The Acolytic Muse
Inspiration from filth
The Bumbledicks regurgitate slogans, they don't actually think. They cannot create anything, because they are incapable of symbolic reasoning. Thus, they are forever reforming things in their own image - devoid of insight, lacking in metaphor, and bereft of inspiration.
Bumbledick “music” is maddeningly repetitive, consisting of four chords and a hook. There are no verses or refrains, just a catchy phrase repeated for five minutes, which interestingly is just long enough to kill several million brain cells.
Bumbledick “art” involves wearing a frock and beret, while taping bananas to the wall and placing stanchions around a pair of sunglasses. If you’ve never been to a Bumbledick “art” opening, let me tell you, you are missing some of the finest unintentional humor ever devised. I’ve passed many a mouthful of wine and cheese through my sinus cavities listening to the perfectly serious conversations around a buck-and-a-half of acrylic paint on a patch of mosquito netting.
The latest affront to human intelligence is the artificially pasteurized entertainment-like full-on assault called the “Acolyte,” which is ostensibly linked in some convoluted and tortured way to the original Star Wars trilogy.
Truth be told, I only watched the first five minutes of it, and after rinsing the vomit from my gullet, I shut it off and sanitized my phone, running a low-level malware scan to be sure I had purged every last scrap of Bumbledickery from my device. It’s that bad, and this from a freak of nature who thinks Tommy Wiseau’s “The Room” is one of the finest film satires ever produced. In comparison, it is practically Shakespearean next to Disney’s latest drivel.
I don’t know why I decided to watch this…this…um, I can’t think of a word low enough for it.
I saw the original “Star Wars” (long before it was Episode IV) 76 times in the cinema. It was THAT mind blowing — unlike anything that had preceded it, and with unmistakable Odyssean elements that even my teenage brain could appreciate. It played in the cinema for a year and I would ride my bike over on a Saturday to repeatedly queue up for 3 or 4 viewings. I dissected every frame and nuance to try and understand what was so appealing about it.
The second film, “The Empire Strikes Back,” was even more amazing, with real peril and a darker tone and palette. The storytelling elements were more complex and the characters gained a third dimension. It didn’t occur to me until much later that George Lucas had little to do with it. The third film began the long slow decline into mediocrity. The second trilogy was nigh on unwatchable, and I’ve seen only snippets of the third trilogy watching Nerdrotic savage them.
I suppose it was morbid curiosity, like passing a horrific car wreck and slowing down to appreciate the sickening gore first hand.
The Bumbledicks are always doing this — they substitute a pallid form of cleverness for creativity, because they are incapable of leaps of fancy. Their worldview sees only materialistic rocks, where the sculptor sees a magnificent harmonious form trapped within the marble waiting to be freed. They are not intelligent enough to create allegories, and their profound lack of education prevents them from drawing on ancient muses and essential wisdom.
Instead, Bumbledicks take a popular story, swap all the characters around and suffuse them with superficial resemblance to actual human beings, and overtly inject their meaningless sloganeering at the most inappropriate and jarring moments. They think that this juvenile manipulation of real art somehow provides insightful new commentary on the original work and society at large.
No, Bumbledicks, it’s not insightful. Bernard Shaw’s reworking of Pygamlion is insightful, and Lerner and Loewe’s musical adaptation is creative. The Bumbledicks only vandalize.
In reality, what the Bumbledicks are doing is tagging true works of art with their graffiti, leaving their mark on posterity by vandalizing monuments of vastly greater skill and subtlety, believing this somehow imbues themselves with superiority. The result is that they make their outer world as ugly as their inner one, which to their Adderall-addled minds justifies how magnificently inferior they feel.
The final missing element of Bumbledick “art” is the ancient mystical practice of catharsis.
The test of true art is that the longer one looks at it, the more it morphs into an expression of deep inner truth. That experience builds until one reaches an irrevocable moment of self-realization, an overwhelming sensation of having looked into the abyss and seen one’s self looking back. Chills scramble up the spine until the fine hairs on the back of one’s neck stand out as if having just grabbed the wrong end of a live wire. Tears of joy and tragedy well up and leap off the cheek in a suicidal plunge into uncontrollable emotional release.
That’s art.
Watching a bunch of weepy insipid overpaid Stanislovskians is not catharsis. It is a jaundiced psychopathic pretense at emotionalism, not emotionality.
Hollywood, or the desiccated husk of it, would fare better if they hired the proverbial roomful of monkeys and gave them typewriters, than they are doing with a roomful of Twinkie-scarfing pink-haired mollycoddled lithium drinkers, with less than zero life experience and only the most fragile and tentative grasp on reality.
One might argue that Thompson and Kesey were drug-addled reprobates, or Hemingway and Burroughs were in absinthe-laced comas, but at the very least, they had functional vocabularies, knowledge of great literature and real adventures to draw on. Heck, Jerry Garcia and Keith Richards never saw a packet of Poppy Power they could pass up, but no one can argue with their creative output.
The Bumbledicks have no knowledge or experience to inspire them. They are filled to the eye teeth with form, but deeply ignorant of function. They can chip away at marble blocks for years and utterly fail to reveal the perfected image of beauty and balance trapped within. Instead, they reveal only a vast wasteland of inner ugliness and turmoil uninformed by any shred of talent or means to express it in meaningful ways.
You know it’s coming — “Casablanca” with Rick recast as a washed-up drag queen, Donald Trump as Signor Ferrari, Jody Turner-Smith as Ilsa, and John Boyega as Captain Renault. Among a rag-tag collection of characters in a run-down bar in Haight-Ashbury scrambling to escape the captialist overlords, Madame Rick and Ilsa respark their co-dependent relationship, with guest appearance by Salomé Herrera as Sam. “Of all the smoke shops in all the world, ‘they’ had to stumble into mine. Play it, Sam,” as Sam launches into a rousing rendition of “We Are Family,” and Madame Rick dons the wig one last time. “We’ll always have Seattle.”
I suppose I should apologize to the callous and cynical hacks at Disney. Though the “Acolyte” is completely devoid of any redeeming social or artistic value, it did inspire this rant on the pathetic state of Bumbledickery. I should probably thank them for that much.
But I’m not going to.
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The real victim may be the website rotten tomatoes; the chasm between the critics' evaluation of 93% and that of the audience at around 39% makes one wonder what relevance the website has any more. Do critics actually critique anymore or do they simply applaud in a socialist realist sort of mammer when the great leader passes by? Although they clearly feel they are doing it 'for the cause,' they risk losing all credibility in the eyes of the viewers: "go woke business croak".
This is the best synopsis of where art has devolved into that I have read in a very long time. It hits all of the low notes. Well done and thank you. As an artist myself, I look at the crap that sells with amazement. To your point, I do find a level of humor in such dreck. The "art" isn't serious and should be treated as such. To cleanse my soul I find it best to look/study the classics and get lost in one of my latest paintings. Pax