ignorant, bigoted, tv-nurtured,
prating little half-mind which has absorbed
nothing about standards of human beauty and
worth other than those which are basically
whorish in nature (i.e., if you don't
want to crawl in bed with it, it's "ugly")?
"And a tawdry cheapness shall outlast
their days." --Pound.
It's like a situation over in a writing newsgroup.
An imbecile (who has been going around telling
how "we" don't pay attention to "Bill Palmer")
posted some sentimental dreck about a homeless
woman. Nobody in the group in question had the
guts to tell the pretentious lowbrow in question
what a pile of mawkish rubbish she had tried
to foist on misc.writing readers.
Well, as an experiment, *I* reposted he "prose
gem" over in the surrealist group (along with
the Max Jacobquote that--for intelligent minds--
devastated the tissue of tripe by of the writing
group poseur). Anyway, an alt.surrealist
poster IMMEDIATELY spotted the passage in
question as maudlin drivel and said so. You
see, HE did not know (or care) that it was
written by a "cultural leader" of a certain
writing newsgroup.
I think a few people need to wake up. When
things get to the point that horribly-written
twaddle is allowed to pass in an un-excoriated
condition because it is written by a "popular
newsgropu person" we are all in trouble.
You know what's wrong with some writing news-
groups? We have too many "Pier One Import
people" who want to be successful writers
so they can be "Laura Ashley people."
All our writing and prose groups are fast becoming big,
tasteless, over-stuffed sofas for mataphorical fat
butts and pretentious middle-brows of the wired world.
We have too many politically-correct newsgroup
cattle who don't have the backbone to call a chunk
of dreck a chunk of dreck because its a maudlin
sketch about a homeless woman and who on earth
would be mean enough to attack something like
that? *I* would, because the article was
poorly-written rubbish, but I preferred
instead to demolish it by juxtaposing it
with the quotation from Max Jacob. Of
course, I had to take it over to alt.
surrealism before anyone "got it"...human
cattle human cattle human cattle--
Bill Palmer
alt.genius.bill-palmer
For example, cutting
>somebody's body open is "violent" unless it is done by a "qualified
>medical team" as a part of a "surgical intervention" (or
>whatever....medical anthropology is beyond me, I prefer actual savages
>whenever possible).
>
> Anyway, as far as I'm concerned, "ugliness" and "violence" point
to
>some interesting aspects of human cultural manipulations of the
inchoate
>facts of nature, and I think they are well worth looking into.
>
>--
>Then Pallas breath'd in Tydeus' sonne --
> to render whom supreame
>To all the Greekes at all his parts she cast a hoter beame
>On his high mind, his body fild with much superior might
>And made his compleate armor cast a farre more complete light.
>
>(Chapman's Homer: Iliad, Fifth Book, first lines)
>
>............Pete
Hogarth
>In <3755DDDF...@worldnet.att.net> Sunbeam the Deacon
><artemu...@worldnet.att.net> writes:
>
>[...]
>
>
>>
>> Ugliness is something of an aesthetic judgement,
>We have too many politically-correct newsgroup
>cattle who don't have the backbone to call a chunk
>of dreck a chunk of dreck
Your oeuvre is a chunk of dreck. OK?
__________
Hogarth
__________
Arnaud M Fercq
[...]
>Sure. There are all sorts of prejudices involved
>in pronouncing people and things "ugly". Take
>spiders for instance. Many humans consider them
>ugly. Why? Because they eat other insects?
>Not really. Many insects eat other insects.
So you think a spider's an insect, do you? I'm not surprised, you ugly cunt.
[PS quit posting to soc.culture.france, fercqhead]
--
Flamer to the Gentry -- Prof. IACW -- mhm 20x8 -- "ludus non nisi sanguineus"
http://members.xoom.com/fgentry/ (updated 14th May 99)
"but I have news for you--it is neither in
my COLLINS ROBERT FRENCH DICTIONARY nor my
LAROUSSE DICTIONARY."
-Palmjob the gullible after frantically searching his
reference books for the French verb "blitter" upon
being informed it loosely translated as "to wank".
<754jui$n...@sjx-ixn4.ix.netcom.com>