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tons of fun, crumbs and ruckus set in England, circa 1975-77. Cameos by Shane MacGowan, Billy Idol, Richard Branson, Sting
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"The Filth and the Fury was seen by critics to be a more balanced version of the events, with the band themselves telling their own story."
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"documentary is comprised of six one-hour conversations between mythologist Joseph Campbell and journalist Bill Moyers."
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"Bill Moyers was given "carte blanche" to interview the brightest person in the world. Other interviewees...directed him to Joseph Campbell, who had never been interviewed as such, was legendary in his scholarship in history and as a teacher. These two DV
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"Mohammed Bah Abba, had created a refrigerator that requires no electricity -- basically uses two clay pots with wet sand in between them. This device helped keep food fresh longer in poor rural areas in Africa"
i grok why campbell is still popular, but gosh i wish people would stop talking about him. i'm a snob, as this is the area of my graduate study, but when it comes to myth and religion, joe had a critical flaw that most academics today could not get away with:
he didn't speak/read the vast majority of the ancient languages in which the texts he based his ideas on were written.
now, i am not arguing that he wasn't a really bright guy, or that some of his ideas were good. but i *have* looked at some of the materials he covered, and i do read the original languages, and campbell's works is, well, often on the fanciful side.
armchair anthropology is fun. but it's not really accurate, when you look at the details. it's all well and good to say, "so and so peoples had a sun-god culture," but when that turns out to be true for only a small portion of a culture/nation, and not for most of its history, the "lessons" to be learned from "sun god worship" are really limited.
always take campbell with a big grain of salt. remember too that there are oceans of ink since he did his work, much of which totally blows away his assumptions, as well as completely changes the understanding of the cultures he discusses. very simply, he got a great deal wrong.
I don't know much about Campbell either, but not reading original source material seems like a pretty big flaw in methodology. Bill Moyers ought to do a follow up interview with someone in the field.
Most of my comparative religion knowledge comes from reading Eliade's History of Religious Ideas, years ago, and he seemed a little Christian-centric for my taste.
In a perfect world, I'd be able to study anthropology and comparative religion in my library study in Tuscany, but Mammon is a harsh master.