The rhetoric of pleas for justice (Defixiones, Part 5)

Defixiones (curse tablets) can be roughly divided into two types, preemptive ones seeking to injure without presenting any particular reason, and backward-looking, so-called pleas for justice based on some offense already given. The defixiones from Aquae Sulis (modern Bath) are mainly of this second type, generally citing thefts, typically by persons unknown. Gordon and Simón characterize them thus:¹

Such curses are […] similar to the world of real litigation they skirt or duck, with rhetorical skill far outweighing the establishment of facts in deciding the outcome or judgement.

These are not unique to Roman Britain, other examples have been found including in Greece, as well as more recently in the sanctuary of Isis and Mater Magna in Mainz. One in particular from Veldidena, now Wilten, a neighborhood in Innsbruck is worth taking a closer look at as an exemplar. John Gager says it’s written in “unsophisticated Latin”² but I think I can show the form and content are actually brilliant:³

Secundina Mercurio et
Moltino mandat, ut siquis XIIII
sive draucus duos sustulit, ut
eum sive fortunas eius infi-
dus Cacus sic auferat quo-
modi ill[a]e ablatum est id quod
vobis delegat, ut persecuatis
vobisque deligat, ut
persicuatis et eum
aversum a fortunis[s]u-
is avertatis et a suis prox-
simis et ab eis quos caris-
simos abeat, oc vobis
mandat, vos [e]um cor[ipi]a-
tis.

Secundina commands of Mercurius and Moltinus that whoever has stolen two cows worth 14 denarii, that the untrustworthy Cacus carry off him and his possessions, just as hers were taken, the very things that she gives to you to track down. And she also assigns you to persecute him and separate him from his fortune and from his family and from those dearest to him. She commands this; you must catch him.

I should note this defixio is often translated to be about a pair of stolen necklaces rather than cows. The word draucus is uncertain: a Greek-borrowed δραύκιον gives the item of jewelry, but others have pointed to a Gaulish word referring to cattle instead. Given both options are equally difficult to verify and the location of this find in an area where a Celtic language would have been spoken alongside Latin, and Greek very likely was not, as well as the fact everything else in this defixio refers to cattle indirectly, as we shall see, I have gone with cows.

Proceeding with the text, we see Mercury being called upon. He is, among many other things, the god of thieves, having himself rustled the herd of Apollo early in his career. Just as he is the god of disease and also healing, it makes sense to call on him to catch a thief, particularly of cattle.

As for Moltinus, he is a little-attested Gaulish god who seems to have been syncretized with Mercury, so we might suppose Secundina is just covering her bases. Like Mercury, he is a chthonian deity, just the sort to communicate with via defixiones. Finally, his name is cognate with English mutton, and he seems to be a god of cattle. The common motif of Mercury riding a ram is a likely reason for the syncretization of the two deities.

Calling upon the mythical monster, Cacus, is also quite clever: first, his name simply means “bad”, but this son of Vulcan was known as a thief, particularly of Hercules’ cattle, dragging them by the tails into his cave, and so leaving behind a misleading trail. This is the sort of deviousness Secundina hopes Mercury and Moltinus can unravel in order to bring the thief to justice.

There is yet another aspect to the language of the prayer revealed here, and which I’ve not yet discussed. It’s embodied in the phrase, “infidus Cacus”. Let’s seemingly abruptly veer into the world of Greek drama. Eva Stehle notes:³

Speaking is dangerously performative in the world of Aeschylus. The prime example is Oresteia: Kassandra’s prophecies and visions of the curse in Agamemnon, the raising of the dead in Choephoroi, the Furies’ “Binding Song” in Eumenides.

This “dangerously performative” nature of speech is neither limited to this playwright nor even the stage, rather plays reflect the cultural value words have power. The tradition of wearing masks and assuming personae assures the catastrophes the actors conjure do not befall them personally—in effect they hide their real selves from the gods.

Dysphemia (δυσφημία: “ill-omened speech”), of which the invocation of Cacus is an example, is easiest defined by what it is not—naturally, euphemia (ευφημία):⁴

[T]hose charged with prayer or song must speak words welcome to the gods and avoid any repellent to them. […] Euphemia along with its nonverbal corollaries of pleasing motion, music, and a beautiful visual scene constituted a human offering of charis to the gods. Charis, pleasure given or received, governs relations between humans and gods: it attracts the gods to prayer and celebration, honoring and delighting them, while suggesting that benefactions should be given in return.

The idea of χάρις (charis) of course gets back to the exchange of value I’ve discussed previously, putting it into this larger context. The amulet I cited in Part 4 skilfully uses euphemia, in its use of terms like ἁγῖοις (holy, lit. “devoted to the gods”), ἀεί (everlasting), ὁλοκλήρουςα (full fitness, “completeness, perfection”), and ὑγιαῖνούςα (health).

In curses, while the value exchange is still there, as we’ve seen, dysphemia is used to engender godly anger toward the intended victim in those called upon instead, consisting of elements like,⁵

[R]eferences to polluting realities such as death, cries of pain or grief, insulting language, and expectation of disaster.

In addition to being directive as to what Secundia wishes to befall whoever has wronged her, the punishments mentioned also act as dysphemia, falling into the final category of the above list.

According to Stehle, even the meter of the language used can be eu– or dysphemic: strophic language presents a steady, repetitive rhythm, fitting with the “pleasing motion” aspect of euphemia, while anastrophic language, with uneven and abrupt rhythms obviously is the opposite. My Latin is honestly not good enough to get a sense of whether dysphemia is also woven into this defixio’s meter, but perhaps one day I’ll attempt such a breakdown.

The loss of two cows or indeed anything worth 14 denarii would be a pretty tough one for almost anyone to simply accept and move past; one denarius is typically thought of as a skilled laborer’s daily wage. As such, Secundina’s seeking of divine intervention seems entirely the correct course. And she, or a magical practitioner working on her behalf, has performed the task admirably. The thieves are unknown, and there is no evidence apart from the missing cattle, so we turn to rhetoric rhetoric urging their punishment instead. Elements pertinent to thievery, cattle, and punishment are invoked, with a dash of dysphemia thrown in to rouse the gods’ anger against the guilty party.

Personally, I hope if she didn’t get her cattle back, at least the thief was brought to justice.

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Read subsequent articles in the Defixiones series

Part 6: More Than Money Can Buy

Part 7: The Punic Curse Trail

Part 8: Hellenism Schmellenism

Part 9: The Celtic Undercurrents of Bath

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Read previous articles in the Defixiones series

Part 1: The Curses of Aquae Sulis

Part 2: Malefic Traditional

Part 3: Sympathy for Sauron

Part 4: Bargaining with the Gods

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Notes

1. Richard Gordon & Francisco Marco Simón, “Introduction”, Magical Practice in the Latin West, Papers from the International Conference Held at the University of Zaragoza, 30 Sept.–1 Oct. 2005, Gordon & Simón, eds., 2010.
2. John Gager, Curse Tablets and Binding Spells from the Ancient World, 1992.
3. DFX 7.5/1 (TheDeMa 109, LCT 238), cited and translated in ibid.
4. Eva Stehle, “Prayer and Curse in Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes”, Classical Philology, 2005.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid, emphasis mine.

The ubiquitous ludling (Argots, Part 2A)

It is well known there are language games, also called secret languages or word games, and while I had some idea other cultures had them, it turns out they appear basically everywhere and there is also a more scientific name for them: ludlings. It’s a portmanteau of the Latin words ludus “game” and lingua “language”.

The best known of these to an English-speaking audience is Pig Latin. This ludling most often appears today as a comedically penetrable code: people either say things in it with a surety they will be understood, or think they are being covert when they’re not. It was featured in the very well-known musical Gold Diggers of 1933, wherein Ginger Rogers sang an entire verse of “We’re in the Money” in Pig Latin. In one Three Stooges short, Larry (Fine) speaks it to a woman in an effort to impress her, but she already knows it, and in another, Moe (Howard) and Larry attempt to teach it to Curly (Howard)¹

Today, it has come to be generally used ironically in phrases like “ixnay on the [x]” (nix), or simply amscray (scram). Nix itself is a borrowing of Yiddish nichts, “nothing” with its meaning extended in an argotic way to become a verb meaning “cancel” or “reject”. 86, which carries the same meaning, is suggested by the OED as rhyming slang for nix, extending this ludus.

Still, when a French reader ran across the following passage in a Kotaku article, they were flummoxed:²

Next time, exne on the wiisucksne when you’re talking with the video games press.

One element of the unintelligibility of this phrase comes from the reference to the Nintendo Wii video game console and another from the fact it’s improperly formed; the article’s comments section included corrections to “ixnay on the iiway uckssay”. Add to that even a slight deficit in English comprehension and click! — the code works again, even though its use in a magazine article reflects its accepted comprehensibility among English speakers. If you watch the Pig Latin performance of “We’re In the Money”, which is available on YouTube, it’s quite strange and even unsettling.

The other shoe I’d have wanted to drop in a dramatic reveal, but have unfortunately already announced in this article’s subtitle, is that ludlings are also argots. Serbian шатровачки (Šatrovački), though it is often compared to Pig Latin, is generally classified as an argot rather than a ludling. The essential difference is a von Braunian one of attitude—if it’s used by marginal groups, it becomes sinister. Take Cockney rhyming slang; what’s more of a language game than that? But it seems clear the language was devised in order to communicate without either the gendarmes or customers (i.e., those being fleeced) understanding what was being said.

Returning to Pig Latin, why is it called “Latin” when it clearly has nothing to do with that language? It is common to name ludlings by analogy to foreign languages: Double Dutch (English), Javanaise (French), Macaronic Latin (Romance languages), Mattenenglisch and Matteänglisch (German; two different ones, despite the similarity in names), Yuantang dialect (苑塘话, Hakka 客家話).

And what about the “pig” part? Again, many ludlings have names recalling animals and other nonhumans. Birds are often invoked, but some stranger ones include Korean 귀신말 or 도깨비말 (Gwisin Mal: “ghost language”, Dokkaebi Mal: “ogre language”), and Somali Af Jinni (“djinni language”). Some even run to inanimate objects like Russian Кирпичный язык (Kirpichny yazyk: “brick language”), Latvian Pupiņvaloda (“bean language”), German Löffelsprache (“spoon language”), and Swedish Fikonspraket (“fig language”). Many of those remaining refer to the type of gibberish they deal in, but only Romanian Greaca Vacească (“cow Greek”) matches the neologizing in Pig Latin precisely.

Latin, perhaps because of its role as a language of learning, seems to have been singled out for mockery. Macaronic Latin, which I mentioned above, is based on a somewhat nonsensical application of Latin endings to vernacular words with actual Latin words mixed in. The name of the language also refers to a rustic dumpling — the term was to eventually evolve into macaroni.

The German version is Küchenlatein, while French has Latin de cuisine—both “kitchen Latin”—which, while it seems a classist put down of the help, actually stems from the fact monks dining together and often lacking a common vernacular would inventively update the liturgical vocabulary they shared in order to communicate concepts more down-to-earth or modern.

In any case, a few precious words of this gibberish found their way into English dictionaries:

• babblative: prattling
• balductum: balderdash
• circumbendibus: roundabout process

These puckishly prod the perceived pomposity of Latin, each via a slightly different stratagem. There are a few more terms I’ve run across in disused lexica of vernacular English that clearly share this origin:

• inebrious: drunken
• excrementitious and stercorarious: covered in feces
• sinistruous and theftuous: hidden, secret

If this reminds you of the ersatz taxonomic binomial names appearing in Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner cartoons, it’s not by accident—it’s exactly this kind of nonsense, though at a less advanced level. And in English, there is a tradition of such code-switching shenanigans going back at least to Shakespeare that post-Bard came to be known as Dog Latin or Cod Latin. The dog element here, rather than referring to the sound of the speech is more to the idea of a mongrelized language and the cod doesn’t refer to the fish or the body part but the meaning of “joke”—ludus again.

As I noted previously in this series, there has always been a literary interest in argots, and indeed, there is a certain virtuosity at work, as Elyse Graham notes:³

[I]n dog Latin […], an appreciation of the misuse of the rules requires an understanding of the rules; it requires a subject position past that of a novice who can only follow rules and toward that of an expert who knows when to violate the rules.

On the borderlands between ludling and argot, Meredith Doran performed a yearlong study on the use of Verlan, formed by swapping syllables, among teens in minority communities on the outskirts of Paris (la banlieue). She finds of their use of the ludling as their preferred idiom:⁴

[B]anlieue youth language may represent a valuable alternative to mainstream French precisely as a tool for forging, negotiating, and expressing identities which stand outside the binary categories of mainstream discourse, allowing youths to define and express themselves through a linguistic bricolage that mirrors their sense of identity as mixed, evolving, and drawing from multiple cultural and linguistic sources.

It’s important to note that Verlan can be dated at least to a 12th-century version of The Madness of Tristan (Folies Tristan), wherein the titular hero gives his name as “Tantris” to conceal his identity. It seems to have also been used during the German occupation. Although not nearly as old, probably dating from at least the turn of the last century, based on the evidence in popular culture, Pig Latin also seems to have had its own renaissance. I’d guess because of the need for a cryptolect during Prohibition, and probably continuing through the Great Depression.

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Read subsequent articles in the Argots series

Part 2B: Me Talk Pretty Ludling

Part 3: Rhyming and Stealing

Part 4: The Mysteries of Zūja-Go

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Read previous articles in the Argots series

Part 1A: The Slang of Empyrea’s Automata

Part 1B: Canargy: a Cant How-To

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Notes

1. Three Little Pigskins, 1934 and Tassels in the Air, 1938, respectively.
2. Luke Plunkett, “Capcom (Try To) Back Away From Anti-Wii Comments”, Kotaku, 2010.
3. Elyse Graham, “Dog Latin: a comedy of errors”, OxfordWords blog, 2017.
4. Meredith Doran, “Alternative French, Alternative Identities: Situating Language in la Banlieue”, Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, 2007.

Modernism in musical theater (Taishō, Part 3B)

When people think of the Japanese theatrical arts, their thoughts run to kabuki, noh, and possibly even bunraku (能, 歌舞伎, and 文楽, respectively). But, just as this series has shown in the fields of film and architecture, the Taishō era (大正時代, 1912–26) saw the creation of its own new, massively popular form of theater, now all but forgotten.

The culture of the erotic and the grotesque (eroguro, エログロ) was present in Japan from the early Heian period (平安時代, 794–1185), characterized by sexually themed paintings. Such imagery has full continuity to the modern era as a distinctively and recognizably Japanese aesthetic.

Nonetheless, Taishō culture both altered the meaning of the extant term and added its own new elements, dubbing the new movement “Erotic grotesque nonsense” (ero guro nansensu, エロ・グロ・ナンセンス).¹ Jim Reichert, a professor of Japanese literature, describes it as a:²

[…] prewar, bourgeois cultural phenomenon that devoted itself to explorations of the deviant, the bizarre, and the ridiculous.

This, however, is far too narrow a definition—assuming he means sexually deviant, it’s almost tautological. The only new information presented is as to the class involved, and on this point, film critic and historian Iwasaki Akira paints a more complex picture, saying it resulted from:³

[…] the capitalist […] system [having] advertised bourgeois consumer culture to Japanese petit-bourgeois and proletarian spectators, drawing them into an eroticism of a bourgeoisie on the decline.

It should be noted for those left in any doubt Iwasaki was also a Marxist.

I’d also note through his synonymy, Reichert makes light of the movement, as many others have. They’re happy to agree with the right wingers, authoritarians, and defenders of the “traditional” it was inherently corrupt, materialistic, and superficial.

The thread of their illogic is the culture is gone, so the Moderns must’ve abandoned it easily, so it can’t have had any real substance. But this ignores constant government censorship and repeated crackdowns, one of the largest urban disasters of all time, a worldwide depression landing particularly hard on Japan, and the Second World War and subsequent US occupation, under which dissidents were purged.

Returning to the definition of the movement, it’s clear ero includes not only manifestations and consummations of physical desire but also the sensual as experienced in gustatory pleasure and visual culture.

Guro, meanwhile, is about the sideshow freak and the grossly oversized or deformed, but also the desperation of poverty; the dark side of modernization which only worsened following the Great Kanto Earthquake (関東大震災) of 1927.

Nansensu covers a range of associations, including nihilism, surrealism, irony, and satire.

Asakusa (浅草), the foremost amusement quarter (盛り場, sakariba) of the day, had all these in abundance. Popular songs, such as the “New Tokyo March”, tied the movement directly to Asakusa:⁴

昨日チャンバラ、今日エロレビュー、モダン浅草ナンセンス。
Yesterday, chambara. Today, ero revue. Modern Asakusa nansensu.

I discussed chambara in the previous Part. Here, its simulated bloody stabbings and hackings are a reference to guro.

As already touched on, Asakusa was home to a variety of food, from restaurants, cafés, and street vendors with stalls or carts. Some Taishō eateries still sell in the district, and there is a continuity of content and style, even among newer shops. The old motto was “cheap, fast, and good,” and the food was defined by the place:⁵

[T]empura in Asakusa was Asakusa tempura; one did not go to Asakusa to eat grilled eel, one ate “grilled eel in Asakusa.” [Gonda gives] an account of a man seeking the best tempura in Asakusa before taking the last train home to his village. His souvenir would be the memory of the food.

These made up some of the ero experiences of the place, while guro manifested in Barnumesque street performers including a variety of animal acts, various foreigners—we were still worth a good stare when I lived there in the ’80s and ’90s—musicians, hypnotists, fortune tellers, men covered in tattoos, giants, strongmen, female acrobats, and the numerous beggars and vagrants, organized into a sort of guild with its own argot, allotting locations and shares, including some with disabilities including advanced cases of leprosy.

Film participated in the full range of ero guro nansensu, with the mere experience of spectation working in the first element, together with the presentation of more literally erotic elements in some. Chambara, as already mentioned, acted as guro, while slapstick, as well as surrealism, to a lesser extent, filled out the nansensu category.

Another such catchall was Asakusa Opera (浅草オペラ). The district’s 14 cinemas were more than matched by its many live musical theaters; as many as 23. All varieties of musical performance in these theaters fell under this “opera” heading. There was revue and operetta as well as traditional opera, with Japanese versions of Rigoletto and Carmen being shown and attracting massive audiences. Following the typical Taishō pattern, these forms evolved rapidly from wholesale adoption of Western styles to a uniquely Japanese aesthetic.

Asakusa Opera  proper dates from the 1917 premiere of Female Troops Go to the Frontline (『女軍出征』, Josei-gun no shuppatsu). Another high point came from Jacques Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld (Orphée aux enfers). The opera is itself a satirical parody fitting with the ero guro nansensu movement, and featured the risque “Galop infernal”, best known today as the music of the “can-can”, and which initially shocked audiences everywhere. In Asakusa Opera, the work was renamed Tengoku to jigoku (『天国と地獄』, “Heaven and Hell”) and significantly altered.

Even though it actually came in 1929, when Taishō was over, though only by three years, Casino Folies (カジノ・フォーリー, Kajino Fōrī) was backward-looking to the heyday of the Asakusa scene and clearly a part of the ero guro nansensu movement. Despite drawing its name from the Western Folies Bergère and Casino de Paris, it was again, uniquely Japanese. What made the revue a household word was the serialized publication of a fictional tale, The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa, which mentioned the show, together with a (false) rumor about the female performers dropping their bloomers during performances.⁶

The works of Asakusa Opera were decidedly strange, comprising skits, songs, and dances created by a group of intellectuals, and then put on by actresses who couldn’t even follow a script. The writers notably approved of this development because, as they said, the Asakusa audience would not laugh at a script.⁷ They didn’t look down on their audience either, but sought to fulfill their desires as well as to comment on social issues of the moment. The nansensu aspect in particular was politically subversive, as it suggested the constructs of society—power inequities and moral codes, for example—were arbitrary and could be easily cast off.

Perhaps even more peculiar than the form itself were its fans: peragoro (ペラゴロ) were fanatical male enthusiasts of popular opera and revues from affluent families who would monopolize seats, shout the names of their favorite stars, and throw love letters onto the stage. Some discussion of the etymology of the term is worthwhile here:⁸

Everyone agrees that the first two syllables are the last two of “opera.” As for the last two, some say that they derive from “gigolo,” others that they are from gorotsuki, an old word for “thug” or “vagrant.” The latter signification, whether or not it was there from the start, came to predominate. The peragoro were the disorderly elements that hung around [Asakusa] park. They went to the theaters night after night, provided unpaid claques for favorite singers, and formed gangs, whose rivalries were not limited to vehement support for singers […]. Their lady friends […] were sometimes called peragorina, though this expression had by no means the currency of peragoro.

Kusama Yaso (草間八十雄) who taxonomized the criminal element in Asakusa, placed these groups in the category of what he termed “soft-core delinquents”.⁹ Both accounts somewhat downplay their criminality, suggesting they were simply rabid fans, but they essentially acted as gangs, dividing according to which stars they followed and physically attacking one another.

Furthermore, at least some of those who came to Asakusa for the entertainments did so until they had no money to leave and so filled out the ranks of the vagabondage there, regardless of the class they came from. It’s strange that a culture strong enough to have this kind of fandom should entirely vanish, but so it did.

Or did it? There is a single remnant of those days, though rather than Asakusa, it’s from the tiny town of Takarazuka. Marxist or not, Iwasaki’s theory of the origins of this type of entertainment is evident in the work of Kobayashi Ichizo (小林 一三), an industrialist and politician whose main goal was to boost ticket sales on the Hanyku Railways (阪急電鉄株式会社) he owned and whose terminus from Osaka (大阪) was in Takarazuka (宝塚市).

Looking around the modern entertainments of the day, he decided an all-female theater group performing Western-influenced song and dance shows like Female Troops Go to the Frontline would be exactly the kind of attraction he needed. His decision to use only women was because of the demographic he was targeting: the new female consumer. This was what became the Takarazuka Review (宝塚歌劇団), opening in 1914.

In 1969, Japanese playwright Kara Jūrō (唐十郎) shocked audiences with The Virgin’s Mask (少女仮面, Shōjo kamen), a surrealistic play about the revue. One sentence drew a direct line, proclaiming:¹⁰

The Asakusa Operas have disappeared and only Takarazuka remains.

The Takarazuka Review has been running for more than 100 years, though not entirely to Kobayashi’s plan:¹¹

[W]hereas Kobayashi sought to use the actor as a vehicle for introducing the spectacular artistry of the theater into the home, some Takarasiennes and their fans used the theater as a starting point for an opposing strategy, which included the rejection of gender roles associated with the patriarchal household.

It is somehow fitting the subversive elements, and particularly those relating to the new roles of women in modern Japan, live on.

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Read subsequent articles in the Taishō series

Part 4: The Mysteries of Zūja-Go

Part 5: How “Alice” Grew Big in Japan

Part 6: Jazz: Agent of Cultural Transformation

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Read previous articles in the Taishō series

Part 1: Japan’s Turbulent Taishō

Part 2A: Epochal Architecture

Part 2B: When Tokyo Moved West

Part 3A: Asakusa Movies

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Notes

1. The kanaized, unabbreviated terms are エロチック, グロテスク, and ナンセンス.
2. Jim Reichert, “Deviance and Social Darwinism in Edogawa Ranpo’s Erotic-Grotesque Thriller ‘Kotō no oni’”, The Journal of Japanese Studies, 2001.
3. 岩崎 昶 (Iwasaki Akira), 「映画イデオロギー」 (“Film ideology”), 中央公論 (Chūōkōron), 1930, paraphrased in Miriam Silverberg, Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times, 2007.
4. 西條 八十 (Saijo Yaso) lyrics, 「新東京行進曲」 (“New Tokyo March”), 1930.
5. Silverberg, 2007.
6. 川端 康成 (Kawabata Yasunari), 『浅草紅團』 (The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa, Asakusa Kurenaidan), serialized in 東京朝日新聞 (Tokyo Asahi Newspaper), 1929–1930.
7. サトウ・ハチロー (Satō Hachirō), 『浅草』 (Asakusa), 1932, paraphrased in Silverberg, 2007.
8. Edward Seidensticker, Low City, High City: Tokyo from Edo to the Earthquake: How the Shogun’s Ancient Capital Became a Great Modern City, 1867–1923, 1983.
9. Silverberg, 2007.
10. 唐 十郎 (Kara Jūrō), 『少女仮面』 (The Virgin’s Mask, Shōjo Kamen), 1969.
11. Jennifer Robertson, Takarazuka: Sexual Politics and Popular Culture in Modern Japan, 1998.

The Ashmolean’s Pocahontas-relevant artifact (DeDisneyfication, Part 5 Addendum)

Britain has some of the finest museums going, particularly when it comes to historical artifacts from around the world. How they got there is a matter of controversy at the very least. The scene in Black Panther where Erik Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan) recovers a Wakandan artifact from a British museum, though obviously fictionalized, is a clear reference to the fact these items are, in many cases, straight-up plunder.

Another artifact discussed in the scene is from Benin, a kingdom in what is now southern Nigeria, with which the Portuguese began trading in the 15th century. In 1897, the British sent a force of 1,200 to capture, loot, and raze the capital city as punishment for the country’s crime of defending itself from an attempt by a previous British expeditionary force of 250 bent on deposing the king and looting the capital. Much of the treasure ended up in the British Museum, most notably the Benin Bronzes, a group of more than a thousand metal plaques and sculptures that once decorated the royal palace of the African kingdom.

There are ongoing bids by several countries, including Nigeria, to repatriate various items from British museums, which the government has been noncommittal about. The so-called Elgin Marbles are the best known of these, obtained via questionably legal means from the Ottomans, occupiers of Greece in the early 1800s when this took place.

I must admit to being of two minds about this type of looting as ruin sites like the Athenian Acropolis have often simply acted as quarries for the people living nearby, and many Greek and Roman works in particular might’ve been completely lost if not for imperialist pillagers like the Earl of Elgin. The bronze from the pediment of the Pantheon in Rome is rumored to have found its way into St. Peter’s Baldachin, and so we are left to guess what a key element of one of the most amazing buildings of the ancient world looked like. To be clear, this in no way excuses what was done in Benin—the British saved the bronzes from themselves, for themselves.

In any case, one of the more unexpected artifacts on display in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford is “Powhatan’s Mantle”. This item is made of four deerskins trimmed, stitched together with sinew, and decorated with some 20,000 polished discs of shell depicting a large standing central figure flanked by a deer and mountain lion, along with circular motifs thought to represent villages. The 1656 catalog of the Tradescant Collection—the founding set of artifacts for the Ashmolean—describes the item as:

Pohatan, King of Virginia’s habit all embroidered with shells, or Roanoke.

The museum’s label for the item is notably wrong; it was neither a garment nor did it belong to Mataoka’s (aka Pocahontas) father, Powhatan (… discuss). It’s far too large and heavy to be worn unless the great chief, whose name was properly Wahunsenaca, was some kind of Andre-the-Giant-esque prodigy. Instead, it’s generally acknowledged that it was a decorative hanging. Incidentally, the name Powhatan was both the name of his people and village and may have been used as a sort of title for Wahunsenaca as their leader.

Mainly though, one wonders how this artifact found its way here. It’s one of the earliest items from North America still preserved in a European museum. Different theories exist, such as it was collected by the younger John Tradescant while visiting Virginia in 1637. Another more likely one is Chief Wahunsenaca gave it to Captain Christopher Newport in 1608 to present to King James I, not as a tribute but a gift from one monarch to another.

There was actually a pair of visits to the Jamestown colony by Newport in 1608. Both were supply missions, as the Jamestown settlement was doing a terrible job of growing crops to feed its people. While the Powhatan had initially allied themselves with the English, being worried about the activities of the Spanish, when John Smith reneged on their treaties and turned to the coercion of supplies from the surrounding villages, the relationship soured.

When Newport arrived in January 1608, there seems to have been some attempt to settle these troubles since Wahunsenaca sent a young man, Namontack, to London with the English ships as a gesture of goodwill, even though Smith seems to have been the aggressor. Nonetheless, the more likely timing for the transfer of the artifact in question is on Newport’s return with more supplies and colonists from England, when there was a noted exchange of gifts at an attempted coronation of Wahunsenaca, which he refused as he was already a king.

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Read subsequent articles in the DeDisneyfication series

Part 6: Trouble with “Tarzan”

Part 7A: The Wrong Rabbit Hole

Part 7A Addendum A: Curious Curation

Part 7A Addendum B: “Alice” in Revolt

Part 7A Addendum C: How “Alice” Grew Big in Japan

Part 7B: Alice’s Adventures in the Cousins’ War

Part 7B Addendum: Repainting the Roses

Part 8: Guerrillas and the “Jungle”

Part 9A: Through a Magic Mirror Marred

Part 9A Addendum: The Woods “Over the Wall”

Part 9B: The Sum of its Versions

Part 9C: The “Snow White” Studio

Part 9D: Snowhaus

Part 10: The Little Less-Than

Part 11: Batmouse 3D

Part 12: Mork & Scheherazade

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Read previous articles in the DeDisneyfication series

Part 1: Straightening out “Hunchback”

Part 2: Making over “Mulan”

Part 2 Addendum B: Your Western Wuxia Is Weak

Part 3A: “Hercules”: Myths and Mistakes

Part 3B: Doing Hera’s Work on “Hercules”

Part 4: Tale As Old As Agriculture

Part 4 Addendum: The Enchanted and the Postmodern

Part 5: Putting “Pocahontas” to Rest

The Tokugawa Times Square becomes a foundry for new forms (Taishō Part 3A)

During the time of the Tokugawa bakufu (徳川幕府, 1600–1868), the pre-modern city of Edo (江戸) began to grow as the place from which the shōgun (将軍) ruled, and so it was with its district of Asakusa (浅草). The Buddhist temple, Sensō-ji (浅草寺), the nucleus around which the town was to grow, was founded in 645, dedicated to Kannon Bosatsu (観音菩薩, Avalokiteśvara), the Bodhisattva of compassion. It remains a central feature of the area to this day, despite having been entirely destroyed in WWII.

Various shops spring up near temples in Japan, and there are frequent fairs; as I mentioned in the previous article in this series, they were a type of sakariba (盛り場—amusement quarter). The declaration of Sensō-ji as a tutelary temple of the Tokugawa clan (徳川氏) also swelled the district, as did the growing affluence of the middle class during the period, since they were the major consumers of the entertainments the place offered.

Add to this the fact Asakusa was essentially the gateway to the Yoshiwara red-light district (吉原遊廓), an extremely popular sort of proto-Disneyland for adult entertainment. When theater performances were banned in Yoshiwara in 1841, they simply moved to Asakusa. All this meant even prior to the modern period, the district was known as the Tokugawa Times Square.

Already the top sakariba, the advances of the Meiji (明治時代, 1868–1912) and early Taishō eras (大正時代, 1912–26) only accelerated Asakusa’s status. There was a new landmark, the Ryōunkaku (凌雲閣, “Cloud-Surpassing Tower”). Better known as Asakusa 12 Stories (浅草十二階, Asakusa Jūnikai), it was the country’s first skyscraper.

The main impetus, however, was from new forms of entertainment; in addition to the temple, brothels, theaters (though kabuki—歌舞伎—began to fall out of favor), street performers, food, and shops, Japan’s embrace of the West meant cinemas and Asakusa Opera (浅草オペラ) came into vogue. Both types of theater were centered in Asakusa’s Sixth Ward (六区), often simply called Rokku.

To get some idea of the feeling of the place in these times, let’s turn to anarchist songwriter Azenbō Soeda’s Asakusa Undercurrents:¹

In Asakusa, all sorts of things are thrown out in raw form.
All sorts of human desires are dancing naked.
Asakusa is the heart of Tōkyō—
Asakusa is a marketplace of humans—
Asakusa is the Asakusa for all.
It’s a safe zone where everybody can expose themselves to their guts.
The Asakusa where the masses keep walking hour by hour; the Asakusa of those masses, is a foundry where all old forms are melted down, to be transformed into new forms.
One day’s dream. Fleeting adoration for the outdated.
Asakusa mood. Those without authority who grieve for the real Asakusa, ignoring new currents, withdraw.
You, proponent of cleanliness who aims to make Asakusa into a palace of lapis lazuli, pull back.
All things of Asakusa may be vulgar; they lack refinement.
But they boldly walk the walk of the masses, they move with vitality….
The Modernist who inhales nourishment from the Western painting of the new era walks alongside believers of the Goddess of Mercy who buy favors from the Buddha with copper coins.
A huge stream of all sorts of classes, all sorts of peoples, all mixed up together. A strange rhythm lying at the base of that stream. That’s the flow of instincts.
Sounds and Brightness. Entangled, whirl, one grand symphony—There’s the beauty of discord there.
Men, Women, flow into the rushing around of these colors and this symphony, and from within it they pick out the hope to live on tomorrow.

Asakusa was the location of the first movie theater in Japan, the Denkikan (電気館). Originally a hall for electrical spectacles (電気, denki), it was converted into a cinema in October 1903 by Yoshizawa Shōten (吉沢商店), a film studio and importer. Before the Great Kanto Earthquake (関東大震災) of 1927, the total number rose to 14.

Gonda Yasunosuke, film theorist and sociologist, discussed the phenomenon of what he described as “moving-picture fever”:²

[Gonda] recorded the jeering of laborers at the Fuji showcase for the swashbuckling idol Matsunosuke, and the dialogue yelled back and forth between film narrators [benshi] and “girl and boy tykes” in the audience, while elsewhere women (and their husbands) wept to melodrama alongside vocational school students and a scattering of soldiers, who clattered their swords. There was also the rapt response of students and intellectuals who applauded when the names of their foreign idols appeared on screen. And there were finer distinctions: the Imperial claimed students from Tōkyō Imperial University, while the Cinema Club catered to Keiō University students, and so on. The places that showed foreign films and played a smattering of Mozart and Beethoven for their audiences had “high-class” customers.

It is interesting to see that class distinctions played out even in film offerings. The dazzling variety of entertainments for different audiences is hard to even picture from our perspective today, where movies, and especially theaters, are entirely generic. Gonda’s article’s title refers to the atmosphere pervading the “movie streets” of Asakusa, where hundreds of advertisements appeared:³

Different syllabaries vied for prominence on the banners hanging in front of the theaters and suspended across the streets, and movie titles were juxtaposed with the huge billboards depicting samurai dramas and Hollywood heroines. These images, preserved in photographs of Asakusa, enable us to imagine the movement and energy there […].

Kondo Nobuyuki, although only a child in the waning days of the Taishō Asakusa scene, recalls similar elements:⁴

垂れ幕や絵看板、あちらこちらから聞こえてくる音楽や呼びこみの声、それにぞろぞろと歩く足音がもつれあって、不思議な雰囲気をかもしだしている。

Banners and painted signboards, music and barkers’ calls, and the shuffle of feet tangled into a peculiar atmosphere.

As was to become their pattern, the Japanese created their own unique style: audiences weren’t there to see foreign movies or even Japanese movies—there were plenty of other venues in Tōkyō and elsewhere in the country for those—they were there to see Asakusa movies.

First, the district itself was an experience, as I’ve already suggested, but additionally, Asakusa was on the forefront in creating a new way of presenting films. Here, silent films were accompanied by the live performances of musicians and voice actors called benshi (弁士) for foreign and domestic films alike. While movies were often accompanied by music in the West, Japanese cinema performances drew heavily on the traditions of kabuki and noh, employing their musical instruments in some cases, but particularly their style of declamation.

These performances proved so popular the benshi, not the screen actors, were the main draw for a film, with their photographs prominently displayed outside the theaters. Though talkies were introduced in the late ’20s, silents continued to dominate through the mid ’30s. As of 1927, nearly 7000 benshi were working in Japan, including 180 women. Gonda notes junior high school students competing in speech contests would attempt to emulate the speech patterns of popular benshi.⁵

The Japanese film essentially grew up around the benshi, understanding they would elaborate the plot as well as performing all the voices. The still-popular Jidaigeki (時代劇, “period drama”) genre came into being in the Taishō, along with many others.

The chambara (チャンバラ) subgenre of Jidaigeki in particular was a response to Western models of realistic and spectacular stunts, such as those of Harold Lloyd, and more specifically, Douglas Fairbanks’ swashbuckling films, as well as the needs of the new medium. The highly mannered swordplay of Kabuki, where real swords were used but only cut air, was completely upended with fake swords that made real contact. Gore was likewise amped up. Benshi would also describe the fighting in chambara just as one played by Mifune Toshiro (三船敏郎) did in the 1994 film Picture Bride.

Asakusa movies turned self-referential with 1935’s Three Sisters with Maiden Hearts.⁶ The film was based on a short story, itself a retelling of one of the tales in The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa.⁷ In it, the titular sisters attempt to hold on to their morals while earning a living in the notorious den of evil. The film also features locations in the amusement quarter, which, though damaged in the earthquake, show its character before its complete destruction in WWII.

In particular, the third daughter, 千枝子 (Chieko), a moga (モガ—modern girl) has a personality completely opposite her older sisters’ and dances in a revue. The character is portrayed by 梅園 龍子 (Umezono Ryūko), who was actually a dancer in the inaugural performance of Asakusa-based actor, singer, and comedian Enomoto Kenichi’s (榎本 健一) Second Casino Folies (第2次カジノ・フォーリー). She then worked with the Pioneer Quintet Dance Company (パイオニヤ・クインテット舞踊団) and Masuda Takashi’s Trio Dance Company (益田隆のトリオ舞踊団) before switching to film acting, where Three Sisters with Maiden Hearts was her debut.⁸

This coincidentally brings us to the next topic I plan to explore. Just as film was a unique experience in Taishō Japan, seen particularly in Asakusa, revue, generally termed Asakusa Opera, was a thing unto itself.

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Read subsequent articles in the Taishō series

Part 3B: Asakusa Opera

Part 4: The Mysteries of Zūja-Go

Part 5: How “Alice” Grew Big in Japan

Part 6: Jazz: Agent of Cultural Transformation

Read previous articles in the Taishō series

Part 1: Japan’s Turbulent Taishō

Part 2A: Epochal Architecture

Part 2B: When Tokyo Moved West

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Notes

1. 添田 唖蝉坊 (Azenbō Soeda), 『浅草底流記』 (Asakusa Undercurrents), 1930, translated in Miriam Silverberg, Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times, 2007.
2. 権田 保之助 (Gonda Yasunosuke), 『ポスターの衢』 (Crossroads of Posters), 1921, paraphrased in Silverberg, 2007.
3. Ibid.
4. [近藤 信行 (Kondo Nobuyuki), 「東京・遠く近き」 (“Tōkyō, Far and Near”), 『學鐙』 (Gakuto), 1997–2003, my translation.
5. Silverberg, 2007.
6. 『乙女ごころ三人姉妹』(Three Sisters with Maiden Hearts, Otomegokoro Sannin Shimai), 1935.
7. The short story is 川端 康成 (Kawabata Yasunari), 『浅草の姉妹』 (Asakusa Sisters, Asakusa no Shimai), 1932, and the book by the same author, 『浅草紅團』 (The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa, Asakusa Kurenaidan), serialized in 東京朝日新聞 (Tōkyō Asahi Newspaper), 1929–1930.
8. コトバンク(Kotobank), 新撰 芸能人物事典 明治～平成 (Newly Selected Encyclopedia of Entertainers from the Meiji Period to the Heisei Period), accessed February 2, 2021.

The Disney Artists’ Collective (DeDisneyfication, Part 9D)

In making Snow White, Walt Disney proved himself a business visionary by pivoting his studio from working solely on shorts to producing feature films. But it took more than just understanding the advantages of this move and seizing the opportunity. He had a band of artists who were quite skillful, as the Oscars racked up by the studio attest, but that skill lay in clever gags for funny animals, and now something quite different was required of them, and here Disney proved no less of a visionary.

He sprang into action to create a wide-ranging program of art education, inviting writers, painters and sculptors, as well as animators, to either work or teach at the studio. The Chouinard Art Institute in particular provided instruction in a variety of areas, including drawing, action analysis, and color theory. This was the school Walt and Roy Disney would later guide into a merger with the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music to establish the California Institute of the Arts in 1961, a school I nearly attended. Walt also screened countless films in the studio to develop a deeper knowledge of the medium, a shared understanding of the techniques and tropes employed in it, and to inspire his artists with its great works.

Loyal readers might think I’ve been hitting the Disney Kool-Aid but I do actually have nearly unmixed admiration for not only the commitment to the huge effort this move required but also because Walt sought out not just the best fine art sources to inspire the studio’s artists, but embraced the avant-garde. This again had its foundation in the business concept the studio’s work had to be defensible, in the sense someone else couldn’t easily accomplish what they had. They perceived it was in their interest to get to—and remain on—the bleeding edge.

The studio carefully studied the works of illustrators like Arthur Rackham and Kay Nielsen, who were of particular interest because of their work with fairy tales, and so aligned with the direction Walt was pushing, and eventually the latter artist would come to work for Disney. Later for Bambi, they’d look at Beatrix Potter’s Benjamin Bunny drawings and Sir Edwin Lanseer’s paintings of deer, and then on The Lady and the Tramp, they’d also study Lanseer’s dog images.

Pioneering architect Frank Lloyd Wright lectured at the studio.  Artists like Jean Charlot came to give painting lessons. Though lesser known, Charlot was solidly in the avant-garde, working alongside Diego Rivera in the founding of Mexican muralism as well as working extensively with lithographs and woodcuts.

Then there was Heinrich Kley, who properly belongs to the Jugendstil movement (essentially Art Nouveau in Germany) but whose works of “high art” are less well known than his often darkly humorous pen drawings, published in the art magazines Jugend and Simplicissimus, which mixed art with political brashness and literature including works by Thomas Mann and Rainer Maria Rilke. Of Kley’s connection with Disney, it was noted:¹

Kley’s drawings were not animated yet each drawing possessed such rhythm and humour they seemed to move. Young animators diligently studied his work to learn how to bring their characters to life. The influence of his drawing style is particularly strong in Fantasia’s Dance of the Hours.

As to filmic references, German Expressionism seems to have been at least one major influence on Disney’s artists. The image of Snow White in the glass coffin, in particular, is a clear lift from Fritz Lang’s 1927 Metropolis. In the latter film the evil inventor Rotwang (Rudolf Klein-Rogge) gives his Machine-Person (Maschinenmensch) the form of Maria (Brigitte Helm) in order to sow dissent among the workers who revere her. The theme of losing one’s humanity is common in the interbellum, even predating Lang, in Karel Čapek’s 1920 play RUR (Rossum’s Universal Robots, Czech Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti), and is central to this scene.

Not only is the scene from Snow White similar, the mad scientist is the descendant of the wicked witch for the modern era, and Disney is simply turning the clock back on the motif. The transformation performed in the Metropolis version contains the Tesla coils seen in many a SciFi production since, replaced in the Disney version with the soon-to-become-ubiquitous kiss of true love.

The scene is reiterated yet again in the “cellular regeneration tube”, a technological glass coffin in which Leeloo (Milla Jovovich) is brought back to life in The Fifth Element, merging the two versions.

And Jean Cocteau, whom I mentioned in the context of Beauty and the Beast? A surrealist. In a documentary, David Lynch introduces Cocteau’s 1930 film Blood of a Poet (Le Sang d’un Poete) thus:²

In my opinion, Cocteau is the heavyweight of surrealism.

One can see why Lynch was drawn to it: it’s a disturbing film, whose release was so controversial it was put off for a year, and even then partially censored.

Salvador Dalí, too, came to Disney. According to an article in The New York Times:³

Like his Surrealist colleagues, [Dalí] recognized that America’s animated cartoonists were unwittingly applying Surrealist principles in their films. Spontaneous subconscious association, anti-logical juxtaposition of imagery, unconnected gags and dream logic abound in the work of Max and Dave Fleischer, Tex Avery and also Disney: his “Pink Elephants on Parade” sequence in Dumbo (1941) is one of American Surrealism’s most sublime moments.

I would argue the article’s characterization of the application of Surrealism in animation as “unwitting” is the one glaring inaccuracy here. Disney and Dalí would go on to collaborate on a film called Destino, whose fate was unfortunately to stall and remain so for another 57 years until its release in 2003.

Despite all his efforts, it turned out Walt’s vision of an unassailably bleeding-edge position was not; other animation groups could simply learn from Disney’s films the things the studio had striven so hard to learn from the masters. Indeed, there is even a counter influence of Disney’s work on fine art, which can be seen in the works of Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, Christian Boltanski, and many others.

---

Read subsequent articles in the DeDisneyfication series

Part 10: The Little Less-Than

Part 11: Batmouse 3D

Part 12: Mork & Scheherazade

---

Read previous articles in the DeDisneyfication series

Part 1: Straightening out “Hunchback”

Part 2: Making over “Mulan”

Part 2 Addendum B: Your Western Wuxia Is Weak

Part 3A: “Hercules”: Myths and Mistakes

Part 3B: Doing Hera’s Work on “Hercules”

Part 4: Tale As Old As Agriculture

Part 4 Addendum: The Enchanted and the Postmodern

Part 5: Putting “Pocahontas” to Rest

Part 5 Addendum: Powhatan’s Mantle

Part 6: Trouble with “Tarzan”

Part 7A: The Wrong Rabbit Hole

Part 7A Addendum A: Curious Curation

Part 7A Addendum B: “Alice” in Revolt

Part 7A Addendum C: How “Alice” Grew Big in Japan

Part 7B: Alice’s Adventures in the Cousins’ War

Part 7B Addendum: Repainting the Roses

Part 8: Guerrillas and the “Jungle”

Part 9A: Through a Magic Mirror Marred

Part 9A Addendum: The Woods “Over the Wall”

Part 9B: The Sum of its Versions

Part 9C: The “Snow White” Studio

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Notes

1. Bruno Girveau, Once Upon a Time: Walt Disney: The Sources of Inspiration for the Disney Studios, 2007.
2. David Lynch Presents the History of Surrealist Film, 1987.
3. John Canemaker, “The New Season/ Film: The Lost Cartoon by Disney and Dalí, Fellow Surrealists”, New York Times, September 2003.

Identification and appropriation (Mythmaking in the Martial Arts, Part 4)

Bruce Lee went around the San Francisco Bay Area shooting his mouth off. He said his kung fu was the best and challenged local practitioners to prove him wrong. Wong Jia Man defeated the braggart, but declined to injure him in doing so. This failed to shut Lee up, and his oft-repeated version of events runs thus:

I’d gotten into a fight in San Francisco with a Kung-Fu cat, and after a brief encounter, the son-of-a-bitch started to run.

There’s a video I’ve seen but have been unable to locate showing this interview or one where he says substantially the same thing—it was well rehearsed, and probably carefully scripted as well, since there are several variants I was able to locate. Personally, even apart from the fact it’s pure fabrication and false bravado, the appropriated language is what struck me. Lee’s manner and dress in the interview are also signals to his audience he’s a major dude.

The video I recall has Lee wearing absurdly flaring bell-bottom pants, a suede jacket, and a shiny print shirt, these last two items with extremely wide collars. The video is in black and white, but the jacket has to be orange, the shirt black, and the pants some other garish color. You can find many pictures of Lee dressed with similar early-’70s flair: he’s with it, he’s far out, he’s real groovy. In a 1971 interview, Lee says:¹

[U]nder the sky, under the heaven, man, there is but one family. It just so happen, man, that people are different.

In his first screen test, Lee verges on nerdy in dress and manner, with no sign of the “cat”s, “man”s, and “baby”s that later came to flavor his speech. So why the abrupt shift? Marketing and demographics.

In the especially hagiographic biopic, I Am Bruce Lee, director/ producer and sometime writer of Black Panther comics, Reginald Hudlin says of him:²

He’s got swagger. We [i.e. black audiences] love his style. He had style the way Muhammad Ali had style in the ring.

It’s no accident Hudlin makes the connection between Ali and Lee. The folklore has it Enter the Dragon (《龍爭虎鬥》) costar, John Saxon, remarked on all the Ali films Lee possessed and obsessively viewed during filming and asked him why. Lee reportedly told him he would fight Ali one day. It is clearthis was mere bluster. Instead, Lee was both studying Ali’s moves, as we shall see, as well as this badass African American’s way of presenting himself.

But why? As I’ve already discussed, the martial arts craze had been sweeping the US for some time when Lee jumped on the bandwagon. The return of soldiers from Korea and Vietnam was one of the main motivating factors. One such person was former marine, Steve Sanders, who took the name Steve Muhammad upon converting to Islam. He summed up the experience thus:³

I didn’t enjoy being over there. Anybody who says he did is either a nut who enjoys seeing people killed or a liar. I really don’t know why I was there in the first place. I didn’t hate the North Vietnamese or the VCs. They looked the same as the South Vietnamese who we were supposed to be helping. How can you like one and hate the other? As far as I’m concerned, those people just want to be left alone to do their own thing.

This was a common sentiment: minorities were disproportionately drafted for the war, and found themselves fighting other people of color on behalf of the white power structure in the US and their abusive and corrupt puppet regime in Saigon.

Muhammad studied karate in Okinawa during his service as well, and went on to co-found the Black Karate Federation, as well as playing a minor part in Enter the Dragon as Williams’ instructor. Williams (Jim Kelly) seemed based on Muhammad—a Vietnam vet who identifies with the downtrodden and seeks justice.

Another factor was white flight from urban centers, which, together with the rise of television, left theaters needing to reduce costs and find new audiences. The Hong Kong film industry provided a cheap product in the form of dubbed martial arts films which had already proved successful in Chinatowns across the nation, and so simply spread to other inner city venues. This was the time of the grindhouse kung fu palace, where I too spent time.

Certainly, the action was a factor. Warrington Hudlin, producer and Reginald’s brother, relates of his childhood:⁴

We’d go and watch films all day. The whole time we’d be going, “Oh man, how’d they do that?” Because it happened so fast, you’d have to screen a film three or four times to get the technique. So we’d be like, “Okay, man, you watch his feet, I’ll watch his hands, and we’ll compare notes in the lobby.” Me and my friends, we used to live in those theaters.

Spaghetti Westerns and blaxploitation were other attempts to deal with the new financial and demographic realities of the urban theater, and while they also contained a decent amount of action, the latter could not compete in terms of cost or speed to produce, the former didn’t offer nonwhite heroes. Kung fu films often featured a lone underdog of color combating villainous forces of greater economic power, and so hit home in black America. Reginald Hudlin describes how Lee fit into this countercultural matrix:⁵

You had Muhammad Ali; you had Malcolm X; you had the Black Panthers; you had a lot of radicalism going on—Bruce Lee represented that same kind of radicalism.

Hong Kong film detected this success and began leaning into it well before Lee arrived on the scene. Initially, the Japanese were typically targeted as the villains of these movies, with their role in WWII still a relatively fresh memory on both sides of the Pacific. Hong Kong superstar Jimmy Wang Yu (王羽), who was eventually to be supplanted by Lee, paradoxically worked frequently with Japanese filmmakers making films expressing over-the-top hatred towards their own countrymen. In particular, the 1970 film that made Wang king of kung fu film, The Chinese Boxer (《龙虎斗》) was practically a dress rehearsal for Lee’s Fist of Fury (《精武門》) two years later. Their plots are interchangeable: Japanese karate goons beat up Chinese people in a kung fu school; one student takes revenge.

Returning to Lee, his Hollywood career had not gone well. The Green Hornet was canceled after the single 1966–67 season, failing to find the success of its contemporary Batman, and he was reduced to taking bit parts and action director (i.e. fight choreographer) roles. There were also some projects he tried to pitch, notably The Warrior, which the Lee faction claims later became Kung Fu, though there is only circumstantial evidence for this. Of the project, Lee said in an interview:⁶

Can you dig that? All these cowboys on horses with guns and me with a long, green hunk of bamboo, right? Far out.

In 1971, he took a role in a Hong Kong production called The Big Boss (《唐山大兄》), flying from LA to the filming location in Thailand. Linda Lee Cadwell claims Lee had secured creative control on the picture, and he himself claimed to have done some script rewrites on it, but it’s clear the director had him do things he was not comfortable with, he did not choreograph the fight scenes, and he was not even supposed to have had the lead role. A last-minute change of directors led to this last-minute shift from the veteran actor James Tien-chun (田俊) to Lee in his first Hong Kong film. So lots of mythmaking right there.

The film was a smash hit, raking in a record-breaking HK$3.2M (just over US$500,000) over an only 15-day run, and going on to have massive showings worldwide as well. In an interview from the time, Lee said of it:⁷

We knew from the outset that the film was going to be a success, but I have to admit we weren’t really expecting it to be that successful.

It was the break Lee had been looking for since 1964 when he had been reminded by Wong Jia Man he wasn’t a martial artist at all, and was really trying to be discovered by Hollywood. He also had a unique qualification compared to the other Hong Kong stars of the day: he was in touch with the American viewing public. Lee’s collaborators knew he was connected to the American kung fu craze and understood the black community’s affinity for martial arts cinema. Certainly he had several African-American students, including Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and one of his earliest, James Glover, who said of those days:⁸

He’s seeing working class folks, he’s seeing people of color and that’s shaping his idea of who he should become. […] I helped him with […] just how to act on the street, how to read people and things like that. Attitudes and what was cool behavior and what wasn’t cool behavior.

If anything, Lee had problems fitting in as Chinese—he did not speak Mandarin, and admitted:⁹

There were some scenes in The Big Boss where I really didn’t think I was being Chinese enough. […] You really have to do a lot of adjusting.

In 1972’s The Way of the Dragon (《猛龍過江》), produced and directed by Lee, the typical ghetto myth is portrayed, but his fight with Colt (Chuck Norris) is pivotal. Initially Colt is getting the better of Tang (Lee), who then decides to adjust his tactics: he starts to bounce—something not a part of traditional kung fu—dancing around his bewildered opponent. The reference is clearly to Ali’s “float like a butterfly” footwork, which he would use to remain mobile and unpredictable in the ring, tiring out his opponents. Of the moment Tang defeats Colt, Reginald Hudlin says:¹⁰

So when he fought Chuck Norris, Bruce Lee represented the entire Third World; he represented all people of color fighting the Western oppressor. […] I can tell you at the Fox Theater in St. Louis, which was 100% all black, we cheered for him.

Ultimately, Lee was simply the best tool in the Hong Kong cinema industry’s shed for selling the ghetto myths they had already been engaged with to a black urban US audience. Bill Brown, a professor specializing in American culture, found:¹¹

While his films theatricalize racial and national conflict—exhibiting Lee in combat with Russian, black American, and, most often, Japanese opponents—Lee’s success, including the extraordinary success in Japan, has been attributed to the simplicity with which his films villainize the capitalist; heroize the worker (particularized as the Hong Kong laborer); locate the power to defeat oppression in the body; and insist on a lawless, violent resolution to class conflict.

Cultural appropriation is so clearly at work here it’s perhaps not worth remarking on, but I will repeat Killer Mike’s rather sensible take on the topic vis-à-vis Elvis Presley:¹²

If you’re gonna do our music—if you’re gonna, say for instance, do hip-hop or rock or blues—when the people who create that—the culture who creates that—when our ass is on the line, step up and be there.

There’s no section in Lee’s Wikipedia page describing his charitable works or activism, and even Reginald Hudlin, I think, meant Lee represented activism in his films, rather than anywhere else. And, as Mickey Rourke noted of him in I Am Bruce Lee:¹³

He was like the Elvis of martial arts.

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Read subsequent articles in the Mythmaking in the Martial Arts series

Part 5: The Littlest Dragon

Part 5 Addendum A: Kato’s Comeuppance

Part 5 Addendum B: The Row over “Hollywood” Continues

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Read previous articles in the Mythmaking in the Martial Arts series

Part 1: The Bruce Lie

Part 2: Enter the Tycoon

Part 3: Fists of Flim-Flam

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Notes

1. The Pierre Berton Show, December, 1971.
2. Jon Shirota, “I’m Not a Militant: Equal Opportunity Sensei”, Black Belt Magazine, 1973.
3. Jeff Yang, “Black belt jonesing: American martial arts culture’s roots in the black community”, SF Gate, 2009.
4. I Am Bruce Lee, 2021.
5. Ibid.
6. Daniel Moss, “Bruce Lee: the big boss and the $3 million man”, South China Morning Post, 1971.
7. Ibid.
8. Be Water, 2020.
9. Moss, 1971.
10. I Am Bruce Lee, 2021.
11. Bill Brown, “Global Bodies/Postnationalities: Charles Johnson’s Consumer Culture”, Representations, 1997.
12. Season 16, Episode 15, Real Time with Bill Maher, May, 2018.
13. I Am Bruce Lee, 2021.

Votives and value in Roman religion (Defixiones, Part 4)

In the spring of 1830, French farmer Prosper Taurin was preparing his field for planting near the hamlet of Villeret, Normandy, when his plowshare grated against what turned out to be a Roman tile about six inches below the surface. When he borrowed a pickaxe and pried the tile up, he found beneath it a hastily buried cache of silver and silver-gilt objects. These hundred-odd items all dated from the first or second century and came from a sanctuary dedicated to a Gallo-Roman version of the god Mercury. Here I’d like to point out if someone had used Latin-descended words meaning “lucky bull” to make up the name of a plowman who stumbled across a Roman treasure, we would scoff at them for being so on the nose.

This hoard, known as the Berthouville Treasure, belongs to Paris’ Bibliothèque nationale, but was eventually sent to the Getty Villa for five years of study and conservation, after which it went on the road, visiting the Legion of Honor where I was able to see it a few years ago in an exhibition called “Ancient Luxury and the Roman Silver Treasure from Berthouville”.

Of course, I have brought up this collection as a way of talking about another aspect of Roman religion. Scholars of ancient religion and magic, Richard Gordon and Francisco Marco Simón, note while the cost of votive items such as these might seem like a side effect, it’s actually an important element of the offering:¹

Investment in an expensive gem attracts divine benevolence in special measure.

Many of the precious Berthouville objects bear the initialism VSLM, which is to be read as:

V[otum] S[olvit] L[ibens] M[erito]

He/ she fulfills [his/ her] vow willingly [and] deservedly.

The term votum, in particular, is key. Cognate in English is our word vow, which is exactly what this is—specifically a promise made to a deity. If you were thinking of vote as a cognate for votum, you’re not wrong: this is what’s called a doublet—a reborrowed word with a different form and meaning. Vota are intended as gifts for the helping figure, but also as a testimony for later visitors to the shrine of the help received. This type of votum is known as an ex-voto from the phrase:

ex voto suscepto

from the vow made

In fact, this latter term also appears nearly verbatim in inscriptions on the items from the sanctuary of Mercurius Canetonensis in Normandy. Nine of the most luxurious Berthouville objects come from one patron in particular, a Quintus Domitius Tutus. One of his cups bears the text:²

MERCURIO AVGUSTO Q[uintus] DOMITIUS TUTUS EX VOTO

To August Mercury from Quintus Domitius Tutus, as vowed.

Thus we can see vota as reflecting a contractual quality of Roman religion. According to classicist professor Georg Luck, writing specifically about magic, which as we’ve seen is an aspect of worship:³

Magic is, in a way, a business transaction between the practitioner and the client. The client wants results, and he wants them here and now. He pays for the service, and he may not be inclined to submit to any spiritual discipline. To a certain extent, ancient religion also has a business-like aspect—the do ut des principle. But in magic, this is carried to an extreme.

Luck raises a phrase expressing this bargaining aspect of religion:

do ut des

I give that you might give.

If you think this concept sounds similar to quid pro quo (lit. “something for something”), you’re again, not wrong. Actually, the latter phrase has only fairly recently supplanted do ut des, which also carried the same connotations in a legal setting. Quid pro quo originally meant to substitute one thing for another, particularly ingredients in the field of medicine.

Turning back to the vota, one can imagine Quintus, in some sort of dire straits and feeling in need of divine aid, swearing something like, “Mercury, help me now, and I’ll give five librae (Roman pounds) of silver to your sanctuary.” And later, as he felt he had received the aid requested, he dutifully made the donation he had promised.

Possibly the most famous and dramatic votum was the ver sacrum affirmed in a vote by the entire citizenry of Rome during the darkest days of Hannibal’s invasion of the Italic Peninsula during the Second Punic War. The text of the vow included this detail:⁴

[P]opulus Romanus Quiritium, quod ver attulerit ex suillo ovillo caprino bovillo grege quaeque profana erunt, Iovi fieri, ex qua die senatus populusque iusserit.

[T]he Roman people of Quirites [i.e. citizens] will give as gift what the spring will bring forth out of the swine, sheep, goat and cattle herds, and which are not consecrated elsewhere, to be sacrificed to Jove, from that day the Senate and people will have decreed.

To be clear, ver sacrum, literally “sacred spring”, is a sacrifice of all animals born in a given spring, and in this case, across the entirety of Rome—they really needed Jupiter to help them out.

The main difference between ex-voto offerings and ones like the ver sacrum and defixiones, is the former category are repayments for a service the gods have already provided, while the latter category are payments in advance for prodigies yet unrealized.

In the British Museum, there is a lamella of soft metal slightly wider than an inch and about two and a half inches tall. Found in plow soil in the south of Oxfordshire in 2007, it is incised on the first three lines with 12 magical charakteres, followed by the main text reading:⁵

CΑΜΙΟΥ
ΗΡΙCΦΑΛΜΑ ΧΝΟΥΝ
ΙΑΧΜΑΤΙΑΝ ΦΝΕ
ΦΝΕ ΩΧ ΠΟΙΗCΑ
ΤΕ ΤΟΙC [υ]ΜΕΤΕΡΟΙC
ΑΓΙΟC ΟΝΟΜΑCΙ
ΙΝΑ ΤΟ Ε[γ]ΚΥΟΝ
ΚΡΑΤΗC[ει] ΚΑΙ
ΥΓΙ[αι]ΝΥCΑ ΦΑΒΙ[-]
Α ΗΝ ΕΤΕΚΕΝ ΤΕΡΕ[Ν-]
ΤΙΑ ΜΗΤΗΡ [αιει] ΟΝΟ[-]
ΜΑΤΟC ΤΟΥ ΚΥΡΙΟΝ
ΚΑΙ ΜΕΓΑΛΟΝ ΘΕΟΥ

Make with your holy names that Fabia whom Terentia her mother bore, being in full fitness and health, shall master the unborn child and bring it to birth; the name of the Lord and Great God being everlasting.

A few things are worth noting here: first it is written in Latinate Greek, using C rather than ⟨Σ⟩ throughout. Second, a specific god is not named, and some think it may even have been devoted to the Christian God rather than a Romano-British one, in which case it demonstrates the conversion to this new religion did nothing to dispel these practices.

This votive also seems similar in form to a defixio in many ways, but seeks a blessing rather than a curse, and is uncoincidentally inscribed on gold rather than lead. It fits the pattern we have seen where the votive object itself can have value.

It may seem a defixio made of lead is a comparatively cheap offering, but it’s important to understand the tablet is just one component of the ritual. Most scholars suggest a prayer, possibly the text of the tablet, would be spoken out loud, and it can also be seen from inscriptions like the defixio to Nodens and the following one, there was a separate donation:⁶

Basilia donat in templum Martis anilum argenteum, si ser[v]us si liber medius fuerit vel aliquid de hoc nouerit ut […] configatur.

Basilia gives to the temple of Mars (her) silver ring, that so long as (someone), whether slave or free, keeps silent or knows anything about it, he may be accursed […].

Additionally, there is a general notion an unbinding costs twice as much as a curse, and Jürgen Blänsdorf notes of a defixio from the sanctuary of Isis in Mainz:⁷

The writer demands the women [being cursed] may not even redeem themselves by “sacrifices bearing wool” [… which] simply means “sheep”, [… nor] by means of lead (i.e. defixiones), gold or silver […].

We see here the do ut des principle of trading material wealth for supernatural acts pervades Roman religious practice. Incorporated within this is a bankerly sense of fungibility among commodities such as precious stones and metals, currency, and livestock; I’ve already discussed the substitution of coins for defixiones. We also find once again curses conform completely with this context and indeed are entirely integral to them. There is a clear implication better curses cost more and therefore cost more to undo.

Some have wondered why in ancient times the Berthouville Treasure was hastily buried rather than melted down for a more portable source of wealth. The reason is simple: the silver did not belong to the priests, but to Mercurius Canetonensis and so wasn’t theirs to take, but only to keep in that god’s name.

A folkloric sense such wealth bore a stamp of otherworldliness long outlived the Romans, lasting even into the 19th century: Taurin refused to touch the silver objects, instead pushing them into a sack with the borrowed pickaxe and irreparably damaging several of the priceless items.

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Read subsequent articles in the Defixiones series

Part 5: Secundina’s Beef

Part 6: More Than Money Can Buy

Part 7: The Punic Curse Trail

Part 8: Hellenism Schmellenism

Part 9: The Celtic Undercurrents of Bath

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Read previous articles in the Defixiones series

Part 1: The Curses of Aquae Sulis

Part 2: Malefic Traditional

Part 3: Sympathy for Sauron

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Notes

1. Richard Gordon & Francisco Marco Simón, “Introduction”, Magical Practice in the Latin West, Papers from the International Conference Held at the University of Zaragoza, 30 Sept.–1 Oct. 2005, Gordon & Simón, eds., 2010.
2. Dedicatory inscription from Berthouville/ Lugdunensis, HD068147, Heidelberg Epigraphic Database, emphasis mine.
3. Georg Luck, Arcana Mundi: Magic and the Occult in the Greek and Roman Worlds, 1985.
4. Titus Livius (Livy), Ab urbe condita (From the Founding of the City), 22.10, 27–9 BCE.
5. Brit. 40.97, inscribed gold leaf amulet, ca. 250–350, Roger Simon Ouin Tomlin’s translation.
6. Sulis 97.
7. Jürgen Blänsdorf, “The Curse-tablets from the Sanctuary of Isis and Mater Magna in Mainz”, Magical Practice in the Latin West, Papers from the International Conference Held at the University of Zaragoza, 30 Sept.–1 Oct. 2005, Gordon & Simón, eds., 2010.

A small-but-vocal demographic (Gladwellocalypse, Part 2 Addendum)

In an earlier article, I characterized Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History (RevHist) episode on golf as a softball piece,¹ I found out there is at least one point of overlap between Gladwell’s audience and people who play golf: surprisingly, the answer is Larry Wilmore. And apparently, the RevHist episode ruffled a lot of other feathers as well.

Wilmore invited Gladwell to appear on his podcast² to talk about other things, mainly his take on Satire,³ which, of course, Wilmore pushes back on as well since it relates directly to his profession. But Wilmore begins by questioning Gladwell’s criticism of golf:⁴

Now, I feel as an attack of country clubs—completely valid. But you go after golf itself. And I’m like, “Wait, hold on a second, Malcolm. Why are you attacking the game?” […] This is what we call playa hatin’ on golf, because there’s no reason to go after the game of golf.

Both of them, people I respect (update: maybe not so much Gladwell anymore), take the opportunity to be both right and wrong on a number of scores. Gladwell attempts to contrast golf with mahjong, saying the former is addictive—in the RevHist episode he said golf was “crack cocaine for rich white guys”⁵—but mahjong is actually nearly inextricably associated with gambling in East Asian culture, as well as being well known for its addictive qualities, which have caused it to be banned in the People’s Republic of China since the Cultural Revolution.

Then Gladwell comes at the golf issue from a different angle:⁶

Gladwell: I cannot believe you of all people are calling me to task for taking on a sacred cow […]. Can I remind Larry Wilmore who Larry Wilmore is?

Wilmore: I’m keeping it a hundred: Larry Wilmore is someone who respects sports.

Gladwell: You served as the inspiration for people like me. I remember your absolutely brilliant [… White House] Correspondents’ [Association] Dinner [speech]: that was one of the high-water marks of my last decade […] watching those guys squirm. So […] if someone had come up to you afterward and said, “Larry, you didn’t have to go that far”? […] and the correct answer is, “Fuck you! I’m not going to pass up that opportunity. They’re all a bunch of fat cats. Let them squirm for 20 minutes.” That’s the right answer.

Wilmore backs down after the exchange, but continues to voice his love of the game of golf, telling Gladwell,

But we have to take you out and play some golf sometime.

Gladwell too backs down. And I suppose for both Gladwell and myself, we should be more cautious about criticizing things we have not experienced. When Wilmore says it’s “a very democratic game”,⁷ he’s actually right: 71% of all golf courses are accessible to the public, and certainly disparaging it because of its Jim Crow past would open that same can of worms for just about any other sport. And maybe my sport, fencing, might seem elitist to those viewing it from the outside, though I think it’s anything but. Still, for all the reasons Gladwell outlined, and from my personal experience of everyone I’ve ever known who was into it, golf seems pretty douchey.

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Read subsequent articles in the Gladwellocalypse series

Part 3: Descent into the Absurd

Part 4: The Immaculate Miscegenation

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Read previous articles in the Gladwellocalypse series

Part 1: The Limits of “Revisionist History”

Part 2: The Unfit “King”

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Notes

1. Malcolm Gladwell, “A Good Walk Spoiled”, Revisionist History, June 2017.
2. “Malcolm Gladwell on Pioneers, Tokens, and ‘The Satire Paradox’”, Larry Wilmore: Black on the Air (LM: BA), July 2017.
3. Gladwell, “The Satire Paradox”, Revisionist History, August 2016.
4. LM: BA, July 2017.
5. Gladwell, 2017.
6. LM: BA, July 2017.
7. Ibid.