Pigs is Pigs

I remember little of my childhood. I listen to people speak of their lives as children and I long wistfully for the memories that so many around me can invoke without the slightest difficulty.

This goes doubly for my childhood entertainments. I remember very little of the cartoons and TV shows of my childhood. One thing I do remember - really liking Three's Company. And just to be clear if you were here yesterday, I don't like it anymore, or, should I say, I don't feel any need to return to my roots when it comes to sitcoms.

I also remember this cartoon. And who wouldn't? It's insane.



I had not watched this cartoon in 20 years, and it had changed quite a bit in my mind. I recalled the moral of the cartoon to be that you shouldn't overeat, the moral I believe most children took away from it.

However, it turns out that the moral is in fact that you shouldn't dream about overeating. Overeating outside of the dreamscape is fine.

But what does one make of the ending? For that matter, what does one make of the cartoon? I am sure Deleuzians or Žižekians could do a better job, but there is something about it that feels terribly relevant.

That pig, he just can't stop eating. Despite the constant scolding of his German or Polish mother (the accent seems to vary, perhaps they are Kashubians), he cheats his siblings out of food, unrepentant.

Then he has this dream. Now this is his dream, and it is a dream where our Piggy purges his sins, by being mechanically force fed by a drunk yellow-skinned scientist (another in-joke?) who enjoys feeding him as much as Piggy enjoys eating. And even when he's finished, and about to leave, he can't help himself, and, grabbing a turkey leg, he finally explodes.

But the dream explosion wakes him back into the real world, where, in the final seconds of the short, Piggy realises that it was all a dream, and that he is good to go on his program of incessant binge eating.

So my reading? Oh, how about this looks a lot like what's going on in our world right now? A sense that the end is nigh, but not quite nigh enough, so we can think that the past was merely a dream, and that the future will solve the problems we created in our past.

In other words, Pigs is Pigs.

***

I misremembered something else about the cartoon. My mind's version of the cartoon included the very famous Powerhouse B piece from many other Warner Brothers cartoons. Somewhere along the way I remembered Pigs is Pigs as having this Raymond Scott tune while Piggy is being force fed by the mad scientist.

Indeed, while you watch it, it makes sense that this assembly line music would be part of the cartoon. Perhaps a later iteration of the cartoon had the powerhouse tune, but I don't know, because I don't remember. And thankfully, that's also the message of the cartoon.

Rather Amazing

Minus the "rather". This is a miniaturized version of the Karlheinz Stockhausen's Helicopter String Quartet.

A friend of mine, whose tastes tended towards the eccentric, went out of his way to get a copy of the Adritti Quartet recording. This version, adapted by Virgil Moorefield, is quite spectacular, especially as a video.

Enjoy! (thanks to Sequenza21 for pointing it out)

Mailer vs. McLuhan

I know I'm not really doing much here, but I thought I would offer up this bit of counterpoint to Conrad Roth's post on Norman Mailer. To keep things provincial, the video I'm offering up is from the CBC.

To be honest, I've never really known much about Mailer, and although I'm looking at my battered copy of The Guttenberg Galaxy, its dereliction is an artifact of its past before it got to me, protected now from ever again being touched by human hands. Nevertheless, when I found this a number of months ago, I quite enjoyed it, although I don't really know why.

This video strikes me as a kind of Catcher in the Rye for one's intellectual development. I suspect if I'd seen this 10 years ago, I would have been astounded by their profundity. Now, well....look, it's two guys talking like this on CBC Television. That alone, given CBC television's mandate is now to become a low-budget NBC makes it worth the half hour it will forever steal from you.

So, please enjoy two of the 20th Century's Greatest Minds, or two posturing public pseudo-intellectuals whose hot air and obfuscation managed to float down from the ivory tower and into the mass culture of their day.

UPDATE: Phil Ford at Dial "M" for Musicology has a very nice piece on Mailer, and also nicely tears apart Roger Kimball's Mailer article in the New Criterion. Read it here.

Friday Night Videos - Ballerina on a Boat

Here's a delightful piece of Russian animation, with music by Alfred Schnittke. Enjoy! And I promise there will be more next week.

And I'm off to the cottage, to enjoy the rural splendour and take in three musical theatre productions!

Friday Night Videos: Race Symphony

Another Richter - to those few regular readers, life....and the piano intrude. Things will be sporadic for a few more weeks, but hang tight, because there's plenty to come!

Richter at the Transcontinental - Finale

For those of you who couldn't spend a mere three hours watching the documentary I've featured here, here's all you need to see:

Richter At The Transcontinental II

Friday's isn't really a night for essays long or short, so let's watch a movie together instead - Part II of Sviatoslav Richter: The Enigma.

Richter at the Transcontinental

I'm working on some other posts, (hint - I saw Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk last night) but while I'm doing that, spend an hour and some watching this - I'll add part two later. Thanks to Google video and the downloader for providing this - it's not available on DVD in North America.