Growing up my idea of masculinity was Cain from Kung Fu. But who I really wanted to be was Master Po, sure he was blind, but he saw more than everybody else and he always seemed fucking happy.
I haven’t seen an episode of Kung Fu since, like, 1973.
A guitarist named Ritchie Blackmore exuded a sort of “I’m a magician” macho swagger, which greatly impressed me as a young dude. While he was kind of a jerk, he really was great, and I do think the realm of musical performance is maybe one of the few appropriate places of masculine, macho swagger. When I saw Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli perform on PBS in my teens I thought it was like the Blackmore stuff. All that continues to thrill me as I move on deeper into my dotage. Paganini and Liszt were probably the pioneers of this: check out my wizardly powers and style! Call me juvenile for still liking that shit, but I do. Your Master Po outdoes my Ritchie Blackmore, I admit.
Yeah I haven't seen it in many many years either and I was probably just 7 or so when watching it... As I'm googling around now I see Master Po quoting Tao Te Ching alot. Nice, I didn't remember that.
Blackmore I recall from Deep Purple which I listened to a great deal as a teenager, but much like Kung Fu, it's been a minute.
I believe that dude was the head of the temple, different guy, less mirthful, cause you know, running things is a bitch. Master Po was the one who called him Grasshopper.
My current incarnation does feature a penis, and I am totally fine with that.
But I admit that the more I think about the notion of ‘gender’, the less I understand what it might be about. It is not related to one’s sexual orientation, and not necessarily correlated to one’s body and genitals. It seems to me that the ‘values’ supported by masculinism are mostly Western cultural concepts that are totally dependant on one’s position in spacetime. For ex, a penis-person might consider cracking open a cold one with the boys while driving a monster truck on their way to the shooting range to be the apex of masculinity. But for the longest of time, and still to this day in some parts of Terra, many of these notions (‘a cold one’, ‘monster truck’ or ‘shooting range’) bear no meaning at all because such things simply did not exist, despite the presence of male humans. So once we have stripped reality from the local tribe rules (C4), what are we left with, exactly?
More importantly to me, and more puzzlingly, why should I even care?
Somehow I seem to be more interested in considering ‘gender’ in its alchemical sense, with everyone having both as part of them, and to work at balancing the two complementary type of energy. I suppose when you critters talk about having Cain from Kung Fu as a male role model, you might be expressing a similar thing (what with the whole Taoist philosophy built into his personality and character).
I’m so glad someone brought up the constructed aspect of masculinity. And I currently suspect the concept itself - masculinity, femininity - when we look at a large enough sample of what people in the West SAY it is - it’s derived from an ongoing, collective exteriorization of ideas about what gender “is.” It came out of imagination.
So: it’s an abstract noun, masculinity, and you can’t smell, touch, taste, see, or detect the word’s referent, much less hook up some given male off the street to a gadget and measure the levels of masculinity in them. (What would be the unit of measurement? adams? dimaggios? There would be fistfights over the unit of measurement’s name: “Why so Italian? What’s wrong with my idea, leonardbernsteins? Too Jewish? Too long?)
We made it up!
So, we reify these ideas and then forget we made them “real” and take them very seriously (sombunall of us, at least).
Then a discourse arises (mostly from pent-up, ain’t-gotta-life types who complain that these days there’s something lacking in men (or women; “they” should be more of this or less of that. It used to be better, back in some golden age they can’t specify at all. This, together with other materialist aspects of the current culture, cause anxiety. Now it’s an “issue". A phony, unnecessary one, but if enough people believe it’s an issue, voila! It’s an issue. lamentably so. It’s like believing in ghosts.
And then you get bad moral entrepreneurs who say there’s only one true/good/desirable way to “be” this hypostatized concept. And they have the hotline to it, just hit my subscribe button and watch me act like an uncouth caveman, for only one $49 initial payment that will have you on the way to true Alphaville. The anxiety or confusion about being adequate to this phantom idea hooks ‘em in.
I really love how to you pointed out the mixture of female in male and male and female, and it was another commenter here who brought up Kung Fu first. How much saner we’d seem if Taoism was incorporated (←—-this word, back to its roots) in all our lives.
This notion also goes back to Plato’s Symposium, where the topic was love, and the idea that when we’re in love we’re looking for someone who makes us whole: we’re a man who has a female complement out there, somewhere. The two sexes used to be one and there’s this almost electromagnetic physical action that’s getting us together. (This is all from memory, off the cuff, haven’t read Symposium in over a decade.)
I like Alphaville okay, but earlier Godard appeals to me more…like Contempt or A Woman Is A Woman - though Masculin/Feminin was made after Alphaville, and I really love that one, too. Yea, I gotta see Alphaville again after you wrote this…which reminds me: I just saw Kurosawa’s The Drunken Angel: OMG it’s so great! Have you seen Drunken Angel?
I love pretty much anything by Godard from the 60s. I rewatched Alphaville a few years ago and had forgotten how FUNNY it constantly is. JL Godard has a reputation of making lofty and talky intellectual films, but I find that his movies were the most humorous of the French New Wave, as opposed to Truffaut, Rohmer, Chabrol or even Agnes Varda. Rivette sometimes had something kind of mischievous going on, but that came a bit later maybe.
I have seen both Drunken Angel and Stray Dog, Kurosawa’s noir films, the first one also being my favorite of the two. His thriller High and Low I loved as well. I still have to watch some of his more well-known films such as Red Beard, Throne of Blood, or Ran. I somehow did not get around to explore his filmography for the longest of time, for no particular reason.
Growing up my idea of masculinity was Cain from Kung Fu. But who I really wanted to be was Master Po, sure he was blind, but he saw more than everybody else and he always seemed fucking happy.
I haven’t seen an episode of Kung Fu since, like, 1973.
A guitarist named Ritchie Blackmore exuded a sort of “I’m a magician” macho swagger, which greatly impressed me as a young dude. While he was kind of a jerk, he really was great, and I do think the realm of musical performance is maybe one of the few appropriate places of masculine, macho swagger. When I saw Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli perform on PBS in my teens I thought it was like the Blackmore stuff. All that continues to thrill me as I move on deeper into my dotage. Paganini and Liszt were probably the pioneers of this: check out my wizardly powers and style! Call me juvenile for still liking that shit, but I do. Your Master Po outdoes my Ritchie Blackmore, I admit.
Yeah I haven't seen it in many many years either and I was probably just 7 or so when watching it... As I'm googling around now I see Master Po quoting Tao Te Ching alot. Nice, I didn't remember that.
Blackmore I recall from Deep Purple which I listened to a great deal as a teenager, but much like Kung Fu, it's been a minute.
Was Master Po the one who said, “When you can snatch the pebbles from my hand it will be time for you to leave”? That guy was beyond cool to me.
I believe that dude was the head of the temple, different guy, less mirthful, cause you know, running things is a bitch. Master Po was the one who called him Grasshopper.
I loved “Kung Fu”. Bob Wilson liked it too. He mentioned once feeling delighted when “King Fu” quoted the Tao te Ching.
My current incarnation does feature a penis, and I am totally fine with that.
But I admit that the more I think about the notion of ‘gender’, the less I understand what it might be about. It is not related to one’s sexual orientation, and not necessarily correlated to one’s body and genitals. It seems to me that the ‘values’ supported by masculinism are mostly Western cultural concepts that are totally dependant on one’s position in spacetime. For ex, a penis-person might consider cracking open a cold one with the boys while driving a monster truck on their way to the shooting range to be the apex of masculinity. But for the longest of time, and still to this day in some parts of Terra, many of these notions (‘a cold one’, ‘monster truck’ or ‘shooting range’) bear no meaning at all because such things simply did not exist, despite the presence of male humans. So once we have stripped reality from the local tribe rules (C4), what are we left with, exactly?
More importantly to me, and more puzzlingly, why should I even care?
Somehow I seem to be more interested in considering ‘gender’ in its alchemical sense, with everyone having both as part of them, and to work at balancing the two complementary type of energy. I suppose when you critters talk about having Cain from Kung Fu as a male role model, you might be expressing a similar thing (what with the whole Taoist philosophy built into his personality and character).
Spookah! Always with the golden comment. Thanks.
I’m so glad someone brought up the constructed aspect of masculinity. And I currently suspect the concept itself - masculinity, femininity - when we look at a large enough sample of what people in the West SAY it is - it’s derived from an ongoing, collective exteriorization of ideas about what gender “is.” It came out of imagination.
So: it’s an abstract noun, masculinity, and you can’t smell, touch, taste, see, or detect the word’s referent, much less hook up some given male off the street to a gadget and measure the levels of masculinity in them. (What would be the unit of measurement? adams? dimaggios? There would be fistfights over the unit of measurement’s name: “Why so Italian? What’s wrong with my idea, leonardbernsteins? Too Jewish? Too long?)
We made it up!
So, we reify these ideas and then forget we made them “real” and take them very seriously (sombunall of us, at least).
Then a discourse arises (mostly from pent-up, ain’t-gotta-life types who complain that these days there’s something lacking in men (or women; “they” should be more of this or less of that. It used to be better, back in some golden age they can’t specify at all. This, together with other materialist aspects of the current culture, cause anxiety. Now it’s an “issue". A phony, unnecessary one, but if enough people believe it’s an issue, voila! It’s an issue. lamentably so. It’s like believing in ghosts.
And then you get bad moral entrepreneurs who say there’s only one true/good/desirable way to “be” this hypostatized concept. And they have the hotline to it, just hit my subscribe button and watch me act like an uncouth caveman, for only one $49 initial payment that will have you on the way to true Alphaville. The anxiety or confusion about being adequate to this phantom idea hooks ‘em in.
I really love how to you pointed out the mixture of female in male and male and female, and it was another commenter here who brought up Kung Fu first. How much saner we’d seem if Taoism was incorporated (←—-this word, back to its roots) in all our lives.
This notion also goes back to Plato’s Symposium, where the topic was love, and the idea that when we’re in love we’re looking for someone who makes us whole: we’re a man who has a female complement out there, somewhere. The two sexes used to be one and there’s this almost electromagnetic physical action that’s getting us together. (This is all from memory, off the cuff, haven’t read Symposium in over a decade.)
Thank you for your great answer, as usual.
“on the way to true Alphaville”
I love Godard’s Alphaville.
I like Alphaville okay, but earlier Godard appeals to me more…like Contempt or A Woman Is A Woman - though Masculin/Feminin was made after Alphaville, and I really love that one, too. Yea, I gotta see Alphaville again after you wrote this…which reminds me: I just saw Kurosawa’s The Drunken Angel: OMG it’s so great! Have you seen Drunken Angel?
I love pretty much anything by Godard from the 60s. I rewatched Alphaville a few years ago and had forgotten how FUNNY it constantly is. JL Godard has a reputation of making lofty and talky intellectual films, but I find that his movies were the most humorous of the French New Wave, as opposed to Truffaut, Rohmer, Chabrol or even Agnes Varda. Rivette sometimes had something kind of mischievous going on, but that came a bit later maybe.
I have seen both Drunken Angel and Stray Dog, Kurosawa’s noir films, the first one also being my favorite of the two. His thriller High and Low I loved as well. I still have to watch some of his more well-known films such as Red Beard, Throne of Blood, or Ran. I somehow did not get around to explore his filmography for the longest of time, for no particular reason.
Nice post. Happy Mayday!