Thursday, July 19, 2012

“You don't get heaven or hell. Do you know the only reward you get for being batman? You get to be Batman.” - Neil Gaiman




I've been in love with Batman most of my life. It's true. If you ask my sisters what the best way to push my buttons was when I was little they would tell you about how they used to delight in tormenting me with their rendition of the theme song to the original Batman tv show with Adam West. It went something like this: nana nana nana nana nana nana nana nana Matman and Bobin. It drove me beserko. Did they not understand my love for the caped crusader and a young girl's delight at seeing a strong female character as a superhero in the development of Barbara Gordon as Batgirl? Of course they didn't care about any of that! As teenage sisters their focus was on holding me down as they cracked the knuckles in my toes and tortured me with the mockery of their ridiculous "Matman and Bobin" theme song. It was the thought that motorcycle riding girls could fight crime and have a PhD in Library Science that helped me overlook the campy condescending spin the original television show put on the world of Bruce Wayne and his alter ego.  But I always loved the characterization of this flawed human man who used his money to battle the Jokers and the Riddlers of the world. Not  to mention tangling with the awesome Catwoman! Yet it wasn't until I started swallowing whole the tales of Bruce Wayne and the Caped Crusader from the mind of true geniuses like Frank Miller and Jeph Loeb that my heart was fully conquered. Batman/Bruce Wayne became this brilliantly flawed archetype  damaged by the violent loss of his parents as a child and determined to save the soul of his city, perhaps attempting to save his own at the same time. He is a man who lives according to his own rules and will not be ruled by the whims of others. One of my favorite scenes in any Batman arc is the fight that occurs between Batman and Superman in Frank Miller's classic The Dark Knight Returns. The scenes are told and drawn to depict raw emotion : anger, frustration, exhaustion. And for a human vs. alien battle Batman's intellect and skills manage to hold their own.
        And then there is the mastermind that is Christopher Nolan. Can there be any other Batman story arc before or after his trilogy is complete? The rise and "fall" of a legend has never been more powerfully crafted into entertainment. I would defy George Lucas to tell such a compelling and powerful story in 3 films and then calling it a day. If Christopher Nolan is smart, and I think the evidence speaks for itself, he will leave his version of Gotham City as is at the end of this last film and give us the gift of seeing this Batman universe untainted by the Lucas effect.  I have no doubt there will continue to be Batman movies but I hope DC and Warner have the good sense to shift the story and character of Batman in a way that is true to his inherently universal humanness. 


Tuesday, July 10, 2012

The Art of Seclusion


Vincen Van Gogh Bride in the Rain 1887

The Art of Seclusion: How the Age of Edo Came to Shape Western Art
            Throughout history the production of art has been a means by which history can be understood. The arts often reflect the very evolution of the social and political developments of any historical period as well as being shaped by those very events; one might wonder why the metamorphosis of art isn’t more readily used as a biography of the modern world particularly in regards to the impact of major world cultures coming into contact with one another on the world stage. Such is the case with the development of art in the Edo Period of Japan, with its long period of seclusion, and its impact on the trajectory of the art movement not only in Japan but also in the Western world once contact was re-established in the mid-nineteenth century
By the late sixteenth century the ruling Ashikaga shogunate in Japan was losing its political dominance. As the shogunate crumbled various daimyos and their samurai battled to fill the growing power vacuum left by the weakened Ashikaga rule. Civil war ensued, destabilizing Japan’s advancements in economic and social arenas and returning it to a collection of independent feudal states battling for dominance During this period, Oda Nobunaga , Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and then Tokugawa Ieyasu  began to consolidate power over the various feudal states of Japan including areas left untouched by Ashikaga authority (Murphey, 273).. While Nobunaga and then Hideyoshi begin the drive to expand and centralize power it is Tokugawa Ieyasu who defeats and unifies the numerous “rival factions” by the beginning of the 17th. Ieyasu then moves the capital form the Ashikaga Kyoto to Edo, what is now Tokyo, ushering in the Edo (Tokugawa) period (Arima, Medieval Culture). Yet however victorious Tokugawa had been in defeating his rivals there was a deep-seated concern about revolt, it was for this purpose a new form of political control was implemented by means of land distribution. As Arima describes it:
Domains were allotted according to whether the Daimyos had supported Ieyasu before his final victory in1600. Those who had supported Ieyasu from the start (fudai) were allowed to serve in the government; those who had surrendered only in the final battle (tozama) were excluded.To try to preempt any revolution a system of control of the samurai families was instituted.Strict rules of conduct, rules governing marriage and construction of castles were also in place. The Daimyos were also often shifted from one domain to another. (Arima, Merchant Culture)
 Reinforcing this rigid social structure was the “alternate attendance system” known as Sankin Kotai which demanded the daimyos alternate annually between a residence in Edo and their own homeland with the stipulation that the families, particularly their wives and heirs, were to remain in Edo permanently. With the expenses that would accrue in travel and living arrangements for the daimyos as well as the overhanging hostage like situation of their families there would be little political or financial resource to revolt against the shogunate. The result of the financial hardship on the feudal lords was their growing dependence on the merchant class for financing which would be achieved through loans or even arranged marriages (Murphey, 275).

The importance of Tokugawa Ieyasu on the development of a unified Japan cannot be overstated. Not only was he adept as a leader in battle, “Ieyasu was a shrewd and calculating politician who changed the social structure of Japan, enabling him and his heirs to control the various factions. He established a dynasty to ensure that the Tokugawa clan continued to rule long after his death. He also supervised early diplomatic relations with Europeans and passed an edict banning Christianity from Japanese shores” (Katsushika Hokusai, What Was Japan Like Then?). Tokugawa instituted a social order that would eventually give rise to an influential merchant class. The stabilization of the political structure would allow for the Japanese to flourish for the next two and a half centuries despite its rigid social order.
            While the blending of daimyos and wealthy merchant classes out of economic necessity and social ambition yielded a kind of cultural unification of Japan the Tokugawa shogunate became more leery of outside influences particularly that of Christian missionaries and foreign traders. Concerned with maintaining the peace and stability they had structured for their society, foreign influence became seen as a threat to the country’s unity and order. By 1638 not only had Christian missionaries been expelled as a state policy but so were all European traders. Western influence would be extremely limited in the Edo period. Yet during this time of seclusion Japan’s growth internally was impressive with increases in production and commerce creating greater wealth for the merchant classes who would then align themselves with cash poor feudal nobles. This accumulation of wealth allowed for the rise of a bourgeoisie and an urban life full of arts and entertainment for those with money (Murphey 277-278).
            While Tokugawa Japan was characterized by a feudal social rigidity its economic growth gave opportunity to the inferior classes in Edo society, the artisans and merchants. It was this increasing “middle class” that drove the cultural revival pursuing and playing off of old traditions to create a flourishing arts culture characterized by kabuki theater, Geisha, literature and poetry, and sumo wrestling (Katsushika Hokusai, The Edo Period). But it is important to remember that
In Japan's self-imposed isolation, traditions of the past were revived and refined, and ultimately parodied and transformed in the flourishing urban societies of Kyoto and Edo. Restricted trade with Chinese and Dutch merchants was permitted in Nagasaki, and it spurred development of Japanese porcelain and provided an opening for Ming literati culture to filter into artistic circles of Kyoto and, later, Edo.( The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Edo Period)
The artistic boom of the Edo period was a reworking of traditional arts along with the exposure to some external influence particularly by Chinese culture.
            As Murphey points out the culture of Edo is dominated by the wealthy middle class who have the money and time to engage in social amusements as well as supporting artistic endeavors. The “Floating World” culture, “an amusement quarter of theaters, restaurants, bathhouses, and geisha houses” become one of the favorite subjects represented in an increasingly popular art form: the woodblock print.(Murphey, 280) . Ukiyo-e [i.e. woodblock] prints became the symbol of this new culture. With their strong linear forms, complemented by flat areas of colour and strange angles, ukiyo-e was some of the first massed produced art in the world, giving normal people the chance to appreciate what had been until then the domain of the rich and privilege”.( Katsushika Hokusai, The Edo Period) It is the popularity and distinctly Japanese development of this artistic form that will shape the evolution of Western and Modern art.
             Tokugawa rule brought about peace and prosperity and allowed for the production of an artistic golden age with the likes of woodblock printmaker Hokusai producing such masterpieces as the 36 Views of Mount Fuji. The greatest master of this technique, Hokusai, produced aesthetically pleasing prints with clean bold colors and simple lines. Although, Hokusai, died in 1849 prior to the opening of Japan to the West just a few years later, his artistry would make an indelible impression on both European and American artists (Murphey, 281).
Katsushika Hokusai  The Great Wave 1830-1833
            Just as Japan is responding to the show of force by Commodore Perry in 1853 by opening its doors to the Western world, “Western art was, by the 1850’s in the doldrums, unable to find a way forward” and it was just at this time that Japanese arts began to flood into Western Europe, where it was viewed as a whole new way of reflecting the world through a drastically different use of form and space (Checkland, 111). As Lemaire describes it, the introduction of Japanese style into the Western perspective caused a “profound change in the focus of aesthetic, with a taste for things Japanese dominating from the 1860s onward…Europeans marveled at the delicacy and sumptuousness of Japanese crafts and visual arts, and in particular Japanese prints” (Lemaire, 282). This adoration of the arts of Japan became more than just a fleeting interest in something new and exotic by Western imperialists, japonisme became an “artistic movement” that found a following by the likes of Manet, Monet, Van Gogh, Whistler, and Cassatt who each found in it a means by which to question the rigidity and complexity of form in Western art (Lemaire, 282). These artists in turn would revolutionize the development of art and the traditional form of aesthetic standards in their Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, and Expressionist movements.
            The history of the world is often written by the victors and as such we have often viewed the significance of the Western world over those they sought to dominate as the focus of study but as is evident in the rich history of Japanese art and society influence can be found beyond political boundaries when looked at through a cultural lens.

Saturday, July 7, 2012

"Learning to trust is one of life's most difficult tasks" ~ Isaac Watts

Confession: I don't trust people, not completely anyway. When it comes right down to the indecorous truth I can count on one hand the people in my life I have trusted with the best and the worst of me. The sticky thing is that my ability to allow people past my very well designed iron gates of superficial interchanges has been hampered by the hostility and rejection offered by the world at large to a young girl who lived her life with her heart on her sleeve.

When you spend so much of your life recovering from the unkind even cruel responses to the essence of who you are the human psyche seems to develop an intangible type of portcullis to prevent the enemy from wandering in and laying waste to your inner sanctum.
Sitting on my friend's couch the other evening I blurted out a statement that  I now see as a fundamental road block in developing a healthy relationship pattern with many people I know and some I may not yet know: I don't trust "people". I don't trust them with who I am and what I really think and feel. I don't trust them with the broken bits and the brilliant bits because throughout my life it has frequently come with a heavy price when I have shared any aspect of the ephemeral things that make me "me". I don't trust them to care for me as I do for them and really don't trust them to treat my Jenielleness as something special and so I keep the gate lowered. Occasionally, I have attempted to raise the bars but it has rarely been to allow for ease of access to my world more often it was for the purposes of becoming a testing ground. It is as if my inner warden says "well, we will open ourselves up just enough to see if this person is willing to crawl  through this small space to see who we really are...and then perhaps we will put faith in their capacity to value our friendship."
Without the willingness and ability to trust I know that relationships can never progress and we lose out on rich and meaningful experiences. If I am forever living confined within my own world without allowing entrance to unfamiliar people and things I am a bit fearful that those gates may actually rust and I may lose the ability to open up to anyone. But putting one's whole self out on display for the world to see or even just for the people around us to see, to care about the happiness and comfort of those who don't reciprocate, and even worse trample thoughtlessly on those things that define who you are makes trust a dangerous thing. No, I do not trust most people fully. But I do trust the ones who know me and love me and most importantly I trust completely in  God who I know will help me be wise in who and how I trust.

Friday, July 6, 2012

"The greatest glory of a woman is to be least talked about by men."~ Pericles


       The study of civilizations, with their rise and fall in world history, can be done through the lens of many different schools of thought. The transition of Greece from its influential Classical period through the dominance of Macedonia and Alexander the Great and then spread of Greek culture throughout the Mediterranean yields a ripe field of study for the disciplines of military history, political history, and even art and cultural history. One field of study that has lagged behind is the history of women and their lives as the Greek civilization changed. While it is true the influence of the classical Greek culture has shaped the political and cultural development of the Western world it is in the age of Hellenism that the role women played in society became not just subject of literary drama but real life drama as well.  During the Hellenistic period the identity of “woman” could, for the first time, become more than what they had been relegated to previously, housewife or "hetaira" (Pomeroy 89).
       To understand how the status of Greek women may have shifted from the Classical period it is necessary to first address the lives of women in the center of Greek culture, Athens. Gomme describes the view of women during this period, thus: "...legally, socially, and in general estimation women occupied a low place in Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries.."(Gomme, 2). During this period Athenian culture had been influenced by its Ionian neighbors. As Katz explains,"...under the influence of neighboring peoples of Asia Minor, [Ionians] inaugurated the exclusion of women from the public sphere and their confinement to the home and to the company of female friends. The Athenians adopted the practice from their fellow Ionians...Prostitution...sprang up as the inevitable corollary to the seclusion of well-born women..."(Katz, 73). This seclusion of women to their homes became a way of dividing and subordinating the female population to either a possession of men as a wife to bear children and maintain their households or the possession of men as a “female companion”, or hetaira. The division of men and women into quite different spheres created a society where men had the freedom of engaging in the public space while women’s space became more limited and less significant. As Pomeroy points out “While men spent most of their day in public arenas such as the marketplace and the gymnasium, respectable women remained at home...residential quarters were dark, squalid, and unsanitary" (Pomeroy, 79).
          The few women who managed to claim the attention and respect of Athenian men were usually hetaira, “escorts” of not only remarkable beauty but talent and intelligence as well. Plutarch writes of one such woman, Aspasia. Consort to the great Athenian ruler Pericles, Plutarch characterizes her influence in this way:
… some say that Pericles resorted unto her, because she was a wise woman, and had great understanding in matters of state and government. For Socrates himself went to see her sometimes with his friends: and those that used her company also brought their wives with them many times to hear her talk ... And to Plato’s book entitled Menexenus … this story is written truly: that this Aspasia was repaired unto by divers of Athenians, to learn the art of rhetoric from her. (Plutarch, 161)
While women like Aspasia had great freedom to interact with a variety of Athenian men, and sometimes even their wives, and held great influence in her social circle this freedom was not one afforded to the Athenian housewife.
            The “free women” of Athens were restricted to an inner life, lived for the most part within the inner walls of their home to prevent them from coming into contact with men with whom they were not related (Pomeroy, 81). There was no liberal education and engagement in political and intellectual debate, like might have been seen in Aspasia’s world. For the wives of Athens seclusion became codified as a signifier of status. As Pomeroy explains
Women stayed home not only because their work did not allow them much chance to get out but because of the influence of public opinion. Many families were likely to own at least one female slave, but even a woman with slaves was tied down by the demands of her household....Wealthier women were most likely to stay home and send their slaves on errands. But poor women, lacking slaves, could not be kept in seclusion ... (Pomeroy, 79-80)
The poorer a female was the more range of freedom she had by sheer necessity to run her home and survive economically, though the only women with any economic independence in Athenian society were those who made their money through prostitution (Pomeroy, 91).
The irony of seclusion lies in its inverse relationship to the political structure of Athens during the fifth century BCE. Katz notes that it actually became a growing social norm “at just the time when democratic ideals of liberty were institutionalized....Athenian men now turned to the company of hetairas ("female companions") for the female intellectual stimulation [they could not find at home]" (Katz, 73). As men were establishing democratic principles and engaging in political and philosophical debates that would greatly influence the future of not just Athens but eventually the Western world their wives were often being pushed inside and out of public engagement. But political change in the mid fourth century will impact the lives of women in an unexpected way, with the development of what will be known as “Hellenistic queens”. These royal women would become major players in political battles and intrigues often becoming both perpetrator and victim.
            While Athenians were crafting more democratic government their Macedonian neighbors to the north were, “ hardly more than a geographical expression, ...The kings of Macedon sat on uneasy thrones, their hold on power and the unity of the kingdom itself repeatedly threatened by … invasions and the intervention of various Greek states on behalf of rival Macedonian dynasts” (www.historians.org).  It was under the leadership of Philip II from 359 to 336 BCE that Macedonian power consolidated and began to expand across Greece (www.historians.org). This shift in power brings with it a new type of power player to the political scene: the mother who would be Queen.
One such queen was Philip II’s wife and the mother of Alexander the Great, Olympias. When Philip II was assassinated at his daughter’s wedding in 336 BCE it was rumored that Olympias had been behind it. Because the assassin was captured and killed there is no way to know for certain. However, “... She does seem to have been responsible for killing Philip's last wife, Cleopatra and their newborn baby... “as means of insuring her son, Alexander’s succession to the throne as well as her own continued political security (Salisbury, 256). When Alexander sets out to defeat the Persians and expand Macedonian power in the Mediterranean in 338 BCE it is Olympias who “presided over the court in Macedonia” in direct competition with Alexander’s “viceroy”, Antipater (Pomeroy, 122).
In a similar vein, Philip II’s daughter and Alexander’s half-sister, Cynane had thoughts of who would succeed her half-brother, Alexander, upon his demise. Having been raised to understand the "art" of battle she taught her daughter, Eurydice, to seek power and they set their sights on a union for Eurydice with one of Alexander’s “weak-minded” half-brothers who would most likely be designated his successor.  While their marriage goal was attained Cynane was seen as a potential problem for her son-in-law and was killed by one of his general’s. Meanwhile, Olympias viewed Eurydice’s power play as a threat to her own security and eventually had both Eurydice and her husband executed. In an ironic, if not self-perpetuated twist, Olympias was also seen as a political threat by her opponent, Antipater’s son, and she too would be put to death. (Sergeant, 16-17).
These two examples are just a few in a long line of Macedonian royal women who battle for personal and political control, a unique development in a world where men had been the political players up to this point.  As Sanford illustrates in regards to the Hellenistic queens following the death of Alexander the Great, “Though they seldom ruled in their own right, they were often interested in dynastic affairs and in Egypt sometimes ruled jointly with their husbands...Greek women of the upper and middle classes naturally gained in freedom through the example of courts, and their opportunity for education increased. (Sanford, 308).
Some of this freedom was a result of the shift away from the city-state and local political power to the hegemony of Macedonian rule. As the identity of citizenship and polis were reshaped by the cosmopolitan underpinnings of the Hellenistic world the privilege gap between men and women also evolved.  Dillon and James explain this age, spanning from the rise of Macedonian power to the conquest of the Mediterranean by Rome, as period which gave rise to a new opportunity for Greek women with a burgeoning ability to obtain and use economic power:
A new phenomenon appeared in this period, namely the political and public prominence of specific elite women who exercised power in a number of ways ...These women need not have been royal and they perceived themselves as having a right to take an active role in the lives, politics, and even wars of their cities...Female public patronage began in this period, on many levels, from helping individual citizens to paying public debts to providing important public buildings. This pattern of female prominence and participation in public life appeared throughout this cosmopolitan period. (Dillon, 229).
The era of political transition of Greek city-state to Macedonian empire became a transition period for Greek women as well. While full gender equality would not be a result of this age of cosmopolitan attitudes the opportunity for women to hold power, political or economic. and to use it was a great step forward from the life of seclusion they were generally expected to live during the Classical period of Greece.