BELLE, A CINEMATIC 8TH WONDER...

THE HISTORIC CINEMA DRAMA “BELLE” IS INDEED A BELLE EPOCH!

From a court painting dated 1779, three years after the American Revolution and 13 years before the French Revolution the gilded life of a black noblewoman named Dido Elizabeth Belle has come into new light in the form of the 2013 film “BELLE”.  The film is brilliant on all levels and visits places that “The Duchess,” another intensely vivid exploration of 18^th century womanhood, could not go; alas, it is a truly different story.  That the late 18^th century evolved into a proving ground for the ideals of the Enlightenment which had been brewing for over 150 years is fully evinced in this film.  Abolition in England was ripe for the ending of slavery as early as 1782 but the Slavery Abolition Act was not turned into law until 1833.  Belle delves into the caldarium of slavery, racism, interracial relationships, class-ism, sexism and happily plain old fashioned love. 

The costume and set design are impeccably in sync with the current fashion trend consisting of revivals of the the 17th through 19th centuries.  The costumes are magnificent!  The eighteenth century was a highly decorative era for ladies and men’s fashion and architecture, it was the height of the exuberantly ornamental Baroque Era.   Neither expense nor attention to detail was spared in the faithful recreation of the 1790's for this production largely filmed in period English homes and exceptional pains were even taken to reproduce the slums and the bustling but raunchy commercial districts along the Thames river in late 18^th century London..  There were no tongue-in-cheek anachronisms or oversights such as electrical fixtures or outlets in the walls or modern skyscrapers in the palatial or urban vistas, the visual experience was remarkably immaculate.  

The screenplay was also masterfully written and acted.  This is one of the few films where I can honestly say every performance was superlative even down to the coach drivers and that is not only due to the artifice and talent of the actors but also to the skillfulness of the director and camera crews.  

The lighting for this film recreated the soft interior glow of candles and fire-lit exteriors, the  genuine play of light was not forgotten, the intensity and cavernousness of interior daylight within the grand and ornate halls and chambers was brilliantly utilised.  Shading and shadowing techniques were brilliantly applied to accentuate the rich textures and intense moods of the film.  The movie, 

Belle, was filmed entirely during the spring and summer of the Island upon which it takes place and the vivid 18th century colors juxtaposed against a verdant backdrop catapults this movie into a realm of one of the most beautiful to capture the landscape of the Isles.   

The musical sound track was engineered to inspire tears, joyfulness and suspense; it kept to the harpsichord, and the typical instruments and compositions of the age.  In the movie Belle played a melancholy classical piano solo and her sister a lively courting song. the soundtrack was a mellow but critical element narrating the mood of the film and it took pause to allow itself a soft, secondary role so that the main focus could be the acting and other visual effects.  

Through the screenplay the audience is stolen and taken back into an aristocratic world that existed over 234 years ago.  it was written in a traditional and eloquent English aristocratic style that retained the ability to convey the minds of historical characters in ways that verified that they thought not so very differently from the way we think.  I always enjoy when a film can prove the human condition is common to all times.  The floral but direct nature of 18th century aristocratic English was played to the fullest in its explication of the complex layers of class embedded into the social etiquette of the day.  The screenplay effectively clarified the distinction between tradition and the law it was as much written from a lawyers mind as it was from the mind of a woman of those times...

BELLE, shows a very different perspective of the black experience.  It shows how a woman wrapped in the trappings of wealth and privilege but stigmatized by race was able to overcome the hesitancy of a world for which change was inevitable by living that change using her affluence to make a difference. As such it also hints a clear message to affluent blacks of this century by demonstrating how privilege ought to be used.  One might argue that it was easy for a woman of privilege to defy the odds yet again one might as easily answer it with, “Why”?  the “Why” is at the very heart of this film, it explains everything in a uncluttered human scale.  While we acknowledge that the actual life of this woman is a complete mystery we can also concede that elucidated in the mythic drama of this amazing film her life truly defined an extraordinarily powerful, “BELLE EPOCH”!

FIN

WRITTEN BY: DAVID VOLLIN

ADMINISTRATOR: FOR THE BROTHAS, A VIRTUAL, INTELLECTUAL AND CULTURAL SALON

VISIT US AT: WWW.FORTHEBROTHAS.BLOGSPOT.COM  

UNE GALLERIE D'IMAGES

THE MATURE MALE DIALOGUE SERIES PART II:

TEN GOOD YEARS!

If you have ever had the pleasure of listening to Nancy Wilson’s stellar version of the song “10 Good Years” which she recorded in 1965 on the Capitol Records label then you know and old dog still has some time to wag his tail.  Take some time, ( if you will), to take a listen before you read this article at:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hk_MVrX3KDw .  Now it is typically not my custom to reference material created with a female sentimentality in mind when treating with manly issues simply because I feel that men are so very different in many respects but this particular song speaks less to the female experience and more the common human experience. 

Contemporary male culture is full of graphic reminders of the fragility and brevity of our masculine virility the most common of which are products promising to restore premature balding and erectile dysfunction.  Coupled with these cattle prods to our sacred male mojo are such popular sayings as, “You better make your fire while you still got wood” (lyrics by Nancy Wilson 1965) and “If you want to let him know there’s steak for dinner you’d better make it sizzle” (line by Wesley Snipes in To Wong Foo 1995).  These types of ticking clock warnings inundate the culture of the male species ever focused on youthfulness, driving men to prove, “They can still hunt”, (Reuben’s line in Oceans 13, 2007).  For a mature male the end of acne and growing pains opens up an entirely new set of issues centered on the inevitable prospect of growing old.  As a euphemism we tend to use the general term, “Mature” to distinguish the process through which we relinquish our youthfulness for the next stage of physical and mental development.  Technically there is no specific threshold or ceiling age to the term; it can include a 21 year old as well as a 91 year old male encompassing quite a broad, subjective range.  But it is not my intent to attempt to define the term “Mature” for anyone as I am certain they will be fully competent to complete that exercise for themselves.  The point of this article is to explore strategies for men to manage the inevitable process of aging within a culture that worships eternal youth and praises the physical success typically achieved by older men.  For example, the couture suits in Gentleman’s Quarterly are being visually marketed by young models ranging from 18 to 21 years old for a mature clientele of businessmen ranging from 35 to 60 years old.  Cultural disparity number one is that young men aged 18 through 21 are hardly in the market for a $3,000 - $5,000 suit and businessmen aged 35 – 60 can no longer pass for an 18-21 year old.  One might say it’s a setup, no matter how hard a mature man tries he is not going to age in reverse but then why should he?

Some mature men may begin to fear they are approaching the end of their marketability as viable candidates for sex, romance or the establishment of relationships.  They fear that because of their age and/or experience they will be overlooked for younger, less “experienced” candidates.  21^st century popular culture certainly does lean more heavily toward the road less traveled as a desirable option for getting to know someone and deciding to stay with them.  Most mature men already know they come to the table with a houseful of offerings that are far more desirable to the bloke in his own shoes looking for financial and emotional meaningfulness and stability as well as the handsome but materially unadorned young Gavin’s pulling at his trousers.  Some of these men will invariably use their status as bait and it is generally but not absolutely true that such men are not really serious about developing anything serious; they are merely attempting to extend the wild frolics of their youth.  Whether a mature man uses his wealth, status and possessions as a lure for prospective lovers or as a standard balance for weighing compatibility a mature man typically but not always uses his status to compensate for what he feels he may have lost in masculine virility and youthfulness.  This begs the inevitable question, “How much time can I survive as a successful player in the popular field on my good looks and charm before having to rely on external assets to attract attention”?  Which begs the additional question, “How much external support do I feel I need in order to feel confident as a successful player,”?

The quantification of a man’s insecurity is at best an unmapped science.  It is sheer guesswork to attempt to postulate how much a man will generally compensate for his insecurity in any given scenario.  This man is 25% insecure due to his receding hairline and overcompensates 50% by dying his hair and investing in expensive hair replacement treatments.  That man is 50% insecure about his erectile dysfunction and overcompensates 75% by investing in male enhancement drugs and externally applied performance products designed to create and maintain an erection.  Another man is 15% insecure about his age and overcompensates 30% by investing in popular, youthful apparel, vehicles, real estate, furniture and other conspicuous retail items.  Some men fabricate elaborate virtual character profiles possessing all the irresistible attributes they feel they do not possess to gain a “Cinderella cyber-machismo” existing only when they are online.  There are some men, bountifully endowed, who overcompensate by using their penis as a sexual lure while allowing the rest of them to fall by the wayside.  These are the dysfunctional aspects of insecurity overcompensation.

On the other side of the spectrum there are those men who actually embrace their maturity including the changing of their appearance, metabolism and libido.  These men have not given up on themselves by any stretch of the imagination they have merely bought in to the natural evolution of their masculinity by developing highly creative and self-actualizing techniques to visualize “re-masculate” themselves.  I want to discuss the term I coined, “remasculate”, a term I created to describe a philosophical rite of passage whereby a man sheds the trappings of a manhood he has outgrown in order to free himself to explore a far more philosophically advanced echelon of manhood.  During a man’s lifetime he may actually undergo the process of remasculization many times over.  The process of remasculization entails more than just the transition from a baby to a boy, an adolescent, a man a, gentleman and an elder although it certainly runs parallel to this structure of social, mental and physical evolution.  Remasculization requires a man to completely revise, reinvent and remodel himself inwardly and outwardly to accommodate his physical and intellectual journey through life and the end result is a philosophical entity that is fundamentally balanced.  Because remasculinization takes into account the fundamental changes of physical and mental maturity it does not have to overcompensate for any loss in manhood because it does not see maturity as a pejorative or decomposing process.  Of course remasculinization is as I have defined it a textbook theory and to be honest it is my opinion that no man can fit the ideal, there will always be some degree of remorse and sense of loss due to the aging process and therefore nearly every man will show some degree of overcompensation. 

When a mature man looks into the mirror, or when he walks into a roomful of young virile males he certainly qualifies himself on the totem pole of manly desirability whether he gives it conscious merit or not.  At some point a man asks himself, “How long will my good looks and youthful stamina last”?  Parallel to the process if remasculinization each time a man moves upward to the next echelon of philosophically balanced manhood he certainly makes a note of where he came from and where he now is with respect to the eternal manly virtues.  That is why the philosophical dimension is so very essential for human growth.  There will come a time when a man will no longer possess any of the shining and careless attributes of his physical youth but in-between those times he will have to engineer a successful bridge equipped with strategic vantage points from which he can take a romantic look back as well as a hopeful look forward.  When our twenties are over we have 10 good years to our 40’s and after those 10 good years to our 50’s, ten good years to our 60’s, 70’s 80’s 90’ and so on until we go to our glory. There is always something great and uncharted to look forward to but until we realize this we must be confident that we have 10 or more good years of sturdy manliness to keep our confidence up.  As our concept of manhood evolves altering our goals and objectives accordingly those 10 good years will seem to come and go as quickly as we can shave an 8-hour beard.  Manhood is one of those things that get's better with age so artificially turning the clock back has a perversely disquieting effect on the gracefulness of a well-balanced aging process.  What matters in the end is the warm and hopeful comfort of knowing we do in fact have 10, 20, 30 or more good years ahead…"So Here's A Toast To Ten Or More Good Years!"  Cheers!

Written By BIGDADDY BLUES

THE EVOLUTION OF MOTHER-GODDESS COSMOLOGY AND ITS CONNEXION TO MOTHERS DAY

IN HOMAGE TO MOTHERHOOD…

The ancients revered the mystery of motherhood as the premier symbol of creativity and power.  All of our current religions evolved from primordial mother-goddess fertility cults and some of the earliest sculptural artifacts that human beings made were crude representations of pregnant females.  

Wherever one looks; to the cult of Isis in Khemet, The cult of Athena in Greece, or to the cult of Hina in Polynesia certainly derived from an earlier mother-goddess cult in India or china the world was once dominated by religions devoted to the reverence of the mystical powers of fertility only women possessed. 

The prehistoric world was dominated by female power figures who served as priests, shaman and oracles and they held power within those early human tribal structures beyond anything imaginable by today's standards, the roles of men and women were not yet fully evolved then and because they held the power of childbirth over me woman ruled supreme.   Over the millenniums men replaced these powerful goddesses with male approximations such as Osiris and Zeus but in many cultures the mystical power of these primordial female deities remained largely intact such as in India from which comes the earliest known concept of a divine trinity in the form of Vishnu, Krishna and Shiva who appear to take on male and female attributes.  The gradual supplanting of the mother-goddess by Male deities was a comprehensible but unnatural evolution wherein the men did not actually create anything of their own artifice but rather took control of the creative process begun by others, in this case the mother-goddess deities.  

This power structure more closely resembled the matriarchal power structure that typified most human civilizations.  Whereas in antiquity female-shaman-wizards possessing the divine connexion between fertility and the spirit world, (which men could not possess), were the most powerful socio-political figures now men revised cosmology over tens of thousands of years to mirror the tribal structures they established through warfare and political aggression. When the French painter Paul Gauguin painted his impressions of Polynesian culture in Martinique in the late 1890's he became fascinated by the local tradition of the female fertility deity Hina marveling at how it had managed to survive in what he viewed a a virtually pristine example of prototypical human civilization.  Gauguin painted the figure of Hina in many of his paintings from that period as a testament to his homage for the mother-goddess cosmology he found still in existence there.

Today we are so far removed from the history of the religions we observe that we hold on to very little of our prototypical reverence for femininity and motherhood.  Western Christianity, for example, reveres the mythic Mother Mary merely as the bearer of the savior of men but leaves her powerless in her impregnation by a male-deity who literally gave her no choice in the determination that she would bear this child we call Jesus.  Feminists have overlooked this aspect of western religion as a critical defining point in the evolution of a cosmology that edited them out of socio-religious power structure of men.  

In contemporary human civilization what is called “The Immaculate Conception”, would have been likened to forcing a woman to be artificially inseminated and then paying her off by cleaning up what could interpreted as rape and giving her divine celebrity status as a constellations prize. 

For over two centuries the Catholic church has packaged this myth as an "Immaculate Conception" but in modern courts a woman similarly impregnated against her will compelled to succumb to the dictates of a man intent on forcing upon her a pregnancy of his own will could sue that man for sexual assault.  But that is another story… Today women still fight to regain their equality with men having once been their lords. 

The purpose of Mother’s Day is to revere the women that bought us all into existence and nurtured us to become the magnificent men and women we have become.  The impact that our mothers have had upon the development of our human psyche is inestimable… we owe not only our physical but also our psychological existence to these women who served as mothers for their children.  Many children will attest to a profound emotional connection they have had with their mother that did not require words… Mothers magically knew what was going on with their children perhaps due to the intimacy of birth when mother and child are principally one organism sharing the same body.  

That is why the bond between a mother and her child can never be severed, there will always be some profound connexion between a mother and her children.  For those fortunate enough to have mothers who are still living my advice to you is to cherish every instant you have and will share with them, hold close to their wisdom and shower them with the same unquestioned love and devotion they have given to you all of your life.  Do everything you can to make their days upon this earth beautiful, it is their turn to be pampered and fussed over… your mother should be the queen of your existence and if you are married then your spouse must respect this relationship because it is one that is fundamental to humanity.  

If your mother is no longer living please cherish her memory on this day asking yourself if you have become the amazing human being that she envisaged.  Perhaps there is a mother who has been neglected by her children and you must make it your mission to find her and act as a surrogate child to celebrate and cherish her so that her motherhood is exalted.  I say this because mother’s day is not really just one day out of the year it is every day.  We must celebrate and cherish the tradition of motherhood every day!  Every day should sacred to the homage of motherhood…  So if asked what is the true purpose of Mother's Day one might answer that it is to recognize the creative mystery, beauty, humanity and power of women who have unfalteringly nurtured the human race through it's difficult struggle for survival on this planet and on a personal level it is a celebration of the mother who has so closely and lovingly shaped us into a loving, breathing, thinking organism when we could not even care for ourselves and in spite of those who might not care four us whenever we could...  

By BIGDADDY BLUES…

A GALLERY OF RELATED IMAGES:

FIN

THE TIDAL PATTERN OF HUMAN SOCIAL EVOLUTION

TIDAL

Rarely does one have time to sit and watch the tide go out and then come back in completely without leaving their point of reference. But we know the tide does shift every day as it has since the beginning of earth’s seas and we know it will continue long after the body we know as ourselves has decomposed and is reunited with the elements from which it came.  Our consciousness is tidal, our passions are tidal, we move most like the fluid bodies of the earth and of the inestimable firmament that fixes us not like an ancient body impregnating a flow of soft, primordial amber but rather like the sea, the clouds, the intergalactic magnetism of changing heavenly bodies.  The electromotive forces pulling and balancing the cosmos are more ancient than those of our marvelous earth's and the waves of energy it fluxes stretch from one eternity to the next... it's reach is beyond infinite!

Social evolution is also tidal.  Each time the fluid forces of change rise against the massive shore that resists them, covering it and obliterating its face but for a moment.  When the waters of change recede they have eroded the face of resistance permanently grinding it down to its most fundamental stratification, loosening every infinitesimally diminutive pebble in its bedrock foundation, opening fissures, causeways and tunnels.  When the tide of social evolution flows out again it gives us a chance to assess how effectively we have eroded our opposition.  It allows us to see the naked truth of oppression and if we are able to descry it without intimidation the next time we ride in on the tidal waves of truth we will have fortified ourselves with suitable strategies to demolish the embankment  so that the tide of change may roll in and over its opposition effortlessly.  Eventually the embankment of opposition will be thoroughly eroded  and the sea will freely flow over them, as the tide moves it in and out of its eternal, diurnal cycles; it will have become the seabed.

Some say the electromotive forces within us move in response to the pull of the moon and the cosmos all around us, that we are bound to this inexorable energy flow and therefore must understand it in order to better understand ourselves.  That is one of the great mysteries of life, that this force we cannot comprehend because it is the result of an infinite matrix of spatial and massing possibilities could have the ability to shape our very humanity… forcing us to ask ourselves if it is truly we who define ourselves or if there are other unseen, unimagined and incomprehensible forces driving our exploration of humanity and existence.  This theory brings us to wonder if we are the thing we believe ourselves to be or if we are not.  We know with certainty that we are organisms moved by the unseen forces of nature.  We know that the atoms and particles defining us are subject the mysterious and volatile happenstances of unrestrained creation.  Like the elements that flow in and out of one form to become another we are definitely tidal…..

Written by Bigdaddy Blues