[This poster is from
here]
(I can think of many people I'd place much higher up the Rampant Egomania List than Barry Manilow, Celine Dion, and Rick James. Bill O'Reilly, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and Donald Trump, to name but four.)
I'll own right away that I've rather had it with white male academic blowhards. Forgive the redundancy in the moniker. Academic blowhards inevitably means white men of a certain "station", in my experience of them. The "station" they seem to get off at or collective move to is Egoville, which is a traveling town perpetually roaming around somewhere in the white, white West.
I recently had an interaction with a Men's Studies dood that confirmed most of what I know to be an unfortunate consequence of a life spent with one's head up the Ass of
The Academy. And let me be clear: I don't mean all college or university education when I speak derisively of
The Academy.
T.A. has specific meaning for me; it is the social place, among the self-appointed intellectual elites, where white male supremacy is maintained and self-promoted as Intellectual Greatness, Brilliance, and
Genius. It is the educational sphere and network, where back-patting and psyche-stroking are taken to the most aptitudinally nepotistic levels. (Go ahead and check it, you PhDs of Presumptuous Phuckery. "Aptitudinally"
is a word in the English lexicon.) You aren't "anybody" unless you're read "so and so". And "so and so" is inevitably someone who was deeply profoundly, influenced by a "great" dead white man.
The Men's Studies prof had the nerve to argue in his own "profeminist" favor by quoting Rousseau. Because, well, only Great White Men uttered anything worth quoting about "The Human Condition". I called his ass out on it, and he got about as miffed and defensively offensive as anyone I'd encountered who is supposed to be able to engage on "a more disciplined intellectual level". Alas, those letters after the name, or the prefixes before it, do tend to fall away as soon as someone calls you on your flagrant use of bare-naked privilege.
But let us return now to the one living "Dr." Patrick D. Hazard, who is obviously eager to toot his own academic horn and poof up his über-privileged white male supremacist feathers by dredging up his own writings from decades prior. As you'll see, he is clearly capable of English speaking, if not English comprehension. He resides, when not traveling the world after he "took early retirement" (the smug fuck), in Weimar, Germany.
This is a biographical sketch of him I found
*here*. One imagines he might feel a tad too much like the emperor without attire should his name get mentioned without some academic letters before or after it.
Dr.Patrick D.Hazard was born in Battle Creek, Michigan, where he was found in an abandoned Kellogg’s Corn Flakes carton. His Ph.D. (1957) is interdisciplinary in American Civilization: two fields in Am Lit, his specialty; Am Art and Architecture, Am Philosophy and its European antecedents; Am Economic History.
He has a special interest in the humanities and mass media, for which he held a Ford Fellowship in New York (1955-56),where he became radio TV editor of Scholastic Teacher 1955-61), Carnegie Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania 1957-59 to create a new course on “The Mass Society” for the Department of American Civilization (1957-59), wrote the first curriculum of the Annenberg School of Communications at Penn (1959-61), where he taught the history of mass media, until appointed first director of the Institute of American Studies at the East West Center, U. of Hawaii, Honolulu (1961-62), and taught Am Lit, film, and media at Arcadia U,1962-82, after which he took early retirement to begin a second career as a cultural critic.
He has written for newspapers in Philadelphia, Detroit, Chicago, Butte, Salt Lake City, Santa Rosa, San Francisco, Oakland, Tokyo, and London. His work has appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, American Heritage, Variety, Asahi Evening News, and The European. He has done radio for NPR, advised Time Life and Encyclopedia Films which BBC films to distribute in America, and wrote a quarterly summary for Contrasts, the TV magazine of British Film. He has appeared on two TV series for University of the Air, WFIL-TV,Philadelphia.
For the past ten years he has lived in Weimar, Germany, where he has a German wife, Hildegard, and a 17-month-old son, Daniel Patrick Moynihan Hazard. He has just finished a book on Walter Gropius, Bauhaus: Myths and Realities. He is now working on an autobiography, Dumb Irish Luck: A Memoir of Serendipities, and an anthology of 50 years of his thinking, Hazard-at-Large”: A Humanist in Mass Culture, 1955-2005.
I'll admit right away to having exceptionally (and fortunately) limited exposure to his apparently massive (or is it bloated) intellect. This swollen, turgid intellect, on display in a blogpost copied and pasted below, shows off his stunning levels of ignorance and arrogance: the conjoined twins of the social dominants' collective consciousness. Such a combination does nothing to assuage those of us who have known HaShoah survivors that the Good Citizens of Germany have learned much since their parents and grandparents murdered millions of people. Then again, this man isn't German. He's an ex-patriot of the U.S. I'll wager that the Germans have learned more than have U.S. white male citizens about our own fathers', grandfathers', and great grandfathers' atrocities, committed on far greater and grander and deadlier scales, both in the past and through to this day.
While there are, no doubt, some academically trained U.S., German, and other non-euro white men who care deeply about both the arts
and humanity, who demonstrate a reasonable commitment to fairly discussing members of oppressed classes as fully human, deep thinking people--perhaps even capable of greatness, brilliance, and genius--Dr. Patrick D. Hazard is not among them. I conclude this based on how he obnoxiously presents himself and describes others below (him).
Pat Hazard seems to care far more about putting down some feminists while getting terribly excited about obstrusive human female nipples and magnificent representations of "the vulva". Men, in increasingly bizarre ways, seem to be obsessed with parts of women's bodies and oblivious to the harm done to women of only discussing women as if they were a body part here or there. What a waste of a "higher" education.
Dr. Patrick D. Hazard has this to say about himself:
"I read, write, and roam from my villa in Weimar where I live with my Ossi Frau Hilly and my three year old third son, Danny."
His blog is called "My Global Eye" and you can find the post I'm responding to
*here*. The post follows. And after that, a response from... guess who?
In the melioristic tradition of "if you're stuck with lemons, make lemonade," St. Paul turns both frozen cheeks each end of January and stages an icy Winter Festival (Jan. 24-Feb. 4--phone 612-297-6985). I was recently spying there to see what the chicken-hearted, hot-blooded indoor types like myself could do to get in out of the cold. Here's the thaw plan.
The Minnesota Museum of Art has three irresistible shows on view for the temperature-timid. Begin at the Landmark Center, that floriously recycled Romanesque old Federal Building kitty-corner from the St. Paul Hotel on Rice Park. Benjamin Thompson's Ordway Theatre and Music Center and a beaux artsy Public Library complete the neighbors on the square at Fifth and Market.
Both the SPPL and the Landmark Center are prim pickup points for the free weeklies and other cultural orientation materials that distinguish St. Paul as one of the grandest self-promoting cities in the country.
The Landmark has (until January 28) a perfectly splendid show on one of my favorite sculptors, Gaston Lachaise, under the randy rubric, "20th Century Venus: Sculptures and Drawings by GL." Man, was that guy into nipples and labia. With one fell swoop of his pen his establishes the most erectile nipples in the long and often aroused history of femininity. The labia and monses also positively throb with a sweet sensuality.
I learned from the captions that this Paris-born and -educated genius (his woodworking father moved to the capital from the Auvergne) fell in love with a Canadian woman ten years his senior in the Luxembourg Gardens and lusted after her as far as Boston, where his money ran out.
He soon met and became the main aide of Paul Manship--he of the Rockefeller Center-sans Golden Prometheus. e.e. cummings, that funky poet who wished he was a better painter than he was, touted GL's early work in the influential Dial magazine. Lachaise did reliefs for the RCA Building in 1930, large plaster reliefs for Chicago's Century of Progress in 1932, reliefs for Rockefeller Center's International Building in 1934. Hell, while most American artists were on WPA relief, he sculpted reliefs for more than good dough.
The Philadelphia Art Alliance enjoys the distinction of giving the Deco-dent relief picturer his first one-man in 1932. MOMA in New York gave him a retro in 1935, the year he died. The Minnesota Museum of Art has the neat idea of getting its patrons to kick in enough dough (the museum is free) to buy a cast of his "Dolphins" (c. 1922), one of an edition of six, on display courtesy of the Kraushaar Gallery. I hope they make it.
Men who love women and their bodies we will always have with us, despite temporary aberrations like Andrea Dworkin and her fear-of-fucking cadre. ("Thou shalt not penetrate me," Ms. Dworkin moans, abusing herself selfishly.)
To prick her illusion, she should gaze at GL's "Dynamo Mother" (1933), which is all vulva, an expressionist romp over the woman's greatest blessing to man's kind: her capacity to nurture a fetus to term. Who cares about penis envy? GL's sculpture gave me instant vulva envy. Hey, if GL's love affair with the female body doesn't give you the esthetic hots, you deserve to die of the cold in St. Paul's exterior darkness.
Down the street, overlooking the river (yes, you geographically illiterate Americans, St. Paul is on the Mississippi), is the lovely Deco original Minnesota Museum of Art Jemne Building. It offers a great-view "Deco" restaurant on the fourth floor. Do a powerless lunch there. It also has two more first class art exhibitions.
"The American Landscape," a chrestomathy from Minnesota collections, has the usual national suspects, plus some unknown (to me, who is more than happy to have his ignorance relieved) locals--such as Mike Lynch (1938- )--whose blue-pink cast "Elevator--29th and Harriet" (1988) is more than a Sheeler updating, it's local color, colored locally--and John Moore ("Quarry," 1987).
And by all means don't miss James Daugherty's "Will Canfield's House." Its Oscar Blemner-like composition and ominousness is delicious.
Wait. There's more. "The Silent Language of Dress" is the kind of show that takes only an attic-full of clothes from all over the globe and an energizing curatorial vision. My fave is an Ainu kimono, not like the first Aino kimono I ever saw--in the Batchelder Museum in Sapporo, Hokkaido, woven of elm bark!--but on the same track, of heavy hemp cloth. Oh, those Ainus were aesthetically hairy creatures, taking the delicate traditions of their Japanese Conquerors and goosing them up most lovingly. They flattered by weirdly misimitating.
And save some time for building inspections. Like the centennial-celebrating St. Paul's Building at Fifth and Wabasha. It's Richardsonianized red sandstone. How I love the aura of that era! 99% of American architecture since has been a precipitate drop into the pits of speculation and peculation. Yucko.
And don't fail to have breakfast at Mickey's Diner, a National Hysterical Building--although its cuisine is better. I always have the "twos" when I drop off the Greyhound across the street: two eggs, two sausages and two pancakes.
Down the street is the headquarters of Minnesota Public Radio, where you can buy Garrison Keilloriana by the freight carload. That's the World Trade Center across the street, and emblem of former mayor George Latimer's ambition to position his blue-collar city in the international markets.
A good cheap, central place to stay is the Civic Center Motel, kitty corner from the Civic Center, except when rock concerts or dog shows (I often confuse the two) prompt them to raise their $40ish rates. The airport is straight out that street, where a $12 cab ride will get you into a bed. A city bus will do the same a little slower for 75 cents.
And don't miss the Ramsey County Court House across the street from MMA/Jemne. In it is Carl Milles' greatest statue, the soaring Mexican onyx Peace Indian.
I love St. Paul, and not just because my granddaughter Sonia lives there. She's just the latest, sweetest frosting on a basically great cake. Other attractions are the Science Museum, the Minnesota Historical Society (and its James J. Hill house), Cass Gilbert's State Capitol, and much more.
Reprinted from Welcomat: After Dark: Hazard-at-Large, January 24, 1990
Posted by Dr. Patrick D. Hazard at 00:01
Blogger Julian Real said...
Men who love women and their bodies we will always have with us, despite temporary aberrations like Andrea Dworkin and her fear-of-fucking cadre. ("Thou shalt not penetrate me," Ms. Dworkin moans, abusing herself selfishly.)
To prick her illusion, she should gaze at GL's "Dynamo Mother" (1933), which is all vulva, an expressionist romp over the woman's greatest blessing to man's kind: her capacity to nurture a fetus to term.
And you appear to be all dickhead, the white man's unkindest manifestation of P.R.I.C.K.dom.
You're silly description of Andrea Dworkin's work and perspective comes from what readings and interpretations of her own writings? Are they your own? Or do you satisfy your intellectual lack-of-curiosities by only skimming secondary sources? You really come across as extremely ignorant, the way people in the U.S. do who spout off what they heard on Fox News as Gospel Truth. The way perpetually hungry consumers of pornography do when describing what feminist antipornography activists allegedly did in the 1980s to try and "censor" pornographers. (As if.)
Are you trying to sound so ignorant? Or do you usually only have crickets chirping in lieu of readers to call you on the ridiculous stuff you publicly say? Oh, yes, you do admit this is "a kook's tour". You've certainly got that part right.
Do you also ridicule Foucault, Chomsky, and Churchill for their philosophical-political views--and in such a sloppy manner? Or do you just make a point to focus in an inanely critical way on feminists whose work you either haven't read at all, or don't or can't comprehend because of your own intellectual ineptitude?
Can you summarize what the major points of analysis are by Dworkin of James Baldwin's novels and non-fiction essays in the "Communion" chapter of
Intercourse, for example? (I doubt it, but I thought I'd at least offer you an opportunity to show that you are capable of reading and accurately assessing the meaning of her work.)
17 May 2010 09:25
