New Year Resolutions and Vintage Self-Help/inspirational/motivational Literature and Ephemera

They say (or used to say) that a picture is worth a thousand words. This peculiar post promises to be heavy on pictures to look at and light on words to read.

As 2014 arrived I had thought it would be an excellent idea to write an essay on trends in self help or self improvement. I had also wanted to write a philosophic critique of what I call moralist exhibitionism (which is not the same as narcissism), a long-term trend only increased by the internet and social media. This trend and now way of life is one in which large masses of people flaunt their virtue and personal life-changing stories, their moral political activism, their fights and struggles against The Man, their dietary and nutritional (newfound) discipline, beliefs and practices, their success at having overcome vices and privations against great hardships and obstacles, their battle against Patriarchy and, if they are a right-winger of some stripe, what the secrets are to becoming that prosperous CEO or entrepreneur or how to take down that pesky activist government that conspires to take your prosperity away. But that longish piece will wait for another day. All of these exhortations and pronouncements are commonplace these days and are simply  so many effects of a culture of teams and group identities, rather than individuals, and "oversharing", rather than reserve,  in short a culture that values "intimacy" (I leave aside the question of whether it is in fact a genuine intimacy or not), at the expense of older values like distance and privacy.

Partly as a side effect of being a lay 1970s scholar, I have amassed quite a collection of ephemera and literature documenting the emergence of various popular psychologies, religious sects and self-help movements. In this all too brief and rushed post I will display but a few of these. Hopefully more will follow at a later date.

As you can see a lot of the presumptions and beliefs contained within these have now become mainstreamed and common sense (or nonsense),  ideas about individual agency and power, for example, or how even the universe itself works.  The first example is a classic and foundational text of the genre, Harris' I'm O.K.-You're O.K. Note the heavy, sometimes turgid jargon. One of the curious things about the language is its mixture of vernacular slang and scientific sounding technical jargon. They even use graphs. Graphs give the aura of being more realistic and authoritative, making you feel as if you were back in school, albeit probably a private, alternative school.

The Handbook To higher Consciousness appears to be associated with a particular religious/spiritual sect, having been published in 1975 by The Living Love Center. I have not yet done research on this particular group but I surely will and get back to you dear reader.

Even Born-Again Christians got in on the act, borrowing the tone and style of secular self-help as in this curious example:

Presumably it was now not enough to love or Praise Jesus, one must now "hang loose" with Him. Had this book been written a few years later it might have even spoken of "getting down with Jesus". This was published in 1973 and, though a thin volume, the author rambles on about how so many Christians are too uptight, serious and "heavy" about their faith and should simply relax and let Jesus do His thing, in short, to hang loose. In other words, with the emphasis on easing up and letting go, this is very much a Christianity for the 70s. The tone and even the content at times resembles a Women's Liberation tract, not in the sense of moral critique of existing or traditional society but in the intimate, candid and relational nature of the approach. The subject of women's self help or inspirational writing merits volumes of study and appraisal.

Hunter writes: "As a new Christian, I was so afraid that everybody would think I was religious that even thought the thirst had begun in my life for the living water, I still didn't want people to know about my avid reading of The Bible. So each Saturday morning I carefully covered my Bible with Playboy magazine because i wanted everyone to think I was a real 'swinger'."

At the opposite extreme from this nice and friendly, almost innocuously banal Christian example is one of my more dated and outrageous finds: an example of a pro-drug, indeed pro-Cocaine book! The illustrations alone are worth the price of the $1.50 I spent on this. I hasten to add that one theme in this book is how the authorities are all wrong about drugs, how safe cocaine is when used responsibly. Literature like this is truly captive to its time.

 This page tells you how to snort cocaine, complete with an illustration.

I can't imagine anything being produced or published like this today. Doubtless much of what we currently regard as truthful, or appropriate, or timeless is as much captive to current transient fashion. I wonder what current mores will be found as dubious by future generations. One thing I'll bet though is that, whatever is in today that dies out, it won't appear as embarrassing or even shameful, as extreme as The Pleasures Of Cocaine.

There were satirists and critics of all of this while it was going on. My personal favorite is the masterful novel of Marin County called Serial, by Cyra McFadden. I feature here the back cover of my first edition if only because it mixes together all of the buzzwords, catch-phrases, jargon, neologisms  period. Some of this has lasted to now, some of it is undeniably dated, all of it evidence of the American, or perhaps human quest for inner development tied to group identities of various kinds.

I love the phrase "Martha who cannot Get Behind ironing boards". Note the capitalization here and throughout. One of the brilliant stylistic and rhetorical strategies of McFadden is to have an omniscient voice speak in the insular language of this world, written totally straight and without any explanation as in this sample. Indeed, this book was originally serialized in the Pacific Sun.

This book was made into an interesting but now forgotten film starring Martin Mull and Tuesday Weld. It has always irritated me that Armistead Maupin's Tales Of The City got such love and acclaim rather than The Serial. Part of the reason could be Maupin's commercial instinct to flatter the reader. McFadden flatters nobody. In my view it is as great  a work of social satire as other more well known works: on a par with the current George Saunders or even the late Stanley Elkin.

And here is one comic author's answer to the "I'm o.k., you're o.k" mantra.

I don't want to go into a long analysis of all of this. I don't want to condemn it and I don't want to praise it. None of the things I have excerpted here are trivial detritus from a bygone age. All of it is interesting. It ought to be important to students of American Studies and History to be sure. But it also should be of continuing interest artistically and aesthetically. Part of the reason is that so much of what we now take to be common sense or take for granted has roots in the period represented here. Another reason is that just as much of what I have excerpted here has been rejected. That is, we should reflect on why we have rejected what we have. Were they right and we wrong? Were they wrong and we, if not right, then, more evolved? How can we tell or know? To me all of it is all one great example of an American form of emergent, evolving Romanticism; the breaking free of the old strictures of traditional society, an expansion of the individual, the expression of a Democratic sensibility. Detractors of these things, those of an older bent, will call it individualism or narcissism, but they are perhaps revealing more about themselves than about the objects of their diagnosis. That is, they do not want the hazards of  this Democratic Romanticism. They fear the bad taste, the outlier Cult, the chaos that may result. I have some sympathy for their fears, but I would never want to live in a society that doesn't at least partly allow such a wild flowering of what philosopher Thomas Nagel calls the "inner tropical luxuriance" of human beings. Interestingly, we now have the technological means for such creative output but the net result is less interesting, more conformist people. It is as if the flattening and abundance of all those voices renders all of it so much white noise and none of it very conspicuous.

To me, any kind of dogma is problematic, no matter how virtuous the intention. A lot of the stuff here has a cult-like feeling about it. Some of it does sound like common sense. Some of it is sentimental in the worst sense. But all of it was actually produced and made and eventually consumed. That fact alone should be a marvel to us. One thing is sure: the human comedy is never boring and, hopefully, will continue, so long as we have some modicum of a so-called civilization.

Happy New Year

Notes Towards An Aesthetic of 1970s Cinema: Chantal Akerman's News From Home and The Power Of Location

In 1970s cinema and aesthetics more generally the power of place comes to the fore; never before has environment, in all senses of the word, been seen as equal to and constitutive of individual or collective human identity. Of course there was great precedence. For example, in the European art cinema of the 1960s - above all, Antonioni - location and place became most important and the entire traditional assumptions of foreground and background were called into question. In addition, the documentary tradition was also very interested in environments, in particular the urban centers.

In the 1970s all of this is pushed to the absolute limit. As I have suggested before,http://themoderatecontrarian.blogspot.com/2012/08/notes-towards-aesthetics-of-1970s.html artists in the 1970s were surely aware, if only unconsciously, that there was something exceptionally weird and at times outrageous about the design of the period, and that awareness must in part account for the level and focus of attention on both location shooting and the environment during this period. It was as if the filmmakers, even in nominally fictional works, wanted to document the curious and striking look of the times: the environment people created and found themselves in became less background and more foreground. Also emphasized were the attire and accessories with which characters, whether fictional or nonfictional, wished to present themselves. It is not merely a budgetary issue (the cost of recreating with a semblance of "realism" the look of an actual historical period or contemporary city) nor a technological issue (the excitement over new techniques of shooting on location): it was above all an aesthetic issue: the question of style and meaning, as in any artistic decision. Understandings or evaluations of this 1970s visual aesthetic that look merely to economic or infrastructural causes, as in the lowering of budgets, or the invention of the steadicam etc., are  inadequate at best.

In the past, when discussing 1970s film and/or visual culture, I have included many works that would fit neatly into a commercial designation. In this latest installment I am including a conspicuously non-commerical work, indeed one that would be considered thoroughly artistic. I have in mind Chantal Akerman's News From Home. 

When it comes to films that can lay claim to documenting the styles and looks of the 1970s none is more definitive than this film.

I can't be coy when it comes to this gem of a movie. It is a masterpiece. Firstly, it is one of the great films of and "about" New York City, easily ranking alongside The Naked City, Dog Day Afternoon and In The Street. One reason it may not be so regarded is that it is in almost every way unlike a traditional narrative film.

The entire film consists of the audio of a woman reading letters from her mother from back home in Europe, in a heavily accented English and in a formal and a times reportorial tone. The content contains all of the qualities that one would expect from a letter by a mother to her daughter living in another country, in this case the United States. Simultaneous with this audio is the visual of different public transportation and street scenes of "real", that is, ordinary, nonprofessional people going about their business in the hear of New York City. The people we see and/or witness appear as if in an unrelated film and in appearance and manner appear different from the ostensible intimacy of the letters, since the spaces are public and "anonymous".

This is literally all that happens in the feature length film.

Over the course of the film the mind wonders and wanders and just maybe one will think about the relationship between this European voice reciting accented, not always decipherable English (and the audio is purposefully kept low at times) and the faces and bodies we see. The film is humanistic in the tradition of older "realist" painting, a comparison I have not seen any critic make. In this sense, this very formalist and structuralist film has a fiery heart at its center, but its emotions are not so specific and specified. It is something of being dislocated, of living in a foreign country. It is something of being a mother or a daughter. It is something in the nature of letter writing itself.

The so-called "classical" Hollywood period of American filmmaking, a list of names including but far from restricted to King Vidor, Raoul Walsh, John Ford, Howard Hawks, George Stevens, Billy Wilder,  Alfred Hitchcock and Frank Capra, Nicholas Ray and Robert Rossen, (again to name only a few) was one of the greatest periods in the history of all Western Art. Nevertheless, though my praise is most high for these figures, there are many radically different and equally valid ways to make a film.

Because of the "template" set down in that period many unsuspecting viewers, including critics, have a rather narrow notion of what a film is supposed to be and look like. Partly in response to this situation critics, and some artists, coin terms like "structuralist", "minimalist", "avant-garde", and perhaps the worst of them all, "experimental", to categorize these differing, "difficult" (and to some eyes and ears simply boring) artistic and stylistic strategies. One book on Akerman considers her a hyperrealist, whatever that may mean. (Though to be fair, Ivone Margulies' book has much that is good in it, and it is, after all, a full length book on Akerman). For me she is simply a filmmaker and one of our very best.

News From Home is really nothing like any of those Hollywood films and is a lot like certain avant-garde films. Akerman's more famous and accessible Jeanne Dielman is actually much closer to Hollywood in certain respects, especially the films that centered upon melodrama or female protagonists. News From Home is much less Hollywood. (Though whole chunks of News From Home could have served as the background in many an action film from the 1970s). Akerman acknowledges the influence of the so-called avant-garde such as Michael Snow and Andy Warhol, yet the film is so much a work of absolute cinema, a work of viewing people, places and things. (Indeed both Snow and Warhol belong to cinema as much as Hawks or Rossen).


Here is my blunt principle for all the writing I have done and will do on all works of art: the absolute gold standard for understanding and evaluating any work of art, from the lowliest commercial advertising illustration to the highest Henry Moore sculpture (or Akerman movie) is how we feel about its sight and sound temporally, as we are experiencing it. All other considerations i.e., cultural allusiveness, intertextuality, historical context and so on, while at times important are still secondary to this experience as it is lived in time. One technical word for my approach is phenomenological.

Looked at in this way, all art is perceptual, whether its artists or creators wish to complicate or contest perception and go by the word and label "conceptual" or not, and however much discursive and textual stuff (or junk) fills the object in question. This is the totality of what we have to deal with.

In this sense Akerman's film, if it is about anything, is about the sound of the filmmaker reading her mother's letters, the emotions and sensibilities of such letters, and the shots of anonymous people in the architecture and setting of New York City. It is about the distance (or perhaps the closeness?) between the audio and the visual. Critics often write about it as if it were purely self referential, a film about film. But to treat News From Home in this way alone is to miss a great deal of its experiential richness: it is too "theory addled" an approach.

Yes it is true there is something like a "breaking of the fourth wall." The strangers acknowledge the camera. In this case the man facing us moves to another train car to escape our and its gaze. But the meaning of it is precisely the effect this has on us, and the feelings we (potentially or actually) have about it. We are the ones who are noticing it and we are going to register that it is different than in other movies we have seen. How this is achieved is perhaps secondary. We have to watch the film and deal with it, in the fullness of time.

News From Home has the second greatest ending of any 1970s film, the other ending of course being Antonioni's The Passenger. The two are similar in certain respects, in their "slowness" and in their spiritual abstraction.
It is a long tracking shot away from the New York Harbor. It is so beautiful. It is also ten minutes long.

Today's movies do not look like this. Most newer technologies take rather ugly pictures, in ways I can't get into now. It always seems wrong, either too bright or too dark.

I love the sound of the seagulls as much as the waves. Robert Bresson was right to observe that cinema was actually more of an aural art form than was usually recognized and nobody exhibits Bresson's lesson better than Akerman/http://vimeo.com/47911048
News From Home (1977) from Dave Chino on Vimeo.
If you have not seen it, here it is in its entirety on Vimeo. If you are at all interested in New York City. It is a must see. If you are at all interested in family and the theme of parents and children, it is a must see. If you are at all curious about how people looked, dressed or behaved in another era, it is a must see.

Enjoy