Why Men Kill and Women Don't. Part One. by Dave Jaffe.
"Why can't a woman be more like a man? " sang Rex Harrison, playing Professor Henry Higgins in Lerner and Lowe's 1950's musical 'My Fair Lady'. The musical was based on George Bernard Shaw's drama 'Pygmalion'. In the play and the musical, professor Higgins teaches a cockney lass to speak what some call 'Proper English'.
Higgins succeeds in his task but then falls in love with his student. Yet his plea for women to be more like men, maybe should be reversed. Perhaps we should be asking instead, "Why can't a man be more like a woman?" The reason for this is simple: Women don't usually kill other human beings. Men do.
Years ago on Vancouver's Commercial Drive, a feminist of the 1980's told me, "The most dangerous man a woman will meet is an angry former lover." Yet most men who've been rejected by women don't go out and kill women. Yet some do. The recent killer of 10 people in Toronto who also injured 18 people by driving his van into a downtown crowd, did feel rejected by women.
So that feminist's statement is partly true. Men who hate women do sometimes kill women. Women who hate men rarely kill men. Not only that. Men can be dangerous especially if they're young. More than eight in ten murders every year are done by men. Nearly 90 per cent of rapes, violent robberies and assaults in Canada are committed by males. Women can kill and do commit crimes like.shop lifting and fraud. Yet even here, men's proceeds from these crimes .always outrank money that women get.
Men drive more dangerously than women, are far more likely to kill themselves, much more willing to shoot up speed and heroin, snort cocaine and join the armed forces of their country. In Syria right now troops from seven or eight armies are killing, shooting and dying. I'll bet that more than nine out of ten soldiers in these armies are men.
Take the terrible mass murders erupting so often in the United States these days. The really first wave of these murders started in about 1966. Since then mass murders have struck in many places. Who's the person pulling the trigger or sitting behind the wheel of a car ramming into crowds? It's usually a man. In Canada Marc Lepine a young disturbed man killed 14 female engineering students and injured ten others in Montreal in the 1980's. Recently Alexandre Bissonnette, went into a mosque in Quebec and killed six Moslems. The latest mass murderer in Toronto,Canada was a man too. If you want to see someone go on a rampage look for a disturbed young male, especially one who's single.
"Women civilize men," a female therapist once told me. This is true. Young single males, especially sexually frustrated ones can be dangerous.
Thursday 26 April 2018
Monday 9 April 2018
Ends and Odds: The Ravings of An Old Man by Dave Jaffe. Chapter Eight. Part Two
An Inspiring Artist: By Dave Jaffe. Part Two.
In 1914 at the start od the First World War, Vassily Kandinsky fled back to Russia. There he saw the Russian revolution of October 1917 sweep away the old order. The Russian Revolution led by Lenin, set up communism and abolished tsarist rule and private property. At first Kandinsky sympathized with the revolution although he lost all his property. He worked for the new government and travelled across the country setting up art museums. Yet the political climate soon hardened and Kandinsky realized that he couldn't live under the new communist regime.
In 1921 Kandinsky moved back to Germany to work at the Bauhaus Institute. Its aim was to merge the work of visual artists, architects and others to create a new world of social justice in Germany. Here Kandinsky met and worked with modern artists like Josef Albers, Paul Klee and others. Yet many Germans didn't like the Bauhaus institute. They found it dangerous and too left leaning. Germany was in very bad shape. It had lost the first world war, saw millions of it citizens killed in the combat, and many of its territories were handed over to other countries. It was also saddled with massive debt that the war's victors like Britain and France forced it to pay as reparations.
The Bauhaus school was forced to move twice. Then came the Great Depression of 1929. Germany was hit hard by the financial collapse. As the jobless rate soared up to 40 per cent, support for the Nazi Party led by Adolf Hitler climbed up too. In 1933, Hitler became Germany's chancellor and the Nazis crushed all dissent. They closed down the Bauhaus and Kandinsky fled to France.
"My roots in Germany are still deep," Kandinsky once said. Yet from the mid-1930's, he lived in France. By now he had split up with Gabrielle Minter and married again. Nina Andrevskaya was a conventional cheerful affectionate woman who loved fashionable clothes and good times. She was much younger than Kandinsky, yet she respected and loved him. In France, most people ignored Kandinsky's art but he kept on painting.
His bright colours and swirling forms now changed into triangular shapes, diagonals and straight lines. These new paintings didn't match the power of Kandinsky's earlier work. Also the theories that he worked out to support his art may have hurt his creativity. Still, he kept on painting. Yet soon more trouble landed near his doorstep.
In 1940 the Germans led by Hitler invaded and occupied France. Like the communist ruler Stalin, but for different reasons, Hitler hated abstract art. Many visual artists and other intellectuals fled to the U.S. and Britain. Yet Kandinsky and Nina stayed in a suburb of Paris throughout the Nazi occupation. No Nazis appeared to hunt Kandinsky. He had not been welcomed by most French artists and critics. And he had remained aloof from all the feuds and controversies that were part of the French art world. So the Nazis probably didn't notice Kandinsky and left him alone.
Kandinsky celebrated his 75th birthday with his wife and some friends. He died in 1944 at the age of 78. "To-day," the British art critic John Berger wrote in 1965, "there are still pockets of exemption anywhere." Kandinsky lived in a pocket of exemptions. He survived while living under two of the most ruthless governments in history, namely Stalin's Soviet Union and Hitler's Nazi regime .Both governments despised modern art. Yet Kandinsky painted abstract art and died peacefully in his bed.
Of course he was lucky. He was born into the richest 1 per cent of Russia. And at each stage of his life he found a woman to love and take care of him. Yet his life illustrates the fact that many people live under terrible governments and yet create beautiful things. In this age of tyranny we should remember this great man and honour him.
In 1914 at the start od the First World War, Vassily Kandinsky fled back to Russia. There he saw the Russian revolution of October 1917 sweep away the old order. The Russian Revolution led by Lenin, set up communism and abolished tsarist rule and private property. At first Kandinsky sympathized with the revolution although he lost all his property. He worked for the new government and travelled across the country setting up art museums. Yet the political climate soon hardened and Kandinsky realized that he couldn't live under the new communist regime.
In 1921 Kandinsky moved back to Germany to work at the Bauhaus Institute. Its aim was to merge the work of visual artists, architects and others to create a new world of social justice in Germany. Here Kandinsky met and worked with modern artists like Josef Albers, Paul Klee and others. Yet many Germans didn't like the Bauhaus institute. They found it dangerous and too left leaning. Germany was in very bad shape. It had lost the first world war, saw millions of it citizens killed in the combat, and many of its territories were handed over to other countries. It was also saddled with massive debt that the war's victors like Britain and France forced it to pay as reparations.
The Bauhaus school was forced to move twice. Then came the Great Depression of 1929. Germany was hit hard by the financial collapse. As the jobless rate soared up to 40 per cent, support for the Nazi Party led by Adolf Hitler climbed up too. In 1933, Hitler became Germany's chancellor and the Nazis crushed all dissent. They closed down the Bauhaus and Kandinsky fled to France.
"My roots in Germany are still deep," Kandinsky once said. Yet from the mid-1930's, he lived in France. By now he had split up with Gabrielle Minter and married again. Nina Andrevskaya was a conventional cheerful affectionate woman who loved fashionable clothes and good times. She was much younger than Kandinsky, yet she respected and loved him. In France, most people ignored Kandinsky's art but he kept on painting.
His bright colours and swirling forms now changed into triangular shapes, diagonals and straight lines. These new paintings didn't match the power of Kandinsky's earlier work. Also the theories that he worked out to support his art may have hurt his creativity. Still, he kept on painting. Yet soon more trouble landed near his doorstep.
In 1940 the Germans led by Hitler invaded and occupied France. Like the communist ruler Stalin, but for different reasons, Hitler hated abstract art. Many visual artists and other intellectuals fled to the U.S. and Britain. Yet Kandinsky and Nina stayed in a suburb of Paris throughout the Nazi occupation. No Nazis appeared to hunt Kandinsky. He had not been welcomed by most French artists and critics. And he had remained aloof from all the feuds and controversies that were part of the French art world. So the Nazis probably didn't notice Kandinsky and left him alone.
Kandinsky celebrated his 75th birthday with his wife and some friends. He died in 1944 at the age of 78. "To-day," the British art critic John Berger wrote in 1965, "there are still pockets of exemption anywhere." Kandinsky lived in a pocket of exemptions. He survived while living under two of the most ruthless governments in history, namely Stalin's Soviet Union and Hitler's Nazi regime .Both governments despised modern art. Yet Kandinsky painted abstract art and died peacefully in his bed.
Of course he was lucky. He was born into the richest 1 per cent of Russia. And at each stage of his life he found a woman to love and take care of him. Yet his life illustrates the fact that many people live under terrible governments and yet create beautiful things. In this age of tyranny we should remember this great man and honour him.
Tuesday 3 April 2018
Ends and Odds: The Ravings of An Old Man by Dave Jaffe. Chapter Eight: An Inspiring Artist.
An Inspiring Artist by Dave Jaffe. Part One.
Do you like abstract art? Many people don't and some people say when confronted with this type of painting , "Why my five year old son or daughter could do this sort of thing." Yet the life of one of the world's first modern abstract painters, Vassily Kandinsky, can teach us lessons about how to survive and create beautiful things in really tough times. Kandinsky's art by the way,could never have been painted by any five year old or most human beings for that matter.
On one afternoon in Germany in 1911, a tall 45 year-old Russian man came back to his artists's studio. A painting of his leaned against a wall. This painting seemed to Vassily Kandinsky to be the most beautiful painting he'd ever seen. He saw no objects in it. It was totally abstract.
Then suddenly he realized that it was his painting that he was looking at. He'd painted a picture of some objects. Yet the painting was tilted on its side and so looked like an abstract painting. Amazed by this experience, Kandinsky became one of the first modern abstract artists. He stopped painting landscapes and other subjects. From then on, he painted nothing but abstract art.
At this date of 1911, the world was changing more than it ever had before. "All is possible," wrote the French poet Andre Salmon. "Everything is realizable, everywhere and with everything." Pablo Picasso and George Braque were painting cubist pictures, James Joyce was writing his path breaking novel called 'Ulysses' and musical composers were inventing atonal music. Yet it was technology that was re-arranging the world. The car, the phonograph, film, the radio and the airplane had been invented around 1900 or a little later. Human beings now lived in a technological world.
Vassily Kandinsky's life was to be chockfull of upheavals due to technology and politics. Yet he survived these shocks and created beautiful art. Kandinsky was born in Russia in 1866. His family belonged to the richest 1 per cent of the population. By the age of 27 he was a professor of law. Then he saw a painting of a haystack by the great French impressionist artist Claude Monet. It was indeed called 'Haystacks' though Kandinsky had never seen a painting of haystacks like this. Suddenly Kandinsky stopped teaching law and became a painter.
After a few years he moved to Munich in southern Germany. Here he painted, wrote books and left his first wife. He became lovers with the painter, weaver and tapestry maker Gabrielle Munter. "If we were to begin to destroy completely the bonds that ties to nature," Kandinsky said in 1896, "we would create works that would look like a geometric ornament." In the end that's what nearly happened to Kandinsky and his painting. Yet in 1914, world politics erupted into his life. The First World War started. Germany, the Turkish Empire and the empire of Austria Hungary squared off against Britain, France, Russia and their allies. Three years later the United States joined the war on Britain's side. Kandinsky fled Germany which was now an enemy of Russia and moved back to his homeland.
Do you like abstract art? Many people don't and some people say when confronted with this type of painting , "Why my five year old son or daughter could do this sort of thing." Yet the life of one of the world's first modern abstract painters, Vassily Kandinsky, can teach us lessons about how to survive and create beautiful things in really tough times. Kandinsky's art by the way,could never have been painted by any five year old or most human beings for that matter.
On one afternoon in Germany in 1911, a tall 45 year-old Russian man came back to his artists's studio. A painting of his leaned against a wall. This painting seemed to Vassily Kandinsky to be the most beautiful painting he'd ever seen. He saw no objects in it. It was totally abstract.
Then suddenly he realized that it was his painting that he was looking at. He'd painted a picture of some objects. Yet the painting was tilted on its side and so looked like an abstract painting. Amazed by this experience, Kandinsky became one of the first modern abstract artists. He stopped painting landscapes and other subjects. From then on, he painted nothing but abstract art.
At this date of 1911, the world was changing more than it ever had before. "All is possible," wrote the French poet Andre Salmon. "Everything is realizable, everywhere and with everything." Pablo Picasso and George Braque were painting cubist pictures, James Joyce was writing his path breaking novel called 'Ulysses' and musical composers were inventing atonal music. Yet it was technology that was re-arranging the world. The car, the phonograph, film, the radio and the airplane had been invented around 1900 or a little later. Human beings now lived in a technological world.
Vassily Kandinsky's life was to be chockfull of upheavals due to technology and politics. Yet he survived these shocks and created beautiful art. Kandinsky was born in Russia in 1866. His family belonged to the richest 1 per cent of the population. By the age of 27 he was a professor of law. Then he saw a painting of a haystack by the great French impressionist artist Claude Monet. It was indeed called 'Haystacks' though Kandinsky had never seen a painting of haystacks like this. Suddenly Kandinsky stopped teaching law and became a painter.
After a few years he moved to Munich in southern Germany. Here he painted, wrote books and left his first wife. He became lovers with the painter, weaver and tapestry maker Gabrielle Munter. "If we were to begin to destroy completely the bonds that ties to nature," Kandinsky said in 1896, "we would create works that would look like a geometric ornament." In the end that's what nearly happened to Kandinsky and his painting. Yet in 1914, world politics erupted into his life. The First World War started. Germany, the Turkish Empire and the empire of Austria Hungary squared off against Britain, France, Russia and their allies. Three years later the United States joined the war on Britain's side. Kandinsky fled Germany which was now an enemy of Russia and moved back to his homeland.
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