{"id":278,"date":"2004-10-06T19:38:00","date_gmt":"2004-10-06T19:38:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=278"},"modified":"2004-10-06T19:38:00","modified_gmt":"2004-10-06T19:38:00","slug":"278","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=278","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

Urban Primitive<\/strong><\/p>\n

When I read the sentence, “Children’s dolls, broken or whole, are symbolic of urban ‘elves’–the urban version of the tomte<\/a> or tontu<\/a>,” I was drawn further into reading–and then buying–Urban Primitive<\/em><\/a>, by Raven Kaldera<\/a> and Tannin Schwartztein<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The title and cover treatment owe something to RE\/Search’s Modern Primitives<\/em><\/a>, whose title in turn came from the idea that “Primitive” actions . . . rupture conventional confines of behavior and aesthetics . . . [they explore] the territory of the last remaining underdeveloped source of first-hand experience: the human body.”<\/p>\n

It’s a Llewellyn book, which means it is “Wicca 101,” but with enough twists and originality to make it interesting–using subway trains in banishing rituals, assigning astrological symbolism to different body piercings. It’s not the usual “the ancient Celts did this and that” approach, at least. The way that the authors teach city dwellers to seek the “heart of the city” is important, because too often American culture tells us to hate our cities–and so we make them ugly, and they sprawl as we keep trying to “escape” them.<\/p>\n

The book gave me the idea of a magical action that I wish to carry out–and it also gave me the germ of a nature-writing class assignment. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Urban Primitive When I read the sentence, “Children’s dolls, broken or whole, are symbolic of urban ‘elves’–the urban version of the tomte or tontu,” I was drawn further into reading–and then buying–Urban Primitive, by Raven Kaldera and Tannin Schwartztein. The title and cover treatment owe something to RE\/Search’s Modern Primitives, whose title in turn came […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-278","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s6xQTg-278","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":6979,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=6979","url_meta":{"origin":278,"position":0},"title":"Looking at Your Polis as a Pagan","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"January 31, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"A Wiccan email list that I am on recently went through a discussion of teaching \"theology\" to children. It is one of the perennial questions among contemporary Pagans: teach the kids or let them make up their own minds as adults. Surprisingly, some discussants reported that said adult children-of-Pagans regretted\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"childhood\"","block_context":{"text":"childhood","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=childhood"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":4428,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=4428","url_meta":{"origin":278,"position":1},"title":"Call For Papers, Presentations, Workshops, Rituals and Performances Mapping the Occult City: Exploring Magick and Esotericism in the Urban Utopia","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"July 7, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"A pre-conference for the Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religions in Chicago, on Friday November 16, 2012, presented by Phoenix Rising Academy and DePaul University. In his classic essay, \u201cWalking in the City,\u201d ethnologist and historian Michel de Certeau distinguished between the \u201cexaltation of a scopic and gnostic\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Chicago\"","block_context":{"text":"Chicago","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=chicago"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1131,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1131","url_meta":{"origin":278,"position":2},"title":"Performance Studies and Reality Television","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"March 27, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"Living a cable channel-free life, I never saw Mad Mad House, but if you did and you want to read a performance studies-based analysis, I direct you to Jason Winslade's \"You\u2019ve Got to Grow or Go\": Initiation, Performance, and Reality Television\" (PDF file).At the center of his analysis are the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"culture\"","block_context":{"text":"culture","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=culture"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":9057,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=9057","url_meta":{"origin":278,"position":3},"title":"Can You Put Your Paganism in the Street?","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"March 14, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"Late last year, I read this in the Pueblo Chieftain newspaper: \"Pueblo Church Walks and Prays over Every Walkable Street in the City.\" About a year ago, the Rev. Jim Murray had a vision. In that vision, members of his church, the First Church of the Nazarene, 84 Stanford Ave.,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"American religion\"","block_context":{"text":"American religion","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=american-religion"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/union-ave.-1-2017-1024x936.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/union-ave.-1-2017-1024x936.jpg?resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/union-ave.-1-2017-1024x936.jpg?resize=525%2C300 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/union-ave.-1-2017-1024x936.jpg?resize=700%2C400 2x"},"classes":[]},{"id":6007,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=6007","url_meta":{"origin":278,"position":4},"title":"Model T Religion","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"October 2, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"A hat tip to Wren at The Witches' Voice, who posted on Facebook a news item about a parliamentarian in Kuwait, Abdulrahman Al-Jeeran, who is upset about the sale of non-Islamic statuary in Kuwaiti gift shops. He revealed that statues representing gods believed by non-Muslim pagan worshippers during the primitive\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"idolatry\"","block_context":{"text":"idolatry","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=idolatry"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6787,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=6787","url_meta":{"origin":278,"position":5},"title":"The Myth of Halloween Sadism","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"October 16, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"Myth in the popular sense, that is to say, an urban legend, says sociologist Joel Best, who has been studying the razor-blade-in-the-apple and similar stories for decades. Visit his website and click the tab for \"Halloween Sadism.\" Halloween sadism is best seen as a contemporary legend (sometimes called an urban\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Halloween\"","block_context":{"text":"Halloween","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=halloween"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=278"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=278"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=278"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=278"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}