by Neil Vodavzny

Earth Mother I heard on a Jefferson Starship live album on a mud-splattered field (Roswell), and the sentiment could be taken to represent a desire for something approaching the primitive.

This monophonic composition is by the little-known 13th century pet and composer Jehan de Lescurel:

Triste Plaisir is a 15th C rondeau by Gilles de Binchois:

There is something exquisitely formal in the rondeau which doesn’t immediately bring to mind mud-splattered fields. The formality engenders a mental state, languid and dreamy, a state of being in a certain milieu. In Binchois’ case it’s principally that of chivalric etiquette and honour.

In both cases, the formality is a type of art-craftwork, primal feelings honed by a diligent apprenticeship to the craft. To that extent, the style is unchanging to modern ears, hallmark of a tradition. So, by that fact, you sort of detect very subtle qualities of phrasing, allusive lyricism. Subtlety is the chief beneficiary of formality.

That puts you in a different place or mindspace; rather than seeking the ever new, you listen for small changes. It’s just a different attitude, one in keeping with a tiered social order, and also one with a keen sense of morality. The feel of the songs is therefore quite equivalent to the courtly feel of medieval life. This is quite a hierarchical order, but the point I want to make is that peasant or folk songs have a similar formality.

In the second part of this essay I will feature a traditional medieval Macedonian song which is a further case in point. Where does this formality come from? It comes from the peasant way of life, la ronde as the French say. Songs are often allusive to nature. For comparison, here’s a Chinese example.  Formality at its root comes from nature itself – the seasons. Mother Earth is an orderly housewife, if you treat her well.

A lot of these minstrelish dances are anon since anon is the most popular composer. This is another link between pop-culture and medieval; the simplicity denotes a universal popularity. As noted in Philosophical Universe 2, the ambiance of medieval music is very easy to define, contrapuntal and metric. This is the milieu where temperament and type predominate; a popular culture which permeates the environment the citizens partake of. They dance and perform cartwheels, as in the paintings of Bruegel (one presumes).

In other words, without a popular culture, you don’t get citizen participation. It’s easy to relate that to folk traditions; for example the German festival of princes and princesses. Because the tradition is generally known, it is a much more temperamental affair. Art is more entwined with the daily round; a medieval mindscape or landscape of forests and castles and cottages is imbued with the ambiance of popular art.

Taking folklore as a type of peasant art-craft then, what is it about craftwork that ties it to nature? “Material which has real innate value is craft-oriented” is the basic theme of Part 2, so it’s the materials themselves – grained wood, sheepskin, bronze, friezes ...  Comic books are actually a craft-oriented form, quite wood-cuttish, and they rely on very simple materials – graphite pencils, paper or board, pen and ink.

CC Beck somewhat dismissively likens it to cross-stitch embroidery, in that:

Some people, not aware of the fact that cross-stitch designs are better when they look like cross-stitch designs rather than like copies of paintings or photos, work on very finely woven linen and use dozens of colors, trying to reproduce all the graduations and blendings possible when working in oil paints or with an airbrush. Such cross-stitch work is very, very bad, artistically speaking, although some people think it is wonderful. It’s bad because it no longer looks like cross-stitch work but like badly rendered oil or airbrush work.
- The Comics Journal #121, 1988

Craftwork, in Beck’s parlance, is things like batik, tapestry, and one can say that there is an inherent facility in producing finely honed work that is fitting to the material. This is a very strong facet of tradition – think only of Amerindian costumes.

Craftwork utilizes the grain and waft of natural materials and, in this sense, extemporizes on nature herself. That’s what I like about The Studio, the 70s collective (Smith, Kaluta, Jones and Wrightson) – their Manhattan loft truly does resemble artists’ studios of yore, replete with ostrich feathers, medieval suits, bones and Persian rugs. This is romance which is true to the craft-oriented spirit of traditions. Without craft you tend to end up with the sterile perfection of 3D animation and suchlike.

So, craftwork is the expression Man gives to natural materials. Without the materials all you’re ever going to get is sterile perfection, because there is no extemporized energy (see Ancient&Modern2). Awhile ago I linked to a German artist of my acquaintance who worked with an Amerindian tribe on reed-weaving.

The exact similar quality I see in the native African villages and Bedouin encampments of 40s Nyoka TV serial. All this may be a bit tricky to grasp, but what I’m saying is there is a link between folk in all its different media: song, dance, material goods, dwellings, crops; a type of gay facility that is partially formulated and partially extemporized. It applies to classical music, since, as mentioned earlier, the baroque of JS Bach was so thoroughly imbued and inculcated that his wife could transcribe his notation by ear alone. Mozart would be played in a Turkish extemporized way. Such still applies in the early 21st century.

Whereas we live in the sterile perfection of pre-formulated reality, the gaiety of the cosmos is partially extemporized. Bruce Lee in an interview compares his “no style” to a sort of war between a robot and a wild beast. What I call the Cartesian multiverse is the robot sphere of things.

What you see in nature is a type of formality or tradition with an inherent gaiety which is difficult to pin down, to quantify. The same quality applies to the very earth on which Man grows his crops. Loosely raked soil forms clods of crumb-like size; a type of bunching that permeates the soil with air and water.

You can tell from this link there’s a hell of a lot of biochemistry going on, but without the colloidal properties there would be none of the natural energy that Man then harnesses. Where does the energy come from? Everything in fact bunches, from the galaxies above to family-trees which branch to form generations, it’s intrinsic to the universe. As stated previously, material which has “real” innate value is craft-oriented; for the reason the material of the universe is partially extempore.

What I’m saying is that the universe itself is imperfect; we are in this modern maze because we cannot see this. It is the truth you see in fairy tales and the legendary constellations; lines that weave across the heavens. The origins of civilization, of the fertile crescents, is almost in clay minerals, in the gaiety of jagged idealism you see in a Greek figure vase.

As Harlan Ellison says, they’re paving over the world – see “observations from the abyss” (ignoring the musical riff, Don McLean is still around). Now, Harlan may come across as a disgruntled liberal but make no mistake, he is speaking for all of us here in defence of Mother Earth, weeping tears of bitter woe for hippy and Right alike, Amerindians and Europeans unite. The time of reckoning is here.

As we speak, Cameron speaks of “garden villages” to pave over ever more of England’s pleasant land. Dead-zones of prefabricated reality, no clodhoppers or donkey-and-cart natives here. While modern environments are sterile perfection, creativity requires some imperfection, an ancient meadow, vagabond hares.

All of the people I’ve cited before and since are cranky in one way or another. CC Beck was known as the crusty curmudgeon, Crumb and Ellison, Kantner and Slick, BWS and REH (a keen student of Ottoman/Crusader history on the common ground of Jerusalem).. The Right could also be called cranky, and we should realize that all in our different ways oppose and deplore modernism. There is a time for imperfection, and that time is now.

That’s my gripe with The Simpsons – they’re not cranky. My impression on reading Groening’s interview with hero-journalist and Comics Journal founder Groth (who also seemed vaguely irritated) is that he was deliberately vague.

Groening: ...I would imagine most of your readers consider comics a solitary expression by an individual artist with a unique vision, and they’ve to write and draw and letter it themselves.
Groth: You obviously don’t feel that necessary.
Groening: I guess if I was just doing team stuff I wouldn’t feel so strongly. But I also do my comic strip all by myself..The good fortune that’s happened to me in recent years is the ability to delegate mechanical tasks as well as get a creative ball rolling and allow other people to join the party.
- Comics Journal 141, 1991

The main thing we get is that he’s liberal-left and the Simpson’s are anti-authoritarian. A vague perusal of episodes on YouTube confirms the anti-authoritarianism, but it’s still very vague. Then there are vague innuendos, for example, that Homer resembles the Hopie the Clown.

If you take the “old-style” cartoons, they’re very recognizable on race and species; that’s what the predator-prey comic-chases and rivalries are all about. There’s the fact that the biggest “authority figure” is your own subconscious. Old cartoons give you clues for subconscious feelings on Bugs Bunny the trendy rabbit and so on. The trouble with The Simpsons is they are an authority on having no subconscious vibes (man). It’s so deliberately vague I can’t work up an interest. In effect, it’s not image in the sense I recognize it.

Here’s an Eastern parallel from king fu films. Their view of image is slightly different to the West in that the form or style of a kung fu sequence is their primary objective; it has to look authentic. The image is what they’re after. The West prefers content and less stylized action; but your subconscious authority is a type of primordial content. When you watch Warner Bros cartoons you don’t have to be told what you are seeing because the image is recognizable as a species and a type.

There are links to pulps where, for example, Ellison’s Vic And Blood  (the graphic novel of A Boy And His Dog) are clearly hunter and hound, or warrior and wise-man (dog). Even more blatantly, here are two illustrations of ERB’s Savage Pellucida.

– copyright Harlan Ellison 1969 and Rich Corben 1987

All these images impinge on your subconscious dreamworld in a profound way. You seem to sense in some long lost way that you knew these women (at least, I do). So, it’s a case of subconscious content. The fact that The Simpsons evolved from rabbits (Life In Hell) to what they are is sort of irritating. You’re given content but no image content, which seems to be the way Groening wants it.

Warner Bros-ish Life In Hell cartooning resembles early Cerebus, which also mutated into verbose yawnathons (prev.)

The Simpsons are, then, the authority without subconscious authority. Is that subversion? Of what? I suppose of the God and guns brigade. If you compare Crumb, who Groening professed to worship in the 60s, he has very recognizable race and sex, as well as mode and species type. Mr Natural, the primitive hippy, Mode O’Day the female aggressive yuppie, Angelfood McSpade the provocative southern black woman, Crumb himself the hairy white outsider, even Doggy the doglike servile toady.

Groening seems to casually delegate the artist’s authority to a corporate milieu (where most of his writers are Jewish, actually).

There’s an interesting quote from a review by R Fiore of Chaykin’s American Flagg! That gets to the heart of the corporate milieu America has become. Fiore quotes #3..

“The American spirit – the honest, open-handed force of solidarity – has been castrated. By the banks.. by big business.. by slimy fat cats who use patriotism like a tart uses cheap perfume..” (American Flagg! #3). A more sophisticated observer might have seen that the bankers, fact cats et al are just the most successful versions of the hustlers that appear at all levels of American society, or that the old solidarity had more to do with the peculiar tendency of Americans to identify with their bosses rather than each other.
R Fiore, Comics Journal #86, 1983

Fiore here dismisses the ethical authority of self-expression – but Chaykin is a pulp writer and, as I’ve been trying to indicate, the pulps have this idea at their heart. Idealist par excellence, Burne Hogarth’s Tarzan exemplifies the moral authority of one man with a knife and his wits, while The Hernandez Bros are the force defining the little guy outsider, with some sex and violence thrown in.

The Simpsons seem to represent corporate America. To misquote Oscar Wilde, “To have 3 writers is a misfortune, to have 9 seems like carelessness”. Those who abandon America, like R Crumb, make similar remarks. Meanwhile, the industrial machine that is Madonna accuses France of having a fascist mentality; what she means is their minds are their own.