On Kermit the Frog, Television, and Puppet Theater

One of the first manufactured televisions was General Electric’s 1928 “Octagon.” Ernst W. Anderson designed the device. It created pictures using a mechanical disc inside a large eight sided wooden cabinet with a couple of knobs on the front. Today only a few of those original units are known to exist. One is part of the collection at the Henry Ford Museum.  With a picture size of only 18mm x 14mm, the octagon was a far cry from the jumbo screened plasma displays that are so common today.

Most people believe that The Queen’s Messenger was the first television program ever broadcast. In 1928 it was beamed to only four sets, perhaps the same four octagons that are still known to exist. The Queen’s Messenger told the story of a British diplomat and a mysterious woman. The drama broadcasted only the heads and arms of its players. Captured using a technology called the scanning disc, the image was clumsy and although it was probably even more blurred than we can imagine, in the context of its own time it was a technological marvel. The Queen’s Messenger predated the iconoscope (or image dissector), the technology for which the RCA Corporation fought a legal patent case for nearly a decade with a young inventor named Philo Farnsworth.

Philo was one of the pioneering engineers of early television. He drew on his childhood farm boy experience working his father’s Idaho fields. Imagine him toiling in the hot sun and displaying all the stereotypical signifiers of early Twentieth Century farming. Maybe he looks like the cover of a John Steinbeck novel, wearing a hand-stitched cotton shirt and thin black suspenders. Or perhaps he is bare-chested except for the faded blue bib of canvas overalls. In his teeth, he grinds a twig of straw, or a cheap cigar; it dangles out of the corner of his mouth and hangs down his chin. There’s a yellow lab or full-grown collie trotting at his side as he rides a horse drawn sickle bar mower or, if his family was affluent, a bright red enameled steam-powered tractor. Picture Philo cutting the hay in rows — back and forth, from top to bottom – making lines slowly and intentionally from the edge of the property line back to the farmhouse.

Legend has it that Philo was 14 and doing just this kind of work when he visualized an electron beam following the same trajectory. The device he created, “the image dissector,” reproduced images by scanning consecutive horizontal lines. It was like an electron sickle, cutting down tall grass rows of luminescence. Today our interlaced video displays are still based on the same principle. 21^st Century TV viewers, watching on 3D plasma displays or computer screens, should never forget that the moving pictures saturating our daily experience are built on the metaphorical foundation of an Idaho hay field. We’ve always been an agricultural country, even if we’re now in the age of an information economy. Likewise, the United States has always been an oligarchy in which feudal underdogs often find themselves up against the pastoral electric fence of capitalist fat cats.

Thus, when Philo refused RCA’s offer to license the device, yet another version of the classic American story pitting corporate Goliath against a brilliant, but temperamental underdog David ensued. Like the story of how the Ford Motor Company stole the intermittent windshield wiper technology from Robert Kearns, or how Charles Mintz and Universal Pictures stole Oswald the Lucky Rabbit from Walt Disney, the corporate behemoth RCA used its financial and political leverage to steal Philo’s innovation. The image dissector became the formative technology on which television is based. Unfortunately, Philo wasn’t paid for his efforts until after a decade of legal battles. And he was never given proper credit for the innovation he brought to our living rooms. Not only has television permanently changed adult leisure time. Television has also become a glowing nanny with ever-present kid’s programming such as Sesame Street, Blue’s Clues, Dora the Explorer, Fraggle Rock, Teletubbies, Barney, and The Muppets. For better or worse, Television has had irreparable effects on child rearing.

When I was a kid in the late 1970s and early 1980s, televisions were large faux-wooden cabinets with bulbous glass screens, ungainly knobs, and monophonic speakers that amplified sound out of a rectangular plastic mesh of horizontal lines.  The remote control had not been invented. We actually had to stand up from the couch, walk across the room and click the knob into place in order to change channels. Cable was in its infancy and static was normal: a random chaos of tiny black and white squares in motion, the visual cathode-ray equivalent of white noise. Set-top antennae were regularly augmented with tin foil. My siblings and I swore that we each knew the best way to manipulate those “rabbit ears” in order to tune the clearest picture. An interior decorator’s nightmare, the TV “set” was placed about a foot away from the wall in order to make room for the tumor-like “tube” that protruded out of the back. The tube was covered with a trapezoidal casing often colored differently than the rest of the set, usually black. The top of the set was wide, at least 12 inches, and my mother often placed a vase of fresh cut flowers between the antenna and the family pictures that captured us at our most awkward: itchy and uncomfortable in the formal clothing that we wore only in order to conform to social mores of holidays and weddings.

Like most of the United States, the TV was the focus of our “family room.” This was where we convened after dinner and before bedtime. While my older brothers and parents watched programs that I was too young to comprehend, or sporting events in which I had no interest, I imagined how this strange light box worked. Apparently, the explanation I created was common. Most three year olds come to the conclusion that tiny little people live in parts of the TV that can’t be seen.

At the time there was space enough: televisions weren’t flat yet. The physical shape of the device – its boxiness and width – made the miraculous seem possible. Surely behind the wood grained paneling, like a little theater with a back stage maze full of costumes and set pieces, the television hosted a troupe of miniature actors, athletes and comedians.

I imagine Jim Henson, creator of Kermit the Frog and the Muppets, must have come up with similar theories as a child watching the boob tube. After all, he has often been celebrated for understanding that the box itself was the perfect puppet proscenium. He realized that the faux-wood bezel around the glass screen was like the technologically grown up version of a child’s fabric and corrugated cardboard puppet theater. His hand held puppets utilized the tangible characteristics of the television set in the same way that an amateur puppeteer like “the Amazing Schwartz,” utilized handmade ply-wood window frames to create pseudo-magical renditions of fairy tales like “the three little pigs” at my friends’ fourth and fifth birthday parties.

Jim Henson’s first television show was only slightly more sophisticated than the Amazing Schwartz’s “Princess and the Pea.” Schwartz used foam balls atop scrap fabric dresses. Henson made jumbo furry sock puppets. Henson controlled their hands and arms with poles from below like upside down marionettes. Eventually he’d even name them “Muppets,” smooshing the words “marionette” and “puppet” together.  But first he made Sam and Friends, a show on which goofy characters lip-synched comedic tunes.

Sam and Friends was broadcast twice daily from May 9, 1955 to December 15, 1961. Each episode was five minutes long and aired on WRC-TV in Washington D.C.. Viewers who watched Henson’s early creation would have owned one of the 52 million TV sets that were in U.S. homes at the time (nine out of ten households).  They might have owned the Zenith model T1816R, a black and white metal-cased set with rounded corners and cat’s eye shaped knobs that protruded out of cylinders on each side. The sixteen-inch set was the ipod of its generation. It had a cutting edge design that served as a status symbol for those lucky enough to own one. As Henson’s characters pretended to sing funny songs they would have looked out of place. Sure, Sam’s bulging ears matched the knobs on the Zenith, but his clunky choreography as he sang Louis Prima’s “Old Black Magic” would have contrasted against the set’s slick Buck-Rogers-like futuristic aesthetic.

Although Kermit was a regular on Sam and Friends, he was not yet a frog.

Kermit began his life as a giant lizard-like sock puppet crafted from Jim Henson’s mother’s old wool coat. Unlike a tadpole, his eyes, made from ping-pong balls, already bulged.  He not only appeared on Sam and Friends, but also in various commercials for companies like Wilson’s Meat. However, he was not a frog until Johnny Carson introduced him as “Kermit the Frog” on The Tonight Show in 1965.

Why a frog? He only slightly resembles the species Ranidae, of the order Anura. He might just have easily been christened Kermit the Lizard. Or just Kermit: certainly there are many Muppet monsters — Grover, Telly, Gonzo — whose physical characteristics bear no taxonomical resemblance to recognizable critters. How, and why, did Kermit the non-descript sock-shaped creature become known as a frog? Sure, Kermit is green, but frogs aren’t. Frogs are just as likely to be green as any other color in the spectrum.

Even if I allow that frogs tend to be associated with the color green, viewers wouldn’t have known what color Kermit was in 1965. Color television didn’t become common until GE introduced the 11inch “Porta-Color” TV set in 1966. Advertisements boasted that the “lightweight” set weighed 24 pounds. It had a handle on the top and a “compact design” that made it “truly portable.” It is on this type of television that many viewers would have watched the original Sesame Street in 1969. By then Kermit was already well established as an amphibian due to numerous appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show, The Mike Douglass Show, and The Hollywood Palace.  I wonder if young Jim Henson ever considered the implications of amphibiousness while preparing for those performances.

The word “amphibious” literally means living on both sides. It comes from the Greek amphi (both) and bios (life). The designation is reserved for animals that physically mutate. In their youth, amphibians breathe water through gills. When fully grown, they inhale oxygen into fully developed adult lungs. In Sesame Street # 2615, May 1989, Kermit discusses his amphibian mutation in a biographical sketch called “My Polliwog Ways.” Kermit was no longer singing in mono. The industry adopted stereo broadcasts in 1984 using the Zenith multichannel television sound (MTS) transmission system. Kermit wore a velvet and satin smoking jacket and looked like a fuzzy reptilian cross between Tom Jones and Hugh Hefner. Kermit sings his biological life story – from egg to frog — in Las Vegas style cabaret form (search YouTube, its well worth it). In one chorus, he belts out:

So long wiggly tale,

goodbye polliwog,

I started growing legs and became a frog,

 

As this is a volume about depth psychology, it seems appropriate that I analyze Kermit’s frog-ness as if it were part of a dream. To do this, I use a depth psychological process termed amplification. I amplify the image (in this case: frog), making it stronger and more precise, by collecting corresponding mythological, scientific, cultural and social ideas. For example, the depth psychologist might ask: what is the difference between a frog and a toad? Why not Kermit the Toad?

In fairy tales, frogs tend to be good; toads tend to be bad. Kissing a frog might even reveal a charming husband. Kissing a toad will give you warts. Frogs tend to be masculine, such as the cursed frog prince. Toads tend to be feminine, associated with mother earth and symbolically connected with the moon and the uterus. Kermit is a frog. Kermit is male. But kissing him won’t turn either of you into anything.

Scientifically toads are frogs. Toad is a word used to identify frogs that spend more time on land. The distinction is primarily visual. Toad skin often appears rougher or dryer, not slimy and wet. Toads’ back legs are shorter and suited to hopping on dirt and stone.

Kermit, being fictional, does not fit neatly into either distinctive category. He sometimes seems toad-like, spending most of his time on land; he works in television and movie studios in New York and Los Angeles. His skin (made from fabric) is dry. But his back legs are long.

When analyzing fairy tales, mythology or dreams, depth psychologists often see the water as a symbol for thinking, thought processes, or knowledge – specifically knowledge from the unconscious. “Water” Carl Jung wrote, “Is the commonest symbol for the unconscious.” The Swiss psychologist is not referring to some kind of esoteric or mystical symbolism. He is talking about the way imagery manifests in our everyday life. For example, we use water imagery when talking about our thought processes: the flow of thought, the stream of consciousness. Ideas are either shallow or deep. Marie-Louise von Franz wrote, “Usually, we interpret water as the unconscious, and differentiate its specific meaning according to the context.” Land, then, in the context of amphibian life, can be understood the opposite of water. Land can be understood as a symbol of the opposite of the unconscious: the habitual conscious attitude, the foundation or the thinking processes in which our daily actions are logically grounded.

Some Jungian and archetypal thinkers find it useful to use imagery of wet and dry to help make a distinction between “inner” and “outer” experience. “Wet” or “Inner” refers to the private personal experience, the thoughts and emotions that are within each individual. “Dry” or “Outer” refers to the external events of our lives, such as our public interactions with other people and objects. Wet has to do with feeling and intuition. Dry has to do with thinking and sensing. Lakes, ponds, rivers, streams and oceans could be symbolic of chaotic and liquid inner experience – the unknown: where thoughts and emotions can sometimes flow crystal clear, but can also be murky and swamp-like. Mountains, valleys, and roads could be symbolic of outer experience – made up of tangible landmarks: easily mapped, diagrammed, and represented.

Frogs are amphibious: of both land and water. They begin as chains or groupings of underwater eggs. Then, quickly, they develop into water breathing tadpoles, or polliwogs. They sprout appendages in their youth. They loose their tales as they enter adulthood. In fact, they hardly resemble what we’d think of as frogs until they are fully grown lily-pad hoppers with lungs suited for oxygen.

It is the both-ness of frogs – their ambiguous position between wet and dry — that leads me to call Kermit a depth psychologist. I think of him like an amphibian of the psyche. He is, metaphorically, of both water and land, of both inner and outer. That is, Kermit lives and performs in between, in liminal, threshold, or boundary spaces. And all the while, Kermit is teaching, inspiring and motivating his audience to do likewise.

When he sings, Kermit’s lyrics often describe a world that is congruent with my ideal. It is a place where dreams come true, where magic is ubiquitous, and impossible things can and do happen. Yes, it sounds like a Disney vacations brochure, but Kermit knows it. Don’t worry; the frog sees through his own platitudes. Always of two worlds at once, he transcends the ambiguity between his utopian fantasy and the reality that he is made of material.

Kermit is puppet, lifeless without his operator, and yet his is arguably the world’s most recognizable frog. Fabric skin and ping pong ball eyes tie Kermit to the laws of inanimate matter, yet puppet and puppeteer are both struck by the other’s autonomy. The puppet seems to exist independent of the puppeteer. Despite the fact that Jim Henson’s arm forms Kermit’s skeletal structure, the performing puppet becomes more than just the operator’s talking hand.  Does something magical happen? No, even Kermit is skeptical of magic. He binds his vision of the miraculous to its shadow, reminding us constantly that he is constructed of fantasy. He reminds us that he manufactured by acknowledging the long-haired bearded puppeteer in a headband that controls him as if he were his autonomous unconscious. Likewise, Jim Henson acknowledges Kermit as a puppet. He often allows the public to see Muppet and Muppeteer together: Henson’s lips moving in full sight as Kermit talks. Henson once said he never bothered to learn how to throw his voice, figuring people would rather look at Kermit the Frog then a freakishly tall bearded hippie. Audiences don’t watch to see Henson; they watch to see Kermit.

Kermit is not simply an extension of Henson, nor is Henson driving Kermit. Jim Henson, on many occasions, commented that the frog had a life of his own. Henson wasn’t alone. After he died in 1990, Steve Whitmire took over as Kermit’s operator. Whitmire described the first time he placed Kermit on his arm: “I looked him in the eyes and he just stared back, almost as if he was saying, ‘come on, I need a voice.’”

What is it about puppetry? Eileen Blumenthal calls it “created actor art.” Puppetry, she writes, is “the most transcendent mode of performance” because it is made up of “inanimate objects endowed with vital force.” She sees puppets as metaphorical symbols of the human experience.

Think about it. I’m human and I’m assuming you, the reader, are also human. However, like a puppet, I perform as if I have a vital conscious awareness but I’m not always sure that I’m in control of myself. I often act against my better judgment. I often wonder why I do the things I do. I often act against what I would ordinarily declare to be in my own best interest. There seem to be unconscious motivations that conflict with my conscious intentions. C.G. Jung explains this phenomenon using the concept of complexes. He does not mean “complex” in the colloquial sense, as when we explain a person’s negative behavior by saying, “he has a mother complex, an inferiority complex, or a power complex.” Instead, for Jung, complexes are “feeling toned ideas.” Daryl Sharp writes that they “accumulate around certain archetypes, like ‘mother’ and ‘father.’” Constellated complexes can make us fall in love. Constellated complexes can make us feel extra confident, charming, or outgoing. Constellated complexes can influence our decisions because they create unconscious feeling reactions to everyday events. For example, mundane activities, like choosing a breakfast cereal, could be inextricably mixed up with deep childhood feelings about my mother. Sometimes — perhaps all the time — I am a puppet of unconscious complexes.

And, like a puppet, at the end of my performance I become matter, a lifeless body, a corpse. Puppets are a metaphorical reminder of the idea that my material body is on loan to an operator that some people call the “soul,” or the “psyche.”  For this reason, puppets, like effigies and masks, play a major part in the death and funeral rites of many cultures. The operator or puppeteer serves as metaphorical reminder of the vital life force that animates a human being. Depth psychologists use the word “psyche” to describe not just the operations of the physical brain, but also the force that gives life to our material existence: our inner puppeteer. Psyche is the Greek word that means soul. The soul/psyche is the part of the self that speaks the language of the imagination. By engaging in the world of images — the imaginal — I make meaning out of everyday experience. I soak a material reality in the moisture of imagination.

 

The Muppet Movie was made in 1979. I was two at the time. I didn’t watch the movie until it was available on VHS video. Likely I watched it on the 27 inch SONY Trinitron set in the family room of my childhood home. Sony’s Trinitron technology, which produced brighter, clearer images, was introduced in 1966 but it didn’t become popular and common in every home until the 1980s. The name Trinitron is a combination of “trinity” and “electron,” because it combines three different types of electron cathode ray technologies. I consider myself lucky to have seen the movie on a TV set rather than in a movie theater. In some ways, I think the physical television adds another dimension to the film’s layered messages.  The Muppet Movie uses puppets to explore the ambiguity between the magic of the imaginary and the inherent reality in show business’ construction of fantasy.

The imaginary can be slapstick: a karate chopping pig wrestling an evil mad scientist (played by Mel Brooks) into his own brain-sucking machine. The reality of show business is full of frustratingly ironic choices: the easiest and quickest way for Kermit to accomplish his dreams of singing, dancing and world fame would be to work for Doc Hopper.

Throughout the film these poles – magic and constructed fantasy — get closer together and in the end a rainbow becomes the symbol that holds the tension. Puppets are like rainbows. They “are visions, but only illusions.”

Yes, rainbows are just prisms of light reflecting off moisture droplets in the atmosphere. And yes human perception and meaning-making also render rainbows more than just physical events that can be attributed to photons or light waves. But the magic of the phenomena is not any less awe inspiring when we understand the laws of physics.

Likewise, a puppet is simply a manufactured object that becomes meaningful in the context of its relationship with puppeteer and audience. The puppet becomes meaningful when placed in a liminal space – an in between, transitional space — between real and imaginal. Or in the words of Gideon Haberkorn, the Muppet “exists only when the liminal space opens up – it exists, therefore, only during the process of performance. A puppet is not just crude material; it is performed material” (Garlen 2009, p. 30).

Kermit’s famous rainbow song, “The Rainbow Connection,” (written by Paul Williams with Kenny Ascher and Jim Henson for the movie) is quick to remind us of the ambiguity between the real and the imaginal: “So we’ve been told and some choose to believe it, I know they’re wrong, wait and see. Some day we’ll find it, the rainbow connection, the lovers, the dreamers and me.” The rainbow connection is what we find when we engage in depth psychology. Or, when we engage in what James Hillman calls Psychologizing. “Through psychologizing,” Hillman writes in ReVisioning Psychology, “I change the idea of any literal action at all – political, scientific, personal – into a metaphorical enactment” (1977, p.127). By psychologizing we find (or make) meaning out of what was and is taken for granted, like the refracted light of a rainbow or the textiles that are sewn together to make a puppet.

We often laud Kermit the frog for his singing, his dancing, or his sense of humor. Perhaps his real skill, however, is his aptitude for psychologizing.

I’ll be honest.  Even as an adult with children of my own, I get tears in my eyes every time I watch the The Muppet Movie. It could be simple nostalgia. The film is associated with many memories. I popped it into the VCR on early weekend mornings while my parents and older siblings were still sleeping and unwilling to play with me. I performed the songs on stage at middle school assemblies. My wife and I watched it together on video for our first date. Now I watch it with my own children. We project the movie onto a 100inch diagonal screen using a Optoma HD66 DLP video projector. The movie streams using WIFI from the itunes software on the upstairs desktop computer through an Roku HD media device. My three year old is much more technologically savvy than I am and he can already work the remote. He selects movies himself, recognizing Kermit, Fozzie, Gonzo, Miss Piggy and the rainbow that appears on the screen. I’m always happy when he chooses The Muppet Movie.

The older I get, the more the movie’s psychological and philosophical themes grab me. Plus, I love the irony that puppets posit ideas worth pondering. I’m glued to the screen as I recognize the theories of depth and archetypal psychologies dramatized with fur and fuzz.

The Muppet Movie is a fictional account of how the Muppets became famous. The central narrative is told as though it were autobiography: made by Muppets, about Muppets.  It tells how Kermit leaves the swamp, meets his Muppet cohort, and heads to Hollywood to follow his passion. He discusses his dream during the big show down that takes place about halfway through the film. The scene is constructed like a Hollywood back lot parody, exhibiting all the signifiers of the western cowboy movie genre. Dust blows; tumbleweeds tumble; Kermit is wearing needle-sharp spurs; lone whistles punctuate the soundtrack.

Kermit:

I’ve got a dream…

Kermit is face to face with the film’s antagonist, Doc Hopper.  They stand on the main road of a ghost town inhabited only by the goofy scientist/inventor Professor Bunsen Honeydew and his assistant Beaker. Doc Hopper has been chasing Kermit the entire film, halfway across the country. He’s got Kermit and his fuzzy friends cornered, held at gunpoint. Doc Hopper wants to make Kermit the spokes-frog for his corporate chain of French fried frog leg restaurants.  But all Kermit can see is “millions of frogs on tiny crutches.”

Doc Hopper:

All my life I’ve wanted to own a thousand frog leg restaurants, and you’re the key, Greenie.

Kermit’s voice is unmistakable. It is nasal and squeaky. It is fun and child-like. But it is also full of wisdom and pathos. He pleads with Doc Hopper,

Kermit

I’ve got a dream, too, but it’s about singing and dancing and making people happy. That’s the kind of dream that gets better the more people you share it with, and, well, I’ve found a whole bunch of friends who have the same dream, and it kind of makes us like a family…

…I don’t think you’re a bad man, Doc. But I think if you look in your heart, you’ll find you really want to let me and my friends go, to follow our dream.

Kermit’s sentimental monologue is nice. It reinforces the traditional American-Christian rhetoric that we hear in self-help seminars and read in best-selling spiritual paperbacks. It emphasizes a focus on community and a do-unto-others mentality that seems to resist a cultural standard of might makes right – a cultural standard where profits come before people, or frogs. But Kermit (and Jim Henson) know that anti-corporate dogma is not necessarily resistant. In fact, a quick survey of New York Times bestsellers list, a flip through hundreds of cable television channels, or a glance at the blogosphere shows that Jimmy Stewart’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington attitude is as prevalent (and profitable) as unchecked commerce in our capitalist democracy. Like two sides of a nickel, corporate greed and anti-materialism go hand in hand like David and Goliath. After all, doesn’t the underdog always beat the establishment in every fairy tale made by corporate behemoth Disney? The righteous meek-shall-inherit-the-earth dogma saturating cartoons not only led the Walt Disney Company to become a global entertainment conglomerate (which now owns the rights to Kermit and the Muppets), it also served as the revolutionary ideological bedrock on which the United States built an oligarchic empire.

No Kermit’s sentiment is not special. In fact, it can be understood as the same old swamp to riches American dream story with a little do-good thrown in for public relations purposes.  And Kermit knows it. The Philo Farnsworths of this world never get the credit they deserve, even after winning decades of legal battles. That is why in the Muppet’s reality, like our own, monologues don’t save the day. No, that honor is reserved for puppetry of the absurd. Animal grows into a giant fuzzy and frightening monster because he has eaten Dr. Honeydew’s insta-grow pills. He scares off Doc Hopper and his thugs.

Animal is a Muppet that might be described as half cave-man and half kind-hearted, untamed beast. He is like the Freudian uninhibited Id covered in yarn and frizz. He is at the whims of his instincts and emotions. His desires are not filtered through the censorship of civilization. Animal does not dress up for weddings and holidays. Animal does not conform to cultural mores. Instead, Animal takes joy in destruction like a toddler toppling a tower of blocks. When I watch him I’m reminded of my childhood temper tantrums: the elation of unfettered sentiment. I imagine my arms flailing. I can feel my throat sore from screaming. I imagine the tickle of salt-tears flowing down my face as my nose wells up with snot (not the thick mucousy kind of snot, but rather the thin liquid that flows like water).  I can feel my heart race and my muscles tighten.

Like temper tantrum personified, the ground shakes and Animal’s giant head breaks through the roof of the building that houses Dr. Honeydew’s lab. Animal belts out a huge growl and smiles a rebellious childish grin. Doc Hopper and his men run.

Kermit

Okay everyone, on to Hollywood!

Then, according to one of the multiple layered narratives, the movie ends when Kermit and his gang of Muppets arrive in Hollywood. Orson Welles, in the role of movie producer, hands them the “standard rich and famous contract.”  The Muppets head straight to the back lot.

They fill a soundstage with hand painted, cartoon like, set pieces that reflect sequences from the film. The characters prepare to shoot the Muppet movie that the viewer has just seen. Under Kermit the Frog’s direction – he barks into a bullhorn and sits with frog legs crossed on the classic director’s chair – they wheel in a plywood swamp, a constructed county fair, and giant wooden rainbow. It is another nod to Kermit’s autonomy.

Is Jim Henson proposing that autonomous Muppets deserve the credit for this work? Is the visionary puppet master commenting on the gap between his own persona and an authentic Self? Or, are Kermit, Fozzy, Gonzo, and Miss Piggy like tangible self-determining voices of what C.G. Jung would call active imagination? Are they inward self-determining, and autonomous voices that speak from deep within the psyches of their operators?

James Hillman, founder of post-Jungian archetypal psychology, writes, “Just as we do not create our dreams, but they happen to us, so we do not invent the persons of myth and religion; they, too, happen to us” (1977, p.17). The film seems to be playing with the implicit ambiguities of Hillman’s suggestions. Who has whom: is the puppeteer in the puppet, or is the puppet in the puppeteer?

In the finale of The Muppet Movie, Kermit reprises the opening number. He sits in a soundstage swamp and sings once again, “Why are there so many songs about rainbows?” The other Muppets join in, adding a new verse, “Rainbows are memories, sweet dream reminders; that’s part of what rainbows do.” We, the audience, get the point; the movie Kermit has dreamed of making is, in fact, the movie we have just seen – the movie we are still watching.

The camera tracks Gonzo, holding balloons, levitating to the giant rainbow set piece. “Someday we’ll find it, the rainbow connection, the lovers, the dreamers, and . . . ” The voices of singing puppets trail off with a smash and a crash, the set is destroyed, the dream falls, one plywood prop at a time. First the rainbow crashes. Then the sky blue background collapses. The cardboard bus (painted to look like the tour bus that carries Doctor Teeth and the Electric Mayhem) falls down. The fake palm trees tip. The paper El Sleezo saloon is left in pieces. Chaos ensues: broken lights, electric sparks. Explosions bust through the sound stage ceiling. The dream has come crashing to the floor.

Magically, however, just when we accept that all reality may be nothing more than fantasy constructed, a real rainbow slides in through the hole (Real? At least within the implied reality of one narrative: this rainbow is not a soundstage construct).

Harps strum and Kermit sings: “Life’s like a movie, write your own ending.”  Life is fantasy, the arrival of one set piece after another, but that doesn’t make it unreal. “Keep believing, keep pretending.” Construct it consciously, but believe in your construction. What is made (puppets by puppeteers) and phenomena that present as if from nowhere (rainbows) are both of equal validity. The Gods are internal and external.  The line between the divine and the material becomes obfuscated when we approach the world archetypally.

As Kermit finishes the song, I can barely hold back the tears when suddenly a six-foot puppet creature named Jack rips through the movie screen (remember this is a movie inside a movie).  Jack cuts through the sentimental and emotional tension screaming “Hollywood!” The implication is that this monster has been chasing Kermit and his pals since the beginning of the film. They met him while trading in Fozzie’s uncle’s Studebaker. But we are also reminded that scenes of Muppets viewing The Muppet Movie premier have framed the entire narrative.  Audience is jolted from one narrative reality to another, reminded that there is always another layer to see-through.

In this case, the audience is asked to see-through the moral banality of Kermit’s rhetoric. Yes, Kermit offers a message familiar to audiences in the U.S.A. raised on Hollywood blockbusters: follow your dreams; you can do anything you can imagine. However, the Muppets’ strength and authenticity is located in their felt covered pathos. Frog and friends are not satisfied with the one sidedness of candy-coated wishes. By breaking through the fourth wall of the puppet proscenium, when one layer of narrative breaks through the next, Kermit and his furry friends are creating a web of meaning-making. They are reminding us to be cynical by de-literalizing one surface narrative after another. They are even skeptical of the songs’ lyrical rhetoric. Muppets reject their own literal moralities, acknowledging that an alternate mythical reality lies directly beneath each surface. Soon the newly revealed reality is exposed as fantasy.

The Muppets’ believability, what makes them life-like, is their complexity of meaning. They consistently see-through their own crayola colored moral dogma severing the suspension of disbelief with unorthodox dramatic devices. They recognize the precariousness of their puppet world and the dubiety of their own autonomy.

The film premier that frames the story is actually a narrative about the film’s larger scenario that references the narrative itself. It is a film-within-a-film-within-a-film that presents itself as the autobiographical work of Kermit, Fozzy, Gonzo, Miss Piggy, Scooter, and friends. Yet even in the opening screening room scene, when Kermit’s nephew Robin asks his uncle if this is really how the Muppets met, Kermit tells him that they took some liberties with the story. The audience is never sure where to focus its belief in the absurd.

I’m reminded of a famous Muppet sketch. Kermit and Fozzie are chatting. As if from nowhere, a startled Fozzie panics. “Don’t look!” He warns Kermit, looking downward, “but there’s somebody underneath you, and he has a beard . . . oh my god, there’s somebody underneath me too!” The irony is perfect. Fozzie is pathologizing the puppeteer. He sees his operator as a kind of illness. He sees frank Oz as something like a hideous blemish, a wart, a growth, a pimple. From audience perspective the puppeteer is natural, even healthy and necessary. A puppet without a puppeteer would be a criminal aberration fit for a late night horror film. However, from the puppet’s perspective, strings are pathological. Fozzie tries not to look and advises Kermit to do the same. As if the puppeteer might just go away if he elects not to pay attention to it.

Of course, when two puppets openly discuss the invisibility of their puppeteers, pretending not to notice, the phenomenon manifested is, in fact, the visibility of, and increased attention to, the operator. The interdependence between Kermit and Henson, between Fozzie and Oz, becomes obvious.

Kermit and Fozzie often talk to Henson and Oz in full view of the camera.  Puppets witness the puppeteers and vice versa. The pole that controls Kermit’s arm can always be seen hanging from his hand, acknowledging the puppeteer that drives and operates the being. The puppeteer is like the complex, the dream, the symptom. What would happen if Kermit or Fozzie eradicated Jim Henson’s or Frank Oz’s hands? They would find themselves limp, inanimate. They could ignore the hands, but then they would become blind instruments operated by another’s autonomy. The best bet is dialogue.

Kermit teaches us amphibiousness. He calls for a dialogue between puppet and puppeteer, between outer and inner. Kermit teaches us to listen. Listen to the symptom — the complex, the hands that control us — to see where they want to go. Kermit teaches us to join them willingly and actively.

Kermit teaches us that sentimentality won’t save us. Platitude is pretty but life’s perfect song and dance numbers are often interrupted, dues ex machina, by the unpredictable, the silly and the absurd. Kermit teaches us not to be like any old puppet, but rather, to be a Muppet.

Most importantly, however, Kermit brings awareness to the puppet proscenium. In Kermit’s case the proscenium is the movie screen or the bezel of the television. He makes us ask what goes on inside the box: GE’s Octagon, the Zenith model T1816R, the Porta-Color, the Sony Trinitron, the Optoma HD66, and today’s 3D Flat-panel, Plasma, LCD, LED, rear-projection, jumbo diagonal, net-connected, DVD combos. Are there little people in there?  Wearing little costumes? Controlling little puppets? Who’s telling the stories, and who’s listening?

The cultural metaphor I’m writing around is trite and obvious. Who are the puppets and who are the puppeteers? We live in an age when desires are manufactured into needs by savvy marketing departments. Thanks to an advertising mega-machine, technological wonders that we didn’t even know we wanted a decade ago are now necessities. Political pundits on TV and radio tell us what to think about social issues. Newspapers tell us how to talk about yesterday’s “current” events. Pop songs tell us what romance is supposed to feel like. Amazon and the New York T

imes tell us which books to read.

Carl Jung counseled each of us to ask what is the myth that we’re living? Kermit the Frog counsels us to ask who’s writing it and who’s performing it?

Jim Henson (or Steve Whitmire) looks into Kermit’s ping-pong ball eyes. One hand controls a fabric amphibian’s mouth; the other hand controls his arm.  Muppet and Muppeteer together tell us always to remember the physical characteristics of the puppet theater and to be willing to knock it down if need be.

Food, Politics and Religion

Part 1: Nourish us!

Mother Knows Less: How the Food Media Colonized our Kitchens

Photo courtesy of Caroline Clough: http://mealsihaveeaten.blogspot.com/

In my house, one night a week is always pizza night. The day changes, but the recipe does not. The chewy dough is flavored with extra-virgin olive oil and a dab of pesto. It is cooked in a hot oven and nestled within the scorching edges of a cast-iron pan. I top the pizza with a homemade tomato sauce made mostly from sweetened tomato paste speckled with red pepper flakes and fennel seeds. Fresh mozzarella is melted until it spreads out gooey and starts to brown beneath the hot flames of the broiler. The cheese blankets the surface just above some handcrafted wild boar prosciutto from Philadelphia’s Italian market. Maybe, if I’m in the mood, the pie is also sprinkled with juicy pineapple chunks. Finally, a dusting of shredded Parmagiano-Reggiano cheese accompanies cheap garlic powder, onion powder and a sprinkling of dried basil.

Photo courtesy of Caroline Clough: http://mealsihaveeaten.blogspot.com/

The final result is thick, almost an inch tall. It is more like focaccia than traditional Pizza. The olive oil creates a rich almost cake-like crumb that browns against the hot cast iron pan and creates flakey edges resembling pastry. The bottom crunches between my teeth and the hot messy mixture of toppings challenges me to get it into my mouth before it slides off onto my plate or drips down my lip, scorching my chin. If I miss, I lift the bubbly goop with my fingers and make sure it lands on my tongue in time to compliment the crust. I feel it starting to scorch the top of my mouth, so I cool it down with a sip of Brunello. In my opinion, this is pizza perfection.

Of course, oenophiles might complain that Pizza is too complex for me to taste the subtleties of the legendary Montalcino wine (Brunello di Montalcino, “nice dark one,” is a red Tuscan masterpiece that usually accompanies rich and heavy meat dishes). Wine snobs might call it flavor pornography that sacrifices vino-eroticism for pure gastronomic perversity. Personally, I’ve always enjoyed fireworks: I like when pungent, sweet, sour, bitter and salty smack me in the face.

But my wine pairing is the least of my problems. Gourmands, for example, might complain about the pizza’s skillet shape. It is not deep dish like Chicago’s. It is not flat and flexible like New York’s. It is not crisp like the original Neapolitan. It is not square like Sicily’s. Furthermore, my combination of ingredients is too pedestrian to qualify as gourmet like Wolfgang Puck’s trendy California version: no wild mushrooms, no arugula, no avocados.

Also, some folks may take issue with the mozzarella. This grocery store purchase is not made from the milk of the water buffalo. It is not even hand crafted or packed in water. No, it comes shrink-wrapped from Wisconsin and branded with a name that ends in a vowel – i or o, maybe both — and a logo colored red, white and green: some marketing department’s attempt to conjure emotions related to Italy.

No, neither my pizza, nor its ingredients are authentic. It is a bastardization of the original and it hardly resembles the well-established American counterparts. Dough tossing pizza professionals from both continents would likely laugh at my pie. Yet, I continue cooking it my way. I’ve worked as a professional chef for so many years that I feel absolutely confident about my creation. Otherwise, I’d probably obsess over it, attempting to achieve some sort of cultural-culinary purity.

I remember this anxiety well from my youthful years in the kitchen. I purchased specialized ingredients from a variety of ethnic grocery stores because I wanted to make genuine food: corn husks and masa harina for true tamales, Japanese short grain rice for real sushi, red bean paste for bona fide steamed buns. I had an obsession with trying to make the real thing. Real paella. Real Waldorf salad. Real buffalo wings. Real Pizza.

What is real pizza? Is it the thin crusted one made in Naples, Italy? Most food historians agree that the tomato topped flat bread originated in Neapolitan cuisine centuries ago. Cheese wasn’t added until the late 1800s. Does this make all subsequent versions bastardizations? No, unlike other foods, pizza has become such a staple of the American diet that we generally do not worry over questions of authenticity. What about other, less ubiquitous, ethnic specialties?

The Burrito, for example, doesn’t really exist in Mexico. There is a traditional Burrito in the Northern Mexican town of Ciudad Jauréz. However, I’m told it barely resembles the overstuffed American meal-in-a-wrap. More akin to a hoagie, submarine, grinder, or muffaletta the Tex-Mex burrito is not authentic Mexican cuisine. Rather, critics might call this an example of U.S. restaurants appropriating indigenous food.

But I could just as easily flip this accusation around. I could say that the very notion of authentic food is a colonization of the family kitchen. From this perspective, cookbooks, food TV and celebrity chefs have robbed the family household of its food authority. Mother is no longer the expert. The expert is the expert. The celebrity chef is judge and jury.

You might argue that it is unfair to vilify restaurants, publishers and famous foodies. You might say they are anthropologists for the masses. They allow us to experience far away places through our taste buds. They give us the opportunity, literally, to consume distant cultures. Before Julia Child, some people argue, Americans knew little about France and even less about its cuisine. French food meant Kraft mayonnaise and canned or frozen Haricot Vert (thin French string beans). Gastronomic gurus made us cultured and worldly. They introduced us to far away places. Furthermore, identifying what is ethnically authentic actually increases the value of unique cultural attributes. In other words, by giving a voice to “humble peasant food” we grant it authority as an acceptable cuisine.

Wait! This statement begs to be challenged: acceptable to whom? It was already acceptable to the families that ate it. In some cases it ensured the survival of generations of eaters. By defining it, don’t we imprison a culture into a cookie-cutter Jell-o mold? Don’t we rob the household of its ability to construct its daily dish according to familial nutritional needs? Now the inability to cook according to the officially sanctioned and so-called authentic recipe – whether due to lack of technical knowledge, or lack of funds to purchase ingredients – marginalizes the home cook.

In fact, while Julia Child, James Beard and M.K. Fisher are often credited with bringing good taste to the USA, one might say that what they actually brought was the idea of an authoritative and elitist voice that chooses the good food, dismisses the bad, and defines sophisticated taste for the rest of us.

What is this “French” cooking? Why should we master it? And what makes it an art? Certainly Julia’s Parisian French recipes were not more genuine than the home cooking done by mothers, grandmothers and peasants in regions throughout France. But Mrs. Child was on TV, PBS even: that ad-free bastion of educational programming. She was an authority. Did her wealthy background — Vanity Fair’s Laura Jacobs describes her as “from wasp stock” — and Smith College education give her a more refined palate than the rest of us?

Or did it just give her articulate speech and the ability to convince a nation that her subjective taste preferences should also be theirs? Because despite the mythology, America ate well before Julia. The new world was extolled for its bounty of exotic ingredients. In fact, many early colonial dishes, particularly the Southern ones, are now experiencing resurgence in international fine cuisine. Virginia’s salt-cured country ham, for example, is often praised with enthusiasm historically reserved for Spain’s dry-cured Jamón Serrano and Italy’s Prosciutto di Parma.

This Smithfield, Virginia creation predates Julia Child. Legend has it that Native American methods of salting, smoking and aging venison were adapted to the razorback hog by the Jamestown colonists when they first arrived on the new continent over two hundred years ago. Furthermore, the process of making Virginia’s Country Ham is hardly unique when compared to the process used to make Spain’s and Italy’s. The differences are mostly a result of the idiosyncrasies of regional climates and their effects on the grains and water fed to the hogs, the salt used to cure the meat, and microorganisms in the dark atmosphere of the aging cellar. Intangible or invisible factors, whether chemical or spiritual (as in ‘the soul of the Parma infuses a unique kind of love into a smoked hog leg’), are the biggest differences between one culture’s dry-cured ham and another’s.

Cooking methods are as universal as human ingenuity. For every pizza, there’s a flat-bread with regional toppings on the other side of the globe. While the Burrito may use ingredients indigenous to Mexico, the citizens of Ciudad Jauréz certainly did not invent the idea of wrapping up their food. Maki and Spring rolls are two Asian examples of rolled food. For every Pâté there’s a meatloaf or Kofta. Industrious home cooks all over the world are adept at modifying local foodstuffs into original creations, even if they don’t all bear the Escoffier or Cordon Bleu stamp of approval.

The codification of authentic ethnic cuisines stinks of the same nationalist ideology that eliminated the spoken dialects of impoverished regions and replaced them with the King’s English, Spanish, French, German, Italian etc. In fact, the refined cooking techniques of France come straight from royal court. Taillevent, the famous cook to Charles the V of France, and La Varenne, author of France’s first book of haute recipes passed their knowledge on to generations of royal chefs whose techniques have been updated, modernized and christened with fancy names. Julia Child eventually took the baton (or should I say baguette?) and taught U.S. TV viewers and cookbook readers authentic fancy French names and regal cooking techniques. She also brought European culinary aristocracy to a new continent. Or as Laura Jacobs wrote in the August 2009 issue of Vanity Fair, what Julia Child introduced to the American home cook was:

Principles—a belief in a right way as opposed to a wrong way. Just as Emily Post’s Etiquette set forth a blueprint for civilized conduct, an ethical structure, if you will, that anyone—no matter what their birth—could learn, so Mastering set forth the structural verities of classic French cooking.

Although the birthright becomes irrelevant, the very notion of principled gastronomic authenticity defines upper, middle and lower class palates carving them into class divisions unequally distributed like white and dark meat poultry. Gourmet sophistication becomes like poetry, ballet and opera — high-art used as economic segregation — for a generation of middle class baby boomers raised on Bob Dylan, Alvin Ailey and Leonard Bernstein. The peoples’ entertainment had taken the ‘high’ out of high culture. Mid-Twentieth Century artists and their pseudo-socialist revolutionary ideology had eliminated the performing arts’ ability to divide the proletariat and bourgeoisie. However, an upwardly mobile generation of white-collar hippies still needed ‘culture’ for the same reason the Nineteenth Century’s Victorian aristocracy did. It separated them from their darker skinned, lower paid or less educated compatriots. Food culture met the prerequisites. It became the new high-culture. A flock of gastronomes, book publishers and TV producers was ready to profit off the new (and gigantic) generation of American elite. An industry established a new set of ‘high’ standards, to which ‘low-culture’ citizens could ‘buy-up.’

Food personalities like Julia Child (followed by Jacque Pepin, Madeleine Kamman, Paul Prudhomme, etc.) inadvertently partnered with the food industry. We tend to forget that the food media developed right alongside the modern industrial food complex. For most of human history, knowledge of nourishment and nutrition was kept in the family: passed from one generation of home cooks to the next. Food and its preparation, recipes and home-remedies, were passed from parent to offspring, from elder to child. But when the daily meal became ‘cuisine,’ when soup became ‘potage’ and beef stew became ‘bourguignon,’ the maternal (or in some cases paternal) link was cut. Family heirlooms, culinary and agricultural, were tossed to the compost heap. Grandma no longer taught mother to bake biscuits. Grandpa no longer taught father to smoke stag meat. Feeding expertise moved outside the home. Corporate interests took the reigns. Factory sealed aluminum cans replaced Ball canning jars. Cryovac and flash-frozen fish replaced salt cod.

Julia Child — then an iconic symbol of American matriarchy – helped the food industry mark its territory. She did not make cooking simple. Instead, she wielded a wallop of a maternal guilt trip, showing women just how luxurious dinner could and should be. And all the while, she pretended it was easy. Now if you don’t have time to fashion a four-star fancy French feast, why bother cooking at all? Buy dinner instead! Restaurants were happy to serve take-out and delivery. Frozen TV platters were plentiful. Hamburger helper, Frito pie and Tuna Casserole were quick fixes that required purchasing packaged and processed provisions. The gargantuan food industry was more than happy to reap the dividends of the new home cook’s insecurity and learned helplessness. Meanwhile industrious parents with time, money and higher education, were elated to learn the new culinary arts. Epicurean expertise not only became a signpost of superior sophistication, it also proved that privilege was the paragon of good homemaking. Or in psychoanalytic terms, the ‘good’ breast flows with gourmet milk.

This is how an unintentional partnership between our favorite foodies and a corporate food industry created a national cuisine that perfectly fits our capitalist culture. I disagree with the critics who claim that the USA – because it is always dipping from a multicultural fondue pot of immigrants at the forefront of a global economy — can never develop its own food. They say it will always be just an amalgam of everything — including the sink. However, I’d argue there is a National cuisine. But it has nothing to do with ingredients and recipes. It is not about hamburgers, apple pie, Cajuns, California or barbecue. Instead, it is a consumerist cuisine: food fit for commercialism.

It is seen in value added products with surnames like imported, organic, local and authentic. These products insure a dynamic market where bread is no longer just bread. Instead, it is a commodity with multiple price points. Wheat. Multigrain. Artisan. Like a car, an electronic gadget, software, or a hedge fund, there are different versions that range in price from cheap to outrageously expensive. And each version’s value is related to the authority granted to it by celebrity chefs and cookbook authors.

Part 2: Sustain us!

Too Many Lobbyists in the Kitchen: The Bitterness of Gastro-political Activism

Julia Child, following in the footsteps of France’s Escoffier, made the Twentieth Century the American age of culinary opulence and value-added luxury with Mastering the Art of French Cooking (1961). Michael Pollan, following in the footsteps of a new generation of chefs like Alice Waters, has set the Twenty-First Century on the track to an age of epicurean ethics. Every bite is political. You vote with your fork. It is a new mythology of mastication that resonates with our capitalist ideological foundation. Table manners are reconstructed into political lobbying.

Although this new gastronomic grass-roots activism seems to be in resistance to the corporate control of our agricultural food system, the implications are more complicated and potentially problematic.

Retailers like Whole Foods and authors like Michael Pollan,  Eric Schlosser, and Jonathan Safan Foer – although admirable in their intentions – have inadvertently sown the seeds of the political food movement in the same noble soil of entitlement that sprouted the separation of eaters along class lines. These heroes of culinary activism neglect to point out that it is in the backyards of wealthy hosts that marginalized party guests suffer from the toxic run-off of the exclusive cocktail hour. In other words, the national food system that has caused obesity and diabetes epidemics with commodity corn sweeteners and cheap subsidized calories is in fact the flip side of the culinary sophistication heralded by TV personalities and cookbook chefs.

Consider that one advantage to mastering the art of an ethnic cuisine is that it invalidates the kitchen antics of the average family cook and widens the gap between classes. Despite Grandma’s old world origins and the hardships of the boat ride she made from the homeland, her unsophisticated ‘macaroni’ smothered with tomato ‘gravy’ and topped with the cheap pecorino Romano is inauthentic now that she resides in an urban immigrant neighborhood. Never mind that South Philadelphia and Boston’s North End can claim direct culinary lineage to Italy. Because Mario Batali has defined regional Italian cuisine for an audience of food network junkies and Manhattan restaurant patrons, Nonna is an imposter. Her lack of interest in truffle oil is indicative of both financial and culinary inadequacy. And now, in the age of gastro-political activism, not only is her so-called non-traditional cooking mediocre, it is also ethically and nutritionally suspect.

Clearly, it benefits the narcissistic interests of affluent eaters to increase the oppositional space between authentic and fallacious food — and to equate that opposition with simple moral parallels like good and bad, or political parallels like local and corporate agriculture.

TV chefs are not the only offenders. Scientific food engineers also inadvertently help increase the divide. Synthetic flavor enhancers, for example, are increasingly used to trick taste buds, preserving and augmenting the polar divisions in the process. Empty laboratory constructed calories masquerade as nutrients, fooling neurotransmitters on microscopic levels. Evolutionary biologists argue that artificial food dyes and flavors deceive our hard-wired instincts to eat what’s good for us. Meanwhile, government subsidies increase the economic distance between vitamin rich vegetables and sugary soda pop. A liter of coke is cheaper than a head of Swiss chard. The poles get further apart. As the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, so healthy gets healthier and junk food gets junkier.

However, we should not blame only the corporations like Cargill, Kraft, Sara-Lee and Philip Morris. The ambience of the American consumerist cafeteria lunch line seems to be the only logical next chapter in the culinary myth that began with the epicurean elitism of the Twentieth Century. Therefore, we should look critically at both the corporate industrial infrastructure of the U.S. food supply and the popular intellectual movement that resists it.

Not only is local, organic and/or ethical the new higher-priced luxury prefix signifying opulence on national menus, it is also a moral marker of piety preserved for people of privilege. Now upper class, educated articulate speakers (following in the footsteps of Julia Child) – calling themselves healthy eating advocates, nutrition educators, and political activists – can act like missionaries saving poor savages. No longer do we teach the infidels that our God sustains life better, now our food provides a more nourishing experience.

Give us each day our daily bread, but make sure its whole grain and unbleached. Sure, it is more expensive. However, hard work is rewarded with dollars. And dollars bring everyone closer to enjoying the everlasting benefits of upper class moral superiority. Yes, only the rich can digest the divine rewards of the new consumerist culinary religion. Fast food, soda pop and commodity corn (and increasingly, animal based proteins) bear the markings of a new heathenism.

Unfortunately, this political food movement confuses its socialist tendencies with free-market opulence and progressively mythologizes local, organic and small-scale food processing as the new road to Mecca. They have forgotten the great depression’s soup lines. They ignore the fact that the U.S.A currently eats better than any society in human history. They’ve repressed memories of the hunger citizens endured just a hundred years earlier. The centralization of the national food supply fed millions of hungry people and has all but eradicated starvation in developed countries (albeit at the expense of the third world).  Thanks to the subsidization of commodity crops, the average U.S. consumer need only spend 9.8% of his disposable income on food.  And clearing the table of precarious and vulnerable local food economies is precisely what enabled a national bounty. Do the pundits of the new political food movement see that they are merely advocating that history plays like a bad song on repeat? The pendulum moves in the opposite direction. From local to global and back again, we swing from one hyperbolic extreme to the other.

Of course, there is nothing new about this debate. It is a county fair pie-eating contest between centralized hoarding and individual autonomy. It is not only a central paradox of our democratic capitalist economy (social welfare state or corporate manifest destiny and the unequal distribution of wealth?). It is also the principle enigma facing the socialized animal: individual or cultural sovereignty. This polarity and its psychological ramifications are symbolized in many ancient stories. As staples for human survival, food and water are ideal ingredients for an mythological repast.

For example, our current food and agricultural infrastructure is based on the same metaphorical edifice as the prudent advice of Joseph the dream interpreter (Genesis 41:31). He counsels Pharaoh to store the bountiful harvest’s grains in preparation for the inevitable seven years of famine lurking right around the corner. Let us not forget that, like biblical Egypt, the U.S.A. streamlines, stores and industrializes the food supply not only to satiate the appetites of corporate fat bellies, but also to fortify the nation against the threat of famine and crop-killing natural disasters. Likewise, the authors and activists who try to resist the corporate food economy have unconsciously built their argument upon a mythological foundation. Like Moses, they attempt to liberate the chosen people from an overly indulgent and exploitative corporate and government Pharaoh.

In this retelling of Exodus, however, the chosen people are not enslaved. Instead they are sophisticated and privileged. They are a select few who have the advantages necessary to heed a message that perpetuates class-based moral separatism. The media validates them. The restaurants cater to them.
It is not blood that they will smear on their doorposts but rather zesty arrabiata sauce made from organic vine ripened tomatoes and flavored with Niman Ranch pancetta. Growth hormones and antibiotics will smite the first born of the unsophisticated and undereducated. The liberated elite will part the waters of high-fructose soda pop, shedding the shackles of common cuisine and heading off into the desert.

The unleavened flat bread of the new Israelites is not the bland matzo my grandmother served. It is pizza in its ‘authentic’ new American manifestation.

Hopefully, they’ll use my recipe:

RECIPE FOR PIZZA PERFECTION

For the Dough:

1 7-gram packet active dry yeast

1 ¼ cups warm water

1 TBS Pesto

1 TBS Sea Salt

3-5 Cups of Flour

Fit your mixer or food processor with the dough kneading blade or paddle. Inside the mixer bowl, dissolve the yeast in the water. When it starts to bubble and smells yeasty, add 2 cups of flour. Mix to combine. Allow the batter consistency concoction to double in size. (This step is called making a sponge. It gets the yeast going and helps develop gluten). Add salt and pesto. Add 1 cup of flour. Knead adding small amounts of flour until the dough pulls away from the sides of the bowl. Coat the dough with olive oil and allow it to rise until doubled in size.

For the sauce:

In a blender or food processor, combine 1 6oz can of tomato paste with 2 TBS of sugar, 1 tsp Sea Salt, 1 TBS of Pesto, 3 TBS Red Wine, ½ TBS Fennel Seed, and a pinch of red pepper flakes. Blend until smooth.

To assemble the pizza:

Turn on oven at highest setting (450-550 degrees Fahrenheit). Place a large cast iron skillet on the stove at medium-low flame. Stretch half of your dough (reserve the second half for another pizza) out so that you have a disc the size of your pan. Lay dough on the hot skillet. Spread half of the sauce evenly with a rubber spatula. Cover with cheese and toppings of your choice.

Bake the pizza in the hot oven until the cheese is gooey and bubbling. Turn on your broiler and brown the top of the pie for 1-2 minutes

(careful not to burn it!).

Open a bottle of red wine. Pour. Drink.

The preceding is an excerpt from a proposal I’ve written for a book entitled:

Eat. how food became religion and why we’ll never feed our hungry souls.

If you are in the publishing business and interested in reading the entire proposal, please email me: jordosh@gmail.com

Embodied Phenomena in Rock and Roll. Or, Touring the Imaginal Geography of Popular Music Performance

“Music, of course, has something. But it can’t propose solutions; it can’t solve anything. But it can make people feel less lonely. You can be somewhere and just hear a tune and just, ya’ know, you feel better that it exists.” – Elvis Costello (Looking for America, 2009).

A song has been playing over and over again. It has been blasting on the car stereo as I drive. It has been floating from itunes into my headphones as I browse the internet. It has been wafting through the speakers of the home stereo.

I wrote the song three or four months ago. The basic chord progression was discovered by accident while fiddling around with the guitar. But the song didn’t really take flight until I started working it at the piano.

Until that moment, I hadn’t really played that particular piano much at all. Perhaps I couldn’t find the time. Maybe I didn’t have the desire. It is not a Steinway or a Bösendorfer, but it is my dream piano.  A Boston built Ivers and Pond’s from 1924, it displays the structural integrity of an airship. When I bought the piano, bizarre lead weights on the back of each key kept the quality of my playing tethered to the limited physical strength I could muster from my fingers. After the weights were removed my hands could launch sound and timbre just by gliding across the synthetic ivory key tops.

However, it is not the instrument’s sonic, mechanical or decorative properties that give it its oneiric qualities. In fact, the piano’s tone lacks the jet-like speed, intensity and brilliance that place better pianos on runways of their own. Instead, its value is in the circumstances of the piano’s acquisition. This small grand is the first piano I purchased with my own earned income. This is the piano I imagined at 13 years old. The instrument is the culmination of boyhood dreams in which I lift off into an ethereal adult existence as orchestra conductor, rock star, or classical composer.

No matter that the piano was purchased not with proceeds from a professional career in music, but rather with money earned flipping pancakes in a diner. When the movers carried it into my house and reattached the legs and damper pedals, it represented an arrival, a landing. It was evidence that the slow conclusion (at 30 years of age) of an elongated adolescence was underway. Hard work and responsibility had paid off and the instrument was material evidence of happiness. Or was it?

In late 2007, the piano sat surrounded by extraordinarily expensive guitars crafted from fine Indian rosewood and Sitka spruce. I pushed my hair out of my eyes. The new haircut was intended to resemble John Lennon’s in Bob Gruen’s famous New York City T-shirt photo, or the mad-scientist-like locks that flew around Leopold Stokowski’s head as he set an orchestra afloat with the wave of his baton. But in its infancy the ‘doo looked more like the frizzy synthetic fuzz that sits atop a child’s troll toy. Whether I would have admitted or not, inside of me there was a ‘tween-ager acting like a new school year was about to begin; he believed that hairstyle held the mana of coolness.  So I ran my hands through my rock and roll coiffure and I glanced at the piano. It was clear that the instrument was more like an over-inflated balloon taking up too much space in the living room of my small Philadelphia row house than the beacon of maturity it was meant to be. Clearly the symbolism was not strong enough to provide a smooth touch down on firm individuated adult tarmac.  Instead, it sat unplayed — used mostly as a shelf on which to stack books waiting to be read.

Yes, I kept my emotional distance, but I physically played it often. After 20 years of practicing scales, arpeggios, jazz runs and blues riffs, any piano beckons to be touched. But I never had my heart in it. Sure, after studying the structural dynamics of counterpoint and harmony, I feel compelled to plow through the technical foundations of each song or melody that intrigues me, tilling the musical loam for buried treasure. But at that time the piano was nothing more than an abacus on which I counted seeds of theoretical harmonics and melodic ingenuity.

That is until this song brought the piano and me into the same atmosphere. The song reinstated my sentimental relationship with, not only this hunk of wood, felt and copper-wound steel, but also any other set of 88 black and white keys tuned to the western chromatic scale. Furthermore, it reacquainted me with the sonic, emotional, unearthly and soulful possibilities that those keys represent.

It is an old conflict. One where even the most stubborn of modernist rationalists are not afraid to use words like ‘soul.’ Music can be played with or without soul; and the majority of folks, aware of the expressive limitations of simple technical mastery, still tolerate the immeasurability of the mystical properties that define a ‘good’ or ‘soulful’ musical performance.

This paper focuses on ‘soulful’ performance.  Locating ‘soul’ in the space between performer and audience, I attempt to understand the lived experience of the performance relationship. I apply post-Jungian dreamwork techniques as a method to understand the experience of performing and I use of a variety of depth psychological concepts in order to describe the actual relationship between performer and audience. First, however, I must discuss what is meant by ‘soulful’ performance.

Oedipal dreams from the heartland: Springsteen and Freud in dialogue

“Outside the street’s on fire, in a real death waltz, between what’s flesh and what’s fantasy” (“Jungleland,” Springsteen 1975).

I’m imagining one of those manuals of etiquette and manners. It describes which fork to use with a fish course and how to tell the difference between a demitasse and a small teacup. It discusses acceptable posture at a formal luncheon table. In the section on acceptable subject of conversation, it states in bold capital letters, “it is best not to mention Sigmund Freud or any of his work in casual conversation.” My imaginary book is not an antique of the Victorian age; it is a modern Twenty First Century Amazon.com best seller. This bold warning about Freud does not surprise me. I have experienced the eye rolling. I am fully aware of the taboo. In a twist that would surely excite Sigmund, we have dismissed Freudianism on the ego level and yet the theories have crept into our unconscious experience.

It is not strange to hear conversations outside of academia in which folks dismiss Freud as a misogynist who contributed to nothing other than patriarchal sexism. I am amazed by how often people who have never read anything written by Freud consider everything he wrote to be wrong, if not offensive. I remember my mother once telling me that Freud was proved wrong years ago. Why, then, I wondered, did our pop psychology seem to be a vulgarized version of Freudian theory? The same people who dismiss Freud are also indelibly inundated with his theoretical understanding of the world. Freud is all around us, particularly in our popular culture artwork. Our popular stories locate the cause of all adult aberrations in early childhood trauma. This can be seen in our culture’s preferred dramatic structure.  The accepted structure of movie screenplays seems to be a vulgarized version of Freudianism combined with Aristotle’s Poetics (350 B.C.E.). Aristotelian catharsis is understood by modern Hollywood to mean emotional cleansing in an unsophisticated Freudian psychoanalytic sense—the uncovering of repressed childhood memories. For example, the plots of the majority of American films can be summarized in one of two ways.

Tunnel Vision. Or: Pinch me, I’m Dichotomizing.

On Sunday, April 26 2009, I was sleeping beneath the perfect unwrinkled sheets in the Holiday Inn express in Carpinteria, CA. During the day I had flown from the east coast to the west to attend a 3-day long class on dreams that was part of my doctoral studies in Depth Psychology.

I arrived in Los Angeles around 1pm and drove the burnt orange colored rental car an hour and a half to the hotel. I quickly washed my face, changed my shirt and headed out to a local wine tasting room just south of Santa Barbara’s State street underpass.

The Kalyra winery tasting room pours for me whenever I’m in the Santa Barbara area. I have a long relationship with the place and sipping there makes me feel grounded, as if the city were not so far away from home.

That afternoon, I felt like a local. I knew the wine well and I was chatting with two women from London that were touring the West Coast. I flirted with the Brits — a short curvy brunette whose fiery personality might force me to categorize her as the tough-girl-next-door and a tall skinny nutritionist whose shoulder length blond hair brushed against her freckled shoulders as she moved like a pixie. I was waiting for my classmate to send me a text message that she was ready to meet for dinner.

Dinner never materialized. Instead, I stumbled into a local hole-in-the-wall Mexican restaurant in which I was the only “gringo.” I order a burrito camarones, devoured it in my hotel room, took a hot bath and fell asleep.

A dream woke me at 4:00am:

The Devil Made Them Do it: Mississippi Delta Blues and Shamanism in Rock and Roll

“If you want to learn how to make songs yourself, you take your guitar and you go to where the road crosses that way, where a crossroads is. Get there — be sure to get there just a little ‘fore 12 that night so you know you’ll be there. You have your guitar and be playing a piece there by yourself . . . a big black man will walk up there and take your guitar and he’ll tune it. And then he’ll play a piece and hand it back to you. That’s the way I learned to play anything I want.” – Tommy Johnson (contemporary to, but no relation to, Robert Johnson).

Rock and roll critics often identify similarities between rock and roll and shamanism. For example, following the release of Patti Smith’s influential first album, Horses (1975), John Rockwell’s Rolling Stone magazine review was entitled, “Patti Smith: Shaman in the Land of a Thousand Dances.” Rockwell points to the evocativeness of Smith’s chanting and compares it to shamanic ritual. Laura Faeth, author of the popular book, I found all the parts: Healing the soul through rock and roll, takes it a step further, claiming rock music has the power to provide emotional healing: “ modern day rock musicians fulfill an essential mythic role for us, that of spiritual shamans/healers and messengers” (Faeth, 2009).  Jungian analyst Marion Woodman (1985) also identifies the similarity between a religious ritual and a rock concert, writing, “at the center is the rock star who stimulates the participants into a ritual frenzy until a combustion point is reached, and symbols appear in the minds of the believers” (p. 76).

Since it is intended primarily as big business entertainment, it is strange that rock and roll is often associated with folk healing. Why is there so much mythology surrounding popular music that has to do with spiritual soothing or psychological transformation? Is this modern phenomenon a compensatory attempt at filling a spiritual vacuum? In other words, in an empty consumer society, do we imagine that we can get our daily dose of spiritualism by buying records and concert tickets? Or, is rock and roll indeed mass-marketed folk healing? Of course, we can’t definitively answer any of these questions. We can, however, look in detail at some of the ways that popular music has incorporated archetypal motifs of the folk healer, specifically the shaman.

Looking first at one of the earliest examples of recorded popular music, blues singer Robert Johnson, I will examine the way the singer’s mythic biography incorporates characteristics and motifs of shamanism. By incorporating a Jungian psychological perspective in this analysis, I will also look at the way transformational folk healing has been appropriated by popular music. I will then speculate on the psychological function that this mythopoetic image making serves for the fans.

Let Your Hair Down: Rock and Roll Coiffure and the Uninhibited Psyche

There is a 1930 Mickey Mouse short called “Just Mickey” (Disney, 1930).  This black and white film begins on the stage of a theater with four sets of patterned curtains parting, one after the other. A lanky, unpolished, early incarnation of Mickey Mouse steps forward, clumsily holding a violin. He bows to the audience and falls flat on his face. Standing up, his face blinks black and white to signify blushing (there’s no color celluloid for pink rosy cheeks). Mickey looks embarrassed, like an awkward prepubescent teen. A loudmouthed heckler is heard obnoxiously chuckling from the audience. Mickey pays him no mind. Instead, he proudly lifts the violin to his chin and places his bow on the strings. He plays a few squeaky dissonant notes and then tunes his instrument. He plays again and breaks a string.  Surprised and horrified, Mickey smiles bashfully. Again the loud heckling laugh blasts from the audience. Mickey is mad! He holds his instrument in one hand and prepares to show them just how well he can play. How does he prepare? He reaches his hand behind his head and ruffles his hair so that his long disheveled locks will thrash around his head as he plays.  For the remainder of the film, the movement of Mickey Mouse’s hair plays a prominent role.  Bouncing up and down and swinging from left to right, Mickey’s hair accentuates each staccato melody. Flowing like ocean waves around his face, each passionate legato phrase of music is echoed in Mickey’s hair.  Mickey is energized by his hair as if musical mana derives from his rodent follicles.
In all his other films, Mickey is rarely portrayed with hair. His head is marble smooth and, especially in the early cartoons, resembles a bowling ball with ears. In this film about musical performance, however, Mickey’s hair is practically the star. I’m reminded of Aaron Lefkove’s “Field guide to Rock and Roll hairstyles, ”Yeah, sure, you should learn to play and all. That’s kind of important. But chops without locks will only get you so far” (2008). In “Just Mickey,” the mouse epitomizes the use of rock and roll locks. Rock and roll locks? But this is 1930, 21 years before disc jockey Alan Freed used the term Rock and Roll to describe the music he was playing on his Cleveland, Ohio radio show (“Rock and Roll,” 2009, para. 10). Yet Mickey Mouse is sporting a “Rooster” hair cut that will become “mod” in 1969 when Rod Stewart, Ronnie Wood and the Faces make the ‘do synonymous with 1970s rock and roll (Lefkove, 2008).

Why did Walt Disney focus on Mickey’s hair when forced to imbue a cartoon mouse musician with excitement and personality? Have hair and musical performance always been linked? Walt was likely just satirizing the popular musicians of his time, poking fun at orchestra conductors like Leopold Stokowski with his signature white hair that rivaled Albert Einstein’s in wildness. “Whenever Stokie [Stokowski] flashed his magnificent profile toward the audience and turned his head skyward, that immense puff of silver fluff seemed to float above the podium like a cloud in heaven” (Dreyer 2004). But how far off was Walt’s gag? There does seem to be some relationship between hair and musicians.

When examining the symbolic relationship between hair fashion and performers, specifically rock and roll musicians of the 20th Century, it becomes clear that rock stars function as hooks for the collective and individual projections of unconscious material.  First, I will explain some Jungian psychological concepts and the ways they can be applied to an interpretation of the cultural artifacts of rock and roll from a mythopoetic perspective. Then I will survey anthropological and psychological literature that examines the symbolic significance of hair in order to further identify the archetypal material that is reflected by rock gods.