Tag: power

Prospero’s Wisdom: Power and the Greater Good

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The Tempest is highly relevant and relatable to our culture today. Especially after coming out of a pandemic, a kind of banishment, we can relate to Prospero’s situation. He had to make do with some very trying circumstances. It’s not just Prospero’s plight that connects this play to our culture, today. In an almost kaleidoscopic way, Shakespeare’s The Tempest is a hall of mirrors for our times.

Prospero washes up on an island with an inhabitant who wants to kill him and to rape his daughter. This would be nightmarish, horrific, were it not for Prospero’s ability to control Caliban with his spells. There is a military imperative. Prospero’s interest in the literary arts led to him ignoring politics and opened the opportunity for his brother to betray him. Alone with his daughter on the island, he has no choice but to control its violent inhabitants. It is either control or be victimized for Prospero.

Still, there is something entirely creepy about Prospero’s controlling ways, necessary or not. Especially when it comes to his daughter. He orchestrates an encounter where she will fall in love. He manipulates the situation to arrange a marriage. In doing so, he is very deliberate about controlling their sexuality. He wants them to fall in love and to get married, but he is manipulating their sexual urges to do so. 

The metaphor of the island has a lot of significance to us, today. Islands have become symbolic of secrets, of illicit and illegal behavior. Prospero establishes a kind of law and order on the island. He is a benevolent master an anti-Epstein. He manipulates the players and works them up to do what he wants, but he is not doing so for personal gain but for what he thinks will be best for the greater good. It is only through Prospero’s ability to renounce his powers, to give up his competitive advantage that we come to trust him. Yes, he is controlling, but with good reason and as soon as he can give up his power, he does. 

The only way to trust someone is to see them in a situation where they have power and do not use it. Otherwise, we can only attribute good behavior to a lack of power. It is through restraint that we gain respect. For this past year and a half, we have all been banished to our own islands. The great hope is that this time of forced introspection, of limited mobility will have helped some of us, enough of us, to overcome our fears and hungers enough to see what a positive solution could be. We need people who are willing to give up their power for the greater good.

This summer will be a “brave new world” and we will do well to listen to the wisdom of Prospero.

As You Neg It: Shakespeare and the Psychology of Attraction

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In Shakespeare’s play, As You Like It, we see a pattern of interaction that illustrates something common in our culture, today. The practice of disingenuously criticizing someone to achieve a psychological effect, or negging, is shown through Rosalind’s interactions with Orlando and with Phoebe. She uses false criticism to create a power dynamic with both characters.

With Orlando, she is costumed as a man, and she guides the conversation and uses it to test him. She questions him, negating his declarations of love as nonsense. Orlando, in turn, asks her if she is from the forest, and she says yes. When he suggests that her pattern of speech is too educated to belong to these parts, she explains that she was educated by an uncle who also happened to be an expert in courtly love. Her lies become part of the game. She positions herself as an expert, even though she is pretending to be foreign to the court and questions his authenticity, turning the conversation back to interrogating him. 

Through her questioning his integrity, she manipulates him into working to prove himself. He responds by giving her more of what she wants: evidence of his feelings for Rosalind. A master of manipulation, Rosalind leads Orlando around like a lion on a leash lashing him with her tongue. It is an erotic exchange, as well. Rosalind’s negging includes assuring him that she would likely sleep with 20 or so men like him if they were married. She tortures him with the idea of her infidelity to test his true feelings.

The layers of deception and identity in Rosalind demonstrate how gender in Shakespeare is a performance of power. He uses cultural norms and customs to present an image of gender that the public reads and believes to be true within the context of the play. Many characters in Shakespeare’s comedies use costume to change genders and, in this case, Rosalind is disguised as a rural dude named Ganymede who is then pretending to be Rosalind to Orlando for him to practice expressing his love. She is pretending to be a man who is pretending to be her, a kind of double negative.

Ironically, this gives her the opportunity to be herself without any exposure. She is a spy watching her future husband react to her ideas. By negging him, by questioning his character and his devotion to love, she also eggs him on. She puts fuel on the fire. She gets to see what he is made of and how he feels about her.

Rosalind, while in disguise as Ganymede, also has a strange encounter with a young woman in the forest. Phoebe is actively rejecting the courtship of a suitor named Sylvius. With not much else to do in the woods, Rosalind is there for the sport of it. She is there to be entertained by their unhappy love connection and to play a trickster kind of role in their affairs. She interrupts their conversation and starts to criticize Phoebe suggesting that she should take the offer Sylvius is making because she is not beautiful enough to do better.

Phoebe’s response is to fall in love with Ganymede. Rosalind explains the psychology behind this reversal. Sylvius was being overly complimentary. He was making Phoebe think that she was better than she is. He was falsely flattering her, and it had the effect of making her think too highly of herself and that she was better than him. Because Sylvius has been worshipping her, she sees him as subordinate.  When Rosalind as Ganymede dresses her down, she feels more attracted to “him,” because his judgmental speech suggests that he is better than her. She is attracted to being negged because it makes her think she is with someone superior. 

We see this kind of cynical darkly humorous stance often on Twitter or generally online. We are pretending to laugh so we aren’t seen crying. We perform wokeness so nobody questions our complicity. We neg our crush so they will give us some attention. We know it works, but does it work to our advantage? What is that pattern keeping us from doing or knowing? 

Romantic love is a drug and a form of madness in Shakespeare. We see characters behaving in uncharacteristic fashion, lying, and deceiving people around them to pursue the feeling of being in love. This is much different than the effect of negging. Rosalind loves Orlando both for how she feels around him and for how she feels about him. She judges him to be worthy of her love and negging him is simply testing him and having fun with him until she can reveal herself to him and claim her place as his love.

Poor Phoebe is repelled by Sylvius who is in love with her, but she becomes attracted to Ganymede for negatively criticizing her. Shakespeare gives us a comparative study of different kinds of attraction to think about the differences between love, attraction, negation and power.

Fools and Villains in As You Like It

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Once you make sense of the plot of As You Like It, you can begin understanding some of the stranger and more interesting parts of the play, like the discourse about power and the unconscious. We have a foolish Duke, a brother made murderously stupid with jealousy, another brother struck dumb with love, we have a wise jester, and a philosophical sad boi. The play is a meditation on how power can make people foolish and how self-aware actors can manipulate the situation.

The play is set in two main locations: the court and the countryside. The main characters are banished from the court to the countryside. When the play begins, Duke Ferdinand has already exiled his brother–Rosalind’s father–to the Forest of Arden. There are biblical connotations throughout the play, beginning with fratricidal rage, evoking the story of Cain and Abel. Arden suggests the Garden of Eden.

Oliver, the older brother, is aware of his own motivations. He identifies Orlando as the source of his own feelings of jealousy. He is fully aware that he is driven by an evil desire, but it is a mental condition he feels he can resolve only with the death of his brother. Shakespeare gives us a look into the mind of a murderer. He’s jealous to the point of being ill and he knows it. 

Oliver believes his path to feeling better begins with his brother’s death. It isn’t till much later in the play, when Orlando saves Oliver’s life from a mountain lion, that he transforms how he feels. It isn’t Orlando’s death, but his willingness to sacrifice his life that is successful in changing the bad energy between them. Despite his jealousy, Oliver is transformed into a loving brother through Orlando’s act of service.

For most of the play, Orlando is completely out of control, first with ambition and then with love. He makes bold moves that lead to radical change. He beats the wrestler, but it is a form of entertainment for the Duke. Orlando’s father was an enemy to the Duke, so wrestling as a form of entertainment for his recently deceased father’s enemy is kinda shady. That’s how bad he feels about himself. He has a cockblocking older bro who wants him dead and so he takes on the court wrestler right in front of the Duke. You almost can’t blame the Duke for losing his shit when he finds out who the kid is. 

We don’t know why Duke Ferdinand exiled his brother, but we do know that it is not working to his favor. The older brother is off in the woods living like Robin Hood with a bunch of men and women loyal to him. Ferdinand is surrounded by arrogant enemies who don’t respect his authority. His temper tantrum when he finds out who Orlando’s father is leads him to snap on Rosalind and his own daughter. In this pathetic speech, you see the Duke insecure about his power and taking it out on young women. This portrayal shows how power can amplify insecurities to the point of violence. 

The villains are fools in As You Like It, and the fools are wise. This play gives us some memorable quotes delivered by fools, including “all the world’s a stage.” The portrayal of Jaquis and Touchstone are another moment of meta-comedy in Shakespeare. The play reflects on the value of entertainment and on the possibility that there is more wisdom in those who occupy the privileged position of entertainer and thinker within a group than in those who have power. Touchstone is subservient, but also witty and he has pointed insights and a theory about everything.

Jaquis is highly empathetic and poetic kind of thinker. He is one of the Duke’s men living in exile and as he experiences things that happen in the countryside he compares it to his own background. This leads to him creating metaphors that link the violence and ruthlessness of men and women in the court to the dealings of the natural world. Whereas Oliver and Frederick try to get rid of their negative feelings through violence, Jaquis is a connoisseur of sadness. 

Through his embrace of feeling bad, because he enjoys his own sadness, Jaquis becomes empowered. He is entertaining to the men. They love to laugh at him grieving over the death of a deer. His sadness is fun for them to witness. Oliver and Ferdinand reject their negative feelings and try to fix their feelings through violence. Jaquis shows us the opposite. He owns his feelings and therefore attracts brotherhood.

As You Like It is a comedic tapestry full of fun moments, but it is also a philosophical reflection on the interaction between power and understanding. The self-aware fool is ultimately more in control and has more influence than someone who has political clout but is not in control of their own emotions. The fools and villains in As You Like It are a key to the play’s deeper meanings and relevance to today. 

The Power of a Portrait

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I’m most interested in photographs that include and involve humans. I find the challenges and rewards of portraiture keep me studying this mysterious art. I value work that gets me to think and to feel something unique or universal about the human condition from looking at a photograph of a person. Sometimes less is more and in the case of my taste in portraiture that is true a lot of the time. I feel like people are so complex it can only help to give them some space.

A portrait of my love

The biggest obstacle to truth in portraiture is that sometimes we carry lifelong habits of creating masks to protect ourselves. Whether it is a smile or a neutral face, there is something that you do to preserve yourself from the intruding eyes of strangers. At least, hopefully there is. Because it can be a rough world if you don’t know how to move with an understanding of the ways people are likely to behave. If you don’t have a grasp on the business, then you are going to have to learn.

Portraits have lots of uses in our contemporary lives. We can use them for our LinkedIn profile, for any articles people may be writing about us, for other social media profiles, and for finding love. Whether you need a good Tinder shot or something to show your grandma that you are doing well, a skillful portrait can go a long way towards helping you to reach your goals.

But there is more to a portrait than that. It is something that belongs to the canons of art history and if you care that much about the result, then you can make some magic happen.

A big part of a great portrait is the lighting. The way you place the model in relation to the light is going to determine how a viewer’s eyes might travel around the composition. The light is going to give shape and interest to the form of your subject’s face, hair neck, etc. You can use light to draw attention to important parts of the face, like a catch light for the eyes. This is when you place a light in view of the subject so that a small white light appears in the dark of their pupil helping to create a sense of depth and importance in the eyes.

One huge advantage of working in the studio is having the ability to create a comfortable environment for the subject. In general, there is a lot more ability to control the results. Natural light can be amazing and the experience of being outside sometimes can make a person really shine, but there is a much higher rate of success with the advantages of studio lighting.

I like to use continuous lights, because I find it is much more comfortable for the model. Not having the flashing of the lights and the beeping of the unit recharging makes it a much more enjoyable atmosphere. The vibes of the shoot always matter. That is one reason why working with someone you really like can help to make great work, or in my case with someone you love. When I photograph Madison I know that there is going to be a whole world of energy, emotion, intrigue, mystery and fun all bundled up into one frame. The feelings. Oh the feelings. We have a lot of them, and they show up in the work. I like that. That is what I like art to be. This portrait is an expression of love, fear, lust, faith, and so many other things all at once.  

The other night we set up the studio and had two continuous lights going to get this shot. What we did next was something amazing. We did an experiment with using long exposures and candle light. This is one area where it is so radical to have a model as a girlfriend because she is so beautiful and I tell her that all the time. She knows it. It’s not a question. It’s not an issue. What is great about this, is it give us the freedom to be silly and to have fun. We did a series of portraits that are not flattering even though they have a beautiful topless woman in them. I’m not going to show them here, but not for the reasons you might think.

This series is art. As a series, it is a powerful experiment that worked. The images are intriguing as fuck. She looks powerful but sometimes scary in these portraits. Because we have done a lot of work together and have a deep sense of creative trust, we were able to do something original and cool.

Now, we have a few different series going and I am super excited about the direction and shape our work is taking. Our collaboration is getting stronger and smarter at every turn and I can’t wait to see what we learn next. So many lessons. I’ll be sharing more of them here as it makes sense in the coming days. I feel as though I have made some very important discoveries and I am excited to put them into practice and to share with other people looking for ways to be more effective and to improve their outlook.