Fame-Everything Earth Addendum 26, vol. 35

Fame — Everything Earth (“EE”) Addendum 26, vol. 35
Dr. Aazort’s Advanced Earth Studies Group – Multiversity of Artaxia

Greetings to Artaxia from exotic Earth! Your esteemed professor continues to masquerade as a human on this wonderful planet where “human” is so loosely defined that wide varieties of creatures are passing. Of course, understanding “human” remains my reason for having regularly visited and lived here for several thousand years compiling the indispensible “Everything Earth” (“EE”) reference. Remember, these are potential space-faring beings. You don’t want one showing up at your door without ready access to your EE. Order your copy today! (NOTE: Owing to the Federated System’s “no official contact” embargo of Earth, “Everything Earth” cannot be shipped to Earth.)

Earth has experienced what qualifies as a “violent media revolution” over just the last century. All aspects of human culture have been affected, but none like the pursuit of fame. Fame, celebrity, renown – all come from publishing one’s accomplishments. It’s only logical that this recent media revolution, producing ever more means of publication, should spur the ancient human desire for the special immortality of fame.

Earthmen played the fame game early, almost simultaneous with their first revolutionary media technology: writing. In the West, epic poems by “Homer” (possibly based on real events from around 1200 BCE) acclaimed the Greeks for conquering Troy and struggling home. Around 800 BCE various fictional accounts of the “Iliad” and “Odyssey” moved from highly-improvised oral performance art and into a standard Homeric text.

As oral performances, with music and dramatic flourishes, these stirring tales were reserved for the hearths of nobles who could afford a star-quality recitalist for special occasions. But by 800 BCE, hand-copied manuscripts of Homer’s version appeared in the libraries of the newly-literate. This was still a pretty small audience, but the technology of writing showed great promise, and it flexed its first muscles with what was in many ways humanity’s First Book.

The “Iliad” and “Odyssey” specify the requirements for a noble life – and fame; values that have survived surprisingly intact from the ancient Greeks right down into modern times. Unfortunately, prowess in combat is top of the list, to humanity’s continuing pain. And hierarchy is busy everywhere, declaring what princes owed to kings and kings to princes. The rabble, or “hoi Polloi,” are told to put up and shut up.

But the books also provide useful information about honor, trust, self-sacrifice, the caprice of the gods, the wages of sin, and, occasionally, the value of compassion. And they’re page-turners, boasting extravagant cruelty, one-eyed monsters, wicked gorgeous dames. The irresistible moral of the story: the best out-perform the rest and get to be “heroes,” destined to be remembered and imitated – in a word, “famous.” Societies bred this lesson into children who, as they grew, naturally wanted to be heroes, too. Or at least look like one.

The perfect real-world example is the first, and my favorite. A backwater Macedonian prince of the mid-4th century BCE fancied himself a descendant of Achilles, a Greek hero in the “Iliad.” Later, as king and conqueror, Alexander “the Great” would become the first human to achieve fame in his own lifetime. That he accomplished this while only living to be 32 speaks to the sheer effort he put into it.

In addition to conquering the known world, a bit of a job in itself, Alexander assembled a killer press team to cover the action. No form of ancient media was overlooked. He employed the historian Callisthenes, the sculptor Lysippus, the painter Apelles. He minted his own coins bearing his recognizable face (“Aazort 18 – Artists”). And, as proof of his success, history’s most ambitious empire builders have all sought to have “the Great” appended to their names, too.

Writing continued to work its magic, with the printing press eventually multiplying its impact. But nothing else so dramatically changed media on Earth until just this last century. Nearly 3000 years of library quiet abruptly ended around 100 years ago with a deafening eruption of media technologies: the telegraph, photography, audio recording, motion pictures, radio, television and the internet of just the last decade or two.

This explosion of publication technologies created a tidal wave of self-promotion. It is no wonder that Earth now suffers the worst plague of celebrity it has ever known. Many humans are even known as “famous for being famous,” a concept that makes my brain hurt.

It seems more than coincidental that during this same remarkable 100-year period, the time-honored setting for achieving fame shifted away from the battlefield and into the arts. Quite soon, audiences may well be more interested in Callisthenes than the bandit he was hired to glorify. This is promising for humans. By 1945, when war finally became too devastating to bear, the art hero had already arrived. Today the arts (and, always, athletics) promise the surest, if most crowded, route to fame.

Anyone seeking lasting fame today would be far better advised to make a stirring film or design an especially fabulous evening gown than take up the conquest and looting of neighboring towns. However tedious at times, this can only be seen as a step in the right direction.

Dr. Aazort’s Film & Video

As my mentor, Prof. Spode Hardratt said: “If you really want to study humans, you gotta watch TV.” Since so much human TV is so very bad, I’ve limited myself primarily to movies and their other long forms.

Very Good: The Girl in the Café (2005) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0443518/ This enjoyable film comes from the writer who is probably best-known for the “Hugh Grant dramedy-romance.” Richard Curtis wrote the screenplays for “Love, Actually,” “Notting Hill,” “Four Weddings and a Funeral,” and (a big credit in my book) numerous Black Adder episodes! But, this film is risky and ambitious given the tightrope it attempts to walk.

The wonderful Bill Nighy (the aging rock star in “Love, Actually”) is the epitome of the diffident, self-deprecating British gentleman. As civil servant Lawrence, he’s caught in a café where the only empty chair is across from Gina (Kelly Macdonald). Ever so cautiously the two are caught in a slow motion emotional collision. The aging Lawrence is impatient for all that he hasn’t accomplished, in his love life or his role working for the Chancellor of the Exchequer, where he seems sincerely dedicated to making anti-poverty programs work, especially in sub-Saharan Africa.

Gina is not such an open book; something of a girl with a past. However, and most un-Englishly (?), she calls ‘em as she sees ‘em. And she likes and admires Lawrence. They share a few meals; some good conversation. Then he impulsively invites her to a fictitious G-8 poverty summit in Iceland where we encounter the almost Capra-esque tightrope walk. Can the English civil servant’s career survive a “calls ‘em as she sees ‘em” kind of girl”? Can a heart worn on the sleeve actually change those cloaked in bureaucratic bean counting? It’s a charming journey to the just barely believable ending.

Very Good: Shadrach (1998) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0144604/  This is a genuinely warm film from a short story by William Styron, directed by his daughter Susanna. Sentiment is certainly present; nostalgia too, but they’re restrained. Given its subject matter, the movie never hit a cringe-worthy note.

Harvey Keitel and Andie MacDowell are Vernon and Trixie Dabney, “white trash” descendants of the once-mighty antebellum Dabney clan of Tidewater, Virginia. We meet them through the voice of our narrator, Martin Sheen and the point-of-view of ten year-old Paul Whitehurst (Scott Terra) the best buddy of the youngest (and stinkiest) Dabney boy, Little Mole (Daniel Treat).

The much-reduced Dabneys are trying to navigate life in 1935 rural Virginia, barely supporting an unwashed mob of children with the trickling aid of Vernon’s moonshine still. One day Shadrach (John Franklin Sawyer) limps into their lives, a 99 year-old former slave who has walked from Alabama to die and lie in “Dabney ground,” specifically the former plantation’s slave cemetery. Shadrach is more a presence than a character, and only manages about ten comprehensible words in the whole film.

Everyone but Vernon is touched to realize Shadrach’s dying wish, despite changes in the law announced by their sympathetic sheriff. Burials on private property are now prohibited, and everything must go according to the books, at a cost of $35. Vernon, who we know will cave eventually, is nonetheless outraged (something he’s great at). That’s a lot of moonshine. The plot simply follows Vernon’s machinations to save the still, outwit the law and score one for the old black man.

What really makes the film is the no-questions-asked approach of the Dabneys as they deal both with Shadrach’s and their own plight. Something approaching unconditional love is working busily throughout. On the drive to the old Dabney plantation, Shadrach’s incontinence blasts even the BO-hardened Dabneys out of the packed car. Trixie gets a bucket and some rags and yet another bottle of beer and cleans the old man, soothing his pride all the while. (Admittedly, while suitably dirty, Andie MacDowell remains remarkably attractive after mothering a brood of kids and swilling beer all day.)

Paul and Edmonia (Monica Bugajski), one of Little Mole’s four older sisters, form a special attachment to each other and the old man. These inter-relationships are the focus here, rather than the obvious social and economic issues engulfing them. There’s no place for any serious explorations of slavery or politics (apart from Vernon’s ritual cursing of FDR). These are the terrors afflicting life, compared to which even death “ain’t much.” Triumph is found in keeping humanity alive right to the grave.