Trickster Central

NPR on Bug Bunny

2009-06-20T11:18:00.001-07:00

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=17874931

Sacred Trickster

2009-06-16T09:59:00.001-07:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKlbBgQHPqo

Monkey

2009-04-11T09:49:00.001-07:00

Gorillaz.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sd_ZyLqTd-Q&feature=related

Making the World Safe for Monsters and Girls with Big.... uuhhh..... Guns.

2009-04-11T09:42:00.000-07:00

From Phil Guzzo.

http://www.robotmonsterous.com/

Tears of a Clown

2009-03-05T13:16:00.000-08:00

While spending time with my mother during her last few days at the curiously named "Crosslands" nursing facility, I found myself thinking about how tricksters are mediators between life and death, boundary crossers, gods of the crossroads, and the significance of being human and somehow not entirely human in a situation where death is close at hand. I found myself pondering the need for deathbed humor, and wishing I could come by more of it. I found myself thinking about how tricksters are not always so hilarious.

The trickster experience is the human experience, the navigation of dealing with uncertainty in an often scary universe, of trying to make some sort of sense of the seeming entropy of our existence. What good can come of this terrible thing that is in front of me?

Well, at her funeral, there was laughter..... talk of her leaving the car running all through church, memories of her pedaling across town on an undersized bike trying to rescue my sister on the back of my dad's car in her fuzzy carpet slippers, and dropping one on the way, images of her -- at 78 -- sledding down a snow covered hill and laughing.... her stories, her smiles... This is the emergent phenomenon, the tricksterly outgrowth of release from pain.

But I also know that tricksters must cry.

Riding at the Crossroads

2009-01-06T09:39:00.000-08:00

While doing some post-holiday mall slumming, I found myself at the food court, which happens to be paired here with an odd assortment of what I call "mall rides." The pale simulacra of amusement park offerings for the pre-K set has often puzzled and amazed me. They are now a feature of most mall settings, but I remember them from my childhood as discount store phenomena, and you may still see them at WalMart or KMart. My memories settle around Gibson's, which in the Laramie of the 70s was a precursor to the box stores.

I know this dates me, but I can actually remember when the horse there only required a nickle. And my mother was always reluctant to give that for the brief jiggle in store. I could never admit to her that, deep down, even I was a little disappointed in the brevity of the actual "ride." I really expected to be somehow transported to the mythical West in which I was supposedly living. This week I watched as adoring parent after adoring parent poured quarters upon quarters into the various shimmying, noisesome contraptions. I don't think this means people are more casual with their money, just that they've been better persuaded that spoiling their kids is the thing to do.

This is when it occurred to me that the whole mall ride industry was an ingenius trickster scam. Somebody somewhere is making a gruntload of money off of parents inability to resist the giggle of a 2 year old who is being bumped about by a motorcycle mock up. While it is true that this age group is easily amused, the fact of the matter is that they are just as easily amused by an empty cereal box, for free. But the scam has worked magnificently. It is noteworthy, however, that now these rides come with a slippery trickster disclaimer: "Parent's do not leave your child unattended." So like them to cover their legal behinds.

I must admit, a part of me still wants to ride that horse, on the off chance the ride's become better through the years. I want to believe.

WalMart - The Trickster's Gateway to Hell

2009-01-03T10:04:00.000-08:00

I came to a profound conclusion a short time ago. All WalMarts (especially the super ones) are actually connected. There are many portals in a host of communities, and each portal has a different perspectival aspect, but it is really all the same store somehow linked through a temporal/spatial wormhole of some sort.... there really is only one WalMart. The more I thought about it, the more I realized this is actually some secret level of Hell, which - when you move therein - sucks upon your life force, evaporating time, money, energy..... I think there may be a black hole connected to the wormhole. It's all very indistinct....

Then I imagined trickster looking for his wife/girlfriend here, as he is called upon to do in many trickster tales. He cannot find her in the women's intimates, but is dazzled by the simultaneous horror of their crassness and appeal. He seeks her through aisle upon aisle of packaged food and kitsch paraphernalia, as a manager passes by, asking a subordinate, "Were you not listening during my meeting?" He passes two large women who are lazily pushing their wobbling carts as one says to the other, "If you can't find it at WalMart, you just don't need it." He finds her in the movie section, but has a hard time dragging her away from the flatscreens, and just before he makes it to the door, he can't help looking over his shoulder at the big display of beef jerky options. Arg!

Yes, WalMart is the post-modern hell of endless mediocrity and optimally abased consumerism. So why, I keep asking myself, do I end up spending so much time there.....?

Monkey Magic

2008-12-31T01:22:00.000-08:00

"The nature of monkey was irrepressible." Heh.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iUMWy4hqAg

Thank you Andrea.

Reynard the Fox

2008-12-18T15:44:00.000-08:00

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d4/Reynard-the-fox.jpg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reynard

Loki Stones

2008-12-18T15:38:00.000-08:00

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/57/Lokistone.jpg

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/45/Loki-GerryMillar.jpg

From the movie "Collateral"

2008-12-11T09:18:00.000-08:00

FELIX: Do you believe in Santa Claus?

MAX: No.

FELIX: Neither do I. But my children do. They are still small. But do you know who they like even better than Santa Claus? His helper, Pedro Negro. Black Peter. There's an old Mexican tale that tells of how Santa Claus got so very busy looking out for the good children that he had to hire some help to look out for the bad children. So he hired Pedro. And Santa Claus gave him a list with all the names of all the bad children, and Pedro would come every night to check them out. And the people, the little kids that were misbehaving, that were not saying their prayers, Pedro would leave a little wooden donkey on their windows. And he would come back and if the children were still misbehaving, he would take them away and nobody would ever see them again.

Meet Krampus

2008-12-11T09:10:00.000-08:00

Be afraid.

http://www.socyberty.com/Holidays/Krampus-The-Sinister-Sidekick-of-Santa.371905

Was Saint Nicholas A Trickster?

2008-12-04T09:16:00.000-08:00

I vote yay. Of course, being born on St. Nicholas Day must count for something. You decide.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Nicholas_Day

First People Legends

2008-11-22T18:48:00.000-08:00

http://www.firstpeople.us/FP-Html-Legends/SpiritChiefNamesTheAnimalPeople-Salish.html

(thanks again to Jerod)

Sundiata and Friends

2008-11-22T18:41:00.000-08:00

(another pilfering from my other trickster blog) Reading about African tricksters took me back to an African literature class I had several years ago. My exposure to the book "Sundiata" predates the movie "The Lion King" so I must confess I never saw the correlation, but there's a website that calls Sundiata the Lion King below. To summarize very briefly and ineloquently, Sundiata was the West African megastar epic hero some 700 or so years ago. His story is something like Charlemagne's, Gungadin's, Odysseus', or the like: in short, well, epic. It was told for years only by griots, who bore a strong relationship, incidentally, to court jesters, or perhaps bards is a better analogy. They were the royals' keepers of knowledge. To learn more go here: (http://www.princetonol.com/groups/iad/lessons/middle/sundiata.htm

Another book I remember from that class is "The Palm Wine Drinkard", which has many amusing tales about incidents at crossroads. These stories have "trickster" written all over them. The book includes such priceless chapter headings as "RETURN THE PARTS OF BODY TO THE OWNERS", "A FULL-BODIED GENTLEMAN REDUCED TO A HEAD", and
'THE FATHER OF GODS SHOULD FIND OUT WHEREABOUTS THE DAUGHTER OF THE HEAD OF THE TOWN WAS." (see a glimpse of the book itself at http://www.africanreviewofbooks.com/100best/100bestsamples/tutuola.html)

The Ambrosia Quartet performs "Coyote March on a Full Moon" by Paris Fairbanks, an American Indian composer

2008-11-14T16:52:00.000-08:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2BYD-6n1hc

With special thanks to Jerod Impichchaachaaha' Tate

Tricky Tricky Cancer

2008-11-14T00:03:00.000-08:00

After a recent cancer scare, my thoughts turn once more (as they so often do) to tricksterly things. I'm sure that thinking of cancer as a trickster entity is neither new, nor a stretch. Tricksters are more often referred to as "virulent" but the more we learn about cancer the more links we see to viruses. The ways that a disease -- whether cancer or virus -- can outwit the body's own immune system gives us pause and opportunity to contemplate the nature of myth, the ways that ancient peoples (and modern) find to account for the unthinkable, the unbearable. Our stories are more scientific now, to be sure, but we continue to be cleverly outdone by illnesses that take our loved ones from us in inexplicable ways. Trickster is, after all, the mediator between life and death, the one who crosses between decay and growth, hope and despair, love and loss. I'm just grateful that, for the time being at least, I will not be requiring the trickster tradition of deathbed humor. It's all about survival after all.

Political Segue: Obama Nation

2008-11-05T01:34:00.000-08:00

Yes, this is a play on the word abomination, which I'm sure many people have believed Obama to be, and that only highlights his tricksterism. Obama came from the fringes, not really "properly" black or white, always evading traps laid for him, and through creative discourse captured the imagination of a nation. He is the ultimate survivor. He is the master of "the dozens" in debates. Let us just hope he does not, with that so-serious look he had when he spoke tonight, end up in the role of that trickster nemesis, "Hates to be Contradicted," who was so well embodied by our soon-to-be past pres, W.

Or worse (better?) still, let us hope he does not get caught up in the other trickster weakness that Monica Lewinsky represents. Bill Clinton was quite fool enough in that regard, as the trickster tends to be when his pants get involved, or lack of same.

So here's hoping for the best a trickster can offer an ailing nation, with a cautionary nod at what a trickster can further mess up.

Aporia

2008-10-25T14:40:00.000-07:00

This term -- in its purest form -- reflects a lack of opening, or couched differently, a lack of opportunity. Rhetorically, it is about doubt, uncertainty, contradiction, paradox, the unsolvable conundrum. Trickster tales are full of the like, and how to get out of them, or at least make peace with their presence. When confronted with fire at both ends of a hole, trickster digs a new passageway. When surrounded by enemies, s/he diverts the one and outwits the other. Let us never forget that to be a trickster is to be clever and to survive, whatever it takes. There is always a way. Vive Le Trickster!

RE: Politicians

2008-10-20T15:15:00.000-07:00

Did I mention the self-interested, consummate survivor angle?

Politician Tricksters.... well duh!

2008-10-19T15:04:00.000-07:00

This observation is not drawn, as you might guess, from the current presidential campaign atmosphere. I'm sure there are more eloquent things that could be said on that count than what I aim to pursue here, but for now I will focus on a case study I've been working on for my leadership class. This case study involves a governor, and to be tricksterly and vague myself, I will not divulge the state. Suffice it to say that he kept jumping back and forth on a key political issue, specifically that of "smart growth" to such a degree that nobody trusted him anymore to do the right thing, and he was eventually (most likely, although the case study did not specify this) run out of office for it. I could not help thinking of coyote outwitting himself and getting caught in his own trap.

The thing is, we've come to expect this of politicians. To use the terms "politician" and "slippery" in the same sentence is not uncommon. Are they seductive manipulators? Are they variable, multifaceted, polytropic creatures? Are they likely to overindulge their appetites? In all but the rarest of exceptions, the answer is yes, yes, yes. I have yet to find clear evidence of gender variability in political circles on the whole, but anecdotal accounts of certain texting shennanigans amongst certain legislators and thoughts of J. Edgar Hoover in pink fuzzy slippers pop into my mind. Was Hoover really a politician, though? And how do we know that Warren G. Harding, stud that he was, didn't enjoy his alone time at the White House in lacey undies? Can we really know?

On Moms as Tricksters

2008-10-07T14:09:00.000-07:00

I like to think of mothers as tricksters. My friend Wayne - who studied tricksters with me - once spoke of mothers as "orchestrators of their children's lives." Wayne and I had another class together in rhetoric, in which I recall the subject of rhetorical situations coming up. I mentioned that I thought motherhood was a rhetorical situation. I think some people thought this was pretty peculiar, but I had an interesting conversation with another classmate later about how any kind of person-hood might be considered a rhetorical situation, and parenthood in particular. I don't know that I'm right, it's just something to ponder.

Isn't this picture funny? Is she preparing her child for the great unknown? Is she sending him out to learn how to swim? Is she gonna walk off any second? Is she reassuring him, or telling him the ocean is a bad, bad place and you should never go in it unless there are CIA operatives chasing you with guns? I wonder what the bird is thinking.

I also keep thinking (and laughing at myself) about how I, as a mother, don't want to be an "orchestrator," don't want to be "She Who Hates to be Contradicted," which is funny because in saying as much, I am refusing the be contradicted about it. It's kind of like the "I am NOT in denial!" t-shirts. The problem is, when you are a mother, you are constantly needing to bridge the gap, be the mediator, between what you think the world will expect of your child, what you expect of your child, what you know your child expects of him/herself, what your spouse expects, etc. etc. This makes for an inherently contradictory situation, pretty much day in and day out. You also have to mediate between trying to teach your child optimism, while knowing that there is a lot of reason to be very pessimistic about life. One of the most tricksterly aspects about being a mother is when you know (societal expectations, shame culture, yada yada) that your kid shouldn't do a certain thing, but when they do it, you are totally laughing at them. My husband has been huffy with me more than once when he has been trying to give my son (or daughter) a sober talking-to, and I'm giggling behind my hand. Sometimes my kids are just a hoot, and sometimes it's when they are being very "naughty." Maybe I'm a wierd mom that way. I hope it's a good thing.

And now for a somewhat ironic anecdote: one day I was listening to some accoustic jazz music, and my daughter kept asking me what that squeaking noise was. It took me a few minutes to realize that it was the sound the guitarist makes when he slides his fingers down the frets abruptly. To me, it was a part of the music, but to her it was noise. This was a peculiar inversion of the John Cage scenario described by Hyde, and the perceptions of music versus noise. I just found it particularly interesting because the child (my daughter) was being the prescriptive one.

The Pink Duck of Permission

2008-09-30T08:05:00.000-07:00

Watching "F is for Fake" took me back (I often have this time distortion experience when I think of tricksters, which seems oddly appropriate) to the year I went to school in Hawaii, which year has now become obscured in my less-than-perfect memory, but seems to be '87-'88, or maybe '88-'89. The beginning of the film features a woman named Oja who struts her stuff for what appears to be a variety of eager, lusty males. Rather, we are watching her headless torso, butt and legs for several ponderous minutes while men (supposedly) look on with hungry eyes. This reminded me of the following experience.

I was shopping with friends in Waikiki when we saw a vision of beauty about a block away. This vision was tall and lanky, walked with a sultry gait, had long blonde hair and was wearing nothing but a bright pink bikini and spike-heeled slides. The hair waved back and forth jauntily across the vision's backside. The imacculately shaved legs moved together tightly in a suggestive manner. The hands stood out from the hips, delicately, as this vision of loveliness moved. Abruptly, the vision turned at the corner to cross the street and -- as one -- my friends and I came to a complete halt. The vision had a beard... not a woman beard, but a full-out hippy style, ZZ top beard. Yes, the vision was a man. Upon asking around, we discovered the vision's name was Waikiki Bob, and he was a well-known fixture of the street scene there.

This is a true story. (As true as they get...)

Anyway, I kept expecting Oja to be other than female.

Freddie the Fake

2008-09-28T09:49:00.000-07:00

“My own position, in any event, is not that the artists I write about are tricksters but that there are moments when the practice of art and this myth coincide" (14).

Trickster Makes This World - Lewis Hyde

Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?
Caught in a landslide, No escape from reality
Open your eyes, Look up to the skies and see,
I'm just a poor boy, I need no sympathy
Because I'm easy come, easy go, Little high, little low
Any way the wind blows doesn't really matter to me, to me.

"Bohemian Rhapsody" - Queen

"I went to bed with the disconcerting knowledge that almost everything I had assumed about my life was incorrect, that I had been baptised in blood and raised on secrets and misconstructions which had, obviously made me who I was" (133).

My Life as a Fake - Peter Carey

Reading Hyde and the backstory of poor Boofy in Carey has led me, via strange and circuitous thought processes, to Queen front man, Freddie Mercury. This stems from more than the fact that they are both British (a fact which Freddie came by through India) and the hidden-or-maybe-not-so-hidden hypersexual notoriety both men shared. Like Lord Wode-Douglass, Freddie "did not discriminate" (127). Lover Mary Austin was his lifetime partner, but Freddie's passions flamed brightly elsewhere. Both knew the burden of "living a lie." But this is just one aspect of the tragedy of the trickster within, the one that tries to outwit itself, and destroys itself in the process.

In my trickster class we talked about first lies, and the lies we keep to ourselves, the transgressions that haunt us and bedevil us through life, and hoaxes. Queen's hard rock image could be said to be one of the great hoaxes of modern music, putting on an aural show of the testosterone rich, head-banging variety while embracing the nail-painting, sequin-wearing, gender-bending visual nuances of glam rock. The group intentionally poked fun at the ultra-masculine suppositions of the corporate rock enterprise. There was something of the jester in Freddie especially, his ability to make a mockery of himself while embracing his musical and theatrical genius. Perhaps Slater was more like Freddie in this regard, as "the thing about dear old Johnno [was] he always did exactly as he damn well like[d]," going where he pleased, basking in the spotlight, the fun-loving face of the trickster (10). Freddie even performed on stage with the Royal Ballet, not just singing, but dancing, and not a soul would nay-say him. In fact, they gave him a standing ovation. The lyrics to such songs as "Stone Cold Crazy" and "I'm Going Slightly Mad" also reflect the reality-bending aspect of Freddie's inner trickster.

But for all his bravado, Freddie could not admit publicly to having AIDS until literally the day before he died, perhaps a reflection of the lyrics to "The Show Must Go On", perhaps just a last lie as significant as a first lie. What must we do to make the unendurable endurable?

Jim Bridger: Mountain Men and Tricksters

2008-09-27T11:18:00.000-07:00

When I think of the research I did on Wyoming history, the most trickster-like character that comes to mind is Jim Bridger. I don't think that most people would categorize Bridger as a con-man as such, but there were elements of his life and dealings which hearkened to that ethic. Mountain men in general could be considered a tricksterly lot. They walked the boundaries between white men and Native Americans, mediated between civilization and wilderness. Their annual meeting, the Rendezvous, was something of a Bacchanal, characterized by drunken brawls and trying to out-sell each other and the traders who came for their goods. One of the attributes which set Bridger apart from the others was his special gift for telling tall tales. They all told them, but he was the master, and was renowned for his stories from the elite of Euro-American society (he even told one of his classics to President Grant, I believe) to the Indian war chiefs themselves (there is a story of how he kept a tribal council enrapt for an hour with a story told all in sign language). His most notorious story was one in which he either died or got scalped at the end, depending on the audience. He was so notorious for his hyperbole that when he told Easterners about the wonders of Yellowstone, no one would believe him at first.

Bridger, like the African trickster Legba, was a master linguist. He was employed as a scout by many people (the U.P. Railroad, the Army, the Mormons) because of this gift. There have been suspicions that his interpretations weren't always accurate. After all, Bridger was also a businessman, and he had his own agendas. He also was known to be quite virile, to put it politely, and was considered handsome. As such, he had several wives, consecutively, maybe (officially), one of whom was Chief Washakie's daughter, called Mary, with whom he spent his final years (she probably had another name, but it has since been lost, as far as I know). Like most tricksters, Bridger could not stay in one place. He was always on the move, exploring usually. He acquired the nickname "Old Gabe" because it was said he knew the face of the earth as well as the Angel Gabriel himself. (wings)

I could go on and on, but just as a final interesting note, Bridger went around for years with an arrow imbedded in his shoulder from an Indian skirmish with some Gros Ventres near the Tetons. He had it removed finally in an open air surgery during a rendezvous as entertainment, with no anesthesia. Aside from the ick factor, I'm not exactly sure how this relates to being a trickster, but I'm working on it.