Stay Tuned...

The second part of the OCD podcast is nearing completion! Actually, it would be complete already except that I lost a chunk of it while sliding sections of dialogue around in GarageBand 1.0. The result? I got the new GarageBand.

Much mental sweat has been expended on the upcoming seminar for Imaginarium 07 at the ever exciting Cornerstone Festival. I work my proverbial butt off on these things, I tell ya! As Flannery O'Connor said, if you have only rewritten it three times it probably isn't any good yet.

My topic is "Kitsch" and I have divided the three part seminar as follows: 1) Kitsch-The Absurdity of Belief, 2) Kitsch-The Three-legged Dog, and 3) Kitsch-The Friendly Prehistoric Carnivore. Seminar numero uno gets into the relationship between Enlightenment thinking, the avant-garde, and kitsch, since I discovered, much to my surprise, that the term "kitsch" came into broad academic usage back in the early 20th century when art critics like Clement Greenberg and Hermann Broch set up a sort of Zeitgeist War between the fine arts and kitsch. For these guys, fine arts was synonymous with the avant-garde. Kitsch, in their view, consisted of 1) the growing presence of mass produced, mass marketed popular culture (which they despised) and 2) any (and I mean ANY) art which gave off a whiff of the Age of Faith. Inspired by the beauty of nature? Forget it. Desirous to pursue figure painting as fine art? Nope. Religous themes? Nah. Passion, emotion, suffering, anything drawn from common experience? Are you kidding? Simply put, it was considered no longer possible to produce fine art from this sort of subject matter. In fact, "subject matter" itself was tossed out the window in favor of utter, impenetrable abstraction.

All of which is interesting, but not what I think of when I think of kitsch. So I had to figure out how to cover this material while also discussing movies that are "so bad they're good" (Plan Nine, Robot Monster), Cheez Whiz, lawn flamingos, beehive hairdos, black velvet paintings, and devotional accessories like Leonardo's "Last Supper" glued to a slice of cypress knee and sealed within three inches of shellac.

I hope to get the 2nd part of the OCD thing in the bag and still have time to record one of these seminars as an excuse me, ghidorah episode before Cornerstone week (last week of June). Also, with the new GarageBand, I should be able to include stills from bad movies, etc. for those of you with photo or video ipods. And chapters!

Say some prayers for me and for Cstone, will you? Le bad cinema is a subcategory of psychotronic films and other subcategories include sexploitation, mondo films, etc. So, much as I love bad movies, B movies, blaxploitation, sword-and-sandal, K. Gordon Murray imports, and so on, I wouldn't want to introduce someone to the lofty pleasures of watching Plan Nine from Outer Space only for that someone to embrace the unsavory stuff, too. For most folks, it's all "of a piece", as they say. A Christian, however, has to exercise spiritual discernment and restraint or else he'll find himself watching Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS when the Lord returns. (Kind of an embarassing situation.) Although, where do you draw the line? Gotta be responsible adults, right? But what about the "weaker brother", right? Hmmm... Prayers, people! Prayers!