Loons, dragons & blooms (oh my!)
Happy February, with thanks to Phil for glad-groundhog tidings of early spring.
From newShrink perspective it can’t be a minute too soon, or much more welcome.
By now you may recall my cool-season delight with the migratory loons of today’s waterfowl title (illustrated above at left.) A few pairs of adults with some dozen young grace this NC inland lake as their deep-diving habitat each winter.
What may be new, as it was to me: A collective community of these wonderful literal snowbirds is… an asylum of loons! Apparently no joke, here in a loon-loving shrink’s backyard. (Who makes this stuff up?!)
Among several sources I choose to believe on this is Blackriveraudobon.org. A second favorite discovered-gem along these lines is a parliament of owls, a coining attributed to theologian C. S. Lewis.
With such terms fresh in mind, by midweek this first full newShrink re-entry in a while ceased to be the planned orderly toe-dip. It’s been more a polar-plunge — down toward the asylum end of the news-cove.
Coverage here of the coming news-week does bring upbeat Lunar New Year celebrations that begin worldwide on Saturday. At last we again welcome a Chinese zodiac Year of the Dragon — my own birth year, and that of several of you favorite-humans.
Meanwhile, I didn’t set out to read, write, think or even know much about Taylor Swift, Travis Kelce, the Super Bowl or pro football in general.
It just became impossible to navigate around such loons, er, news…
the great K-Tay kerfuffle
For those who’ve managed to miss this one, a lot of it’s entertaining and funny. Beyond that, below are links and quoted passages from selected pieces reflecting some non-frivolous elements. For me they became worth pondering here — particularly during an election year with so much at stake.
First a few disclaimers:
Generally none of these tend to be topics of particular focus or intense interest. With Swift I appreciate how for a while now she’s inspired such passion in my 7-year-old granddaughter — for many valuable things far beyond just the fun music.
For me the sport of football itself doesn’t rivet my attention. (It’s not as if it were college basketball, or last night’s winning Tar Heels🩵!) Occasionally a player, larger news issue or intriguing human narrative will pique my “psychological” interest and exploration along both clinical and archetypal or cultural themes.
And next Sunday’s Big Game’s hook for the old communicator in me is the ads, not so much game itself, halftime shows (or the wardrobe malfunctions of a prior decade.)
My shifting interest to this one may have been when I began to hear and see eye-roll memes and disparaging posts against Taylor Swift that were not the now-familiar far-right rants, often from avid male football fans. These Taylor-disses are different, from progressive-leaning people who aren’t big fans of pro football in general, the Super Bowl in particular, Kansas City OR San Francisco. At least as many I’ve encountered are from women as men.
At some point this week, this cultural moment, these people and story became somehow a different kind of lightning rod. To get at some semblance of a summary-viewpoint, a recent GOP-focused Washington Post column by Eugene Robinson has had me imagining comparable strategies helpful to Democrats and progressive-leaning independents. Robinson argues here for saving the Republican Party, and healthy two-party democracy itself, by all voting against the current extremist “dumpster-fire cult” it has become. (As if that unanimous vote would ever happen…)
Toward similar aims, progressives would do well to keep in mind that stadiums, arenas and media venues full of enthusiastic fans in collective support of anything are also full of voters. That’s the very essence of — and what’s best and worst about — democracy. It seems logical to embrace, or at least not ridicule or whine about, those who fill them with enthusiastic fans/voters who support one’s progressive objectives. It’s a crucial election year, with the wise and decent octogenarian incumbent candidate evoking less than lukewarm enthusiasm — particularly from key youthful adult and next-generation demographics.
From that perspective a Taylor Swift concert, Kansas City and the Super Bowl might be viewed as rather the ultimate in mega-UN-MAGA rallies at which to cheer. Loudly.
With all respect to progressives who aren’t Swifties and/or who dislike Kansas City, the Super Bowl, even pro football:
Please, please consider saving your boos for those who aren’t so helpful to your cherished causes and goals.
Here’s a cross-section of news and opinion pieces. This first, tongue-in-cheek one from The Charlotte Observer’s Issac Bailey rather nails the overall tone I share on this:
Hey, Taylor: Come do for NC and SC what you’ve done for KC
An open letter to Taylor Swift:
Ms. Swift, on behalf of everyone who wants the Carolina Panthers to be relevant again, I beg you to come and save us. We need you now, more than ever! Don’t pay attention to all those dudes complaining you’re making it difficult for them to concentrate on grown men playing with a pigskin.
We want you to do for us what you’ve done for Kansas City. You’ve generated more than $330 millionfor the National Football League and the Kansas City Chiefs just by showing up to games and cheering on your boyfriend, what’s his name, from a luxury box. If you find it in your heart to come to the Carolinas and spend a few Sundays at Panthers stadium next season, maybe that would go a long way towards ensuring everyday taxpayers won’t have to fork over hundreds of millions of dollars to upgrade a stadium owned by a man who is worth billions….
These next two cover the basic recent facts.
Taylor Swift, Travis Kelce and a MAGA Meltdown (The New York Times)
The fulminations surrounding the world’s biggest pop icon — and girlfriend of Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce — reached the stratosphere after Kansas City made it to the Super Bowl.
For football fans eager to see a new team in the Super Bowl, the conference championship games on Sunday that sent the Kansas City Chiefs and San Francisco 49ers back to the main event of American sports culture were sorely disappointing.
But one thing is new: Taylor Swift. And she is driving the movement behind Donald Trump bonkers…
Inside Biden’s Anti-Trump Battle Plan (and Where Taylor Swift Fits In) (NYT)
Watching Donald Trump ascend, the newly energized Biden campaign is aiming to make the general election all about him. It’s also hoping for some big endorsements.
A pro-K-Tay opinion piece from Rick Reilly (WAPO)
If anyone should be worried about Taylor Swift-Travis Kelce, it’s Trump
…I want K-Tay to stick for one very good reason: They’re both loathed by right-wingers. She, for openly standing up against Donald Trump and for abortion rights. He, for appearing in coronavirus vaccine ads and taking a knee during the national anthem, the highest-profile White NFL player to do so.
In fact, if anybody should be worried about K-Tay, it’s Trump. These two have fan bases that are huge and devoted. Just from Swift attending that single Chiefs game, Kelce’s merchandise sales jumped 400 percent. Swift put out one Instagram story last week urging her fans to register to vote, Vote.org reported, and participation on the site jumped 1,226 percent in the next hour.
Between X (formerly Twitter), Instagram and Facebook, she has around 450 million followers (Kelce has “only” about 5 million). What if they decided a fun couples thing to do would be to … I don’t know … save democracy? K-Tay could stir up voters, from homecoming queens to assisted-living grandpas, from Castro Street to Wall Street, and rock polling places the way they rock stadiums.
That might be something even Trump couldn’t shake off…
A comic take…
Did liberals put Taylor Swift and pro-vaccine Travis Kelce in the Super Bowl? Yes, we did. (USA Today)
We made it so Chiefs players would play their best football once they got into the playoffs. We also paid off the Chiefs' opponents with offers of Cabinet positions in the next Biden administration.
Taylor Swift has some factual bona fides.
A nonpartisan Taylor Swift Instagram post helped drive a surge in voter registration (NPR story 9.22.22)
Here’s a widely trending factual summary of Swift’s accomplishments.
https://www.facebook.com/TheOther98/posts/882591527246181?comment_id=598160889169881
And finally this — from the have-we-lost-our-freaking-minds New York Post.
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From a depth-psychology perspective it bears reminding that we are always both driven/influenced by and driving/influencing the culture in which we live. At the universal, archetypal level of myth that’s expressed and illustrated in ways such as religions, literature, drama, the arts, as well as dream and other engagement with the unconscious. At our more mundane, everyday level (more fairytale than myth) is a lot of news, pop culture and entertainment.
It’s now peak award and new-production season for film, TV and music, with surging volume and enthusiasm after pent-up pandemic years and writer-strike. In strange counterpoint to K-Tay hoopla, I’ve happened to catch two remarkably intense, dark ones back-to-back.
Hearts in darkness: “Killers of the Flower Moon” and “Night Country”
I briefly cite both of these very different productions here. Each has hauntingly not-quite-fully-conscious, multi-layered situations and themes of systemic abuse and marginalization of indigenous people, particularly women. The domestic relationship(s) portrayed in Martin Scorsese’s Flower Moon were to me chillingly similar to the terrible complexities of sexuality, familial intimacy, even a twisted love within the inherently abusive, generationally traumatic contexts of chattel enslavement of Black people.
Here’s some useful update and historic context for the true history depicted in Flower Moon.
Blood, oil, and the Osage Nation: The battle over headrights (NPR)
Most reviewers here and beyond refer rather routinely to this film as a Scorsese “masterpiece.” I’m still processing my responses to the long, complex movie, and I’m perhaps not the best judge of this director’s works. For me there is something so stylized-Scorsese masterpiece about this and his other films, that the style itself somehow gets in the way, becomes a “thing” itself.
In this case the allegorical feel to this movie’s devastating depicted tragedies rather trivialized, put them at emotional arms-length, for me. I found myself craving a straightforward, journalistic/historic chronologically told version of this.
I would love to hear what you think.
‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ Review: An Unsettling Masterpiece (NYT)
Martin Scorsese’s three-and-a-half-hour epic, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, is a romance, a western, a whodunit and a lesson in the bloody history of the Osage murders of the 1920s.
‘Hollywood doesn’t change overnight’: Indigenous viewers on Killers of the Flower Moon (The Guardian)
Martin Scorsese’s epic adaptation of David Grann’s nonfiction book has received mixed notices from Native viewers, praising its existence yet with vital caveats
The New Yorker piece captures a powerful element with the role that silence — “transcendent silence” — plays in the film.
The Silent Thunder of “Killers of the Flower Moon” (The New Yorker)
Martin Scorsese’s masterpiece is intent on not merely narrating history but awakening a collective confrontation with racialized murder.
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This HBO Max latest season of True Detective is still under way with episodes dropping weekly. Haunting too, in very different ways, it is way, way beyond chilling. And dark, as in a 60-day-long night.
True Detective: Night Country review – a blazing Jodie Foster makes this show better than ever before (The Guardian)
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For a truly needed turn to some light after that..
Portals to light: Lunar New Year
The dark-web humor cartoon is thanks to a post from Ann Ahern Allen.
In the candle photo, worshippers make early-morning offerings with joss sticks on the first day of the Lunar New Year in Hong Kong, China. (This year that’s Saturday, February 10.) And at right the traditional Chinese Lantern (or Yuan Xiao Jie or Yuanxiao) Festival celebrated on the 15th day and first full moon of the Lunar New Year. (This year that’s on Saturday, February 24.)
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As mentioned, this heralds not just any Lunar New Year but my own, and many of your, Year of the Dragon:
Chinese Dragon Symbolism (Washington.edu). Illustrations center column and across top.
For those attuned to the vast range of timeless mythic and archetypal traditions:
The dragon is the fifth of twelve creatures in the Chinese zodiac. In Chinese culture, the dragon represents good luck, strength, health and also masculine Yang. Uniquely, dragon is the only mythical creature of the Chinese zodiac; more babies are said to be born in the year of the dragon than any other zodiac- animal years.
In many cultures, dragon symbolizes evil and darkness. But in China dragon represents imperial power and authority. Traits associated with dragon are charisma, intelligence, confidence, power, good luck and striving for excellence.
As depicted at left and right columns, and in Daenerys Targaryen of Game of Thrones, dragon symbolism is also prevalent in Celtic and other worldwide traditions.
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Today I’ll leave you with a storied camellia and some of its welcome, albeit belated, blossoms.
(… so NOW, they bloom??)
The 82-year-old camellia japonica is pictured at top left, on a slide from our recent celebration of my late Mom. The black-and-white photo of her is circa mid 1950s, taken with the shrub in my grandparents’ Charlotte backyard.
The plant was fully grown and large by then. In 1942 or ‘43 my WWI-veteran maternal grandad had been training troops near Charleston, where Chinese camellias were first being propagated in the U.S. He brought the scrawny one-gallon potted shoot of an unfamiliar blooming plant home as a Christmas gift to my grandmother. (Originally deeper red, its specific variety is named “Christmas.”)
It would be much later, 2006, that by fluke (and I am sure by much relentless lobbying and directing by capital-M Mother), the camellia was dug up from Charlotte and found its way into my yard. Despite dire warnings from landscapers it thrived from the start, and has reliably bloomed every holiday season and January since.
The color photo of it above was taken three days before our January celebration. I was cutting a few blooms and greenery from my gardens for Mother’s longtime Charlotte florist to use in flowers done “her way.”
Bitter temperatures and a hard freeze had clobbered the entire south-side blossoms on the bush, and on the north it was mainly still buds. (Mind you, this entire complicated process was surely amusing and delighting my late mom!)
A few of those buds did make it into the arrangements. (Above shown first at the event. Along with attendees’ written notes and drawn pictures, the one shown in my dining room was disassembled to share in smaller versions with people who couldn’t attend. The third photo is one of two intact arrangements, thanks to Allison and Robert Miley shared immediately and displayed at the Davidson retirement community of Mother’s lifelong closest friends.)
Meanwhile, now two weeks later and voila: The floating cut camellias here are just a sampling of the shrub now afire with flowers. I could supply a florist’s weekend of weddings, funerals, multiple corporate events in a single cutting
So… NOW, they DO bloom! (And bloom…)
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And, that is all I have! Talk to you next week.
🦋💙 tish
… it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give — yes or no, or maybe —
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.
— William Stafford, “A Ritual to Read to Each Other”
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