Transcendental Punishments
Please allow 10 working days to process before shipping
Garment Dyed - 6.5oz Black Short Sleeve
Made in USA - 100% USA Cotton
*back to the old boxier blanks*
Printed by Mike's Deli
Cocteau:
I must speak to you about one more delicate matter. (I don't mind; I'm no longer there to take the rap.) It is obvious that all honours and awards and prizes are nothing but punishments. Yes, transcendental punishments - but very real.
1. Golden Lion Venice Film Festival
2. AIA Gold Medal
3. AIGA Medal
4. National Medal of Arts
5. Cannes Palme d'Or
6. MacDowell Medal
7. BAFTA Mask
8. Golden Boot
9. MTV VMA Moon Man
10. Pulitzer Prize
11. Kyoto Prize
12. Nobel
13. Nobel in Literature
14. Booker Prize
15. National Book Award
16. Tony Award
17. Rock & Roll Hall of Fame
18. VIZE 97 Award Crosier
Time Magazine Sep 30th 1957:
Cocteau:
Beau Brummell perhaps that name is still known to you? He was a famous English dandy - answered a young man who congratulated him one day on having looked so elegant at the Derby: "I could not have been elegant if you remarked!", he answered.
For the sake of young people, I hope that tin medals have disappeared.
I am a member of the French Academy, the Belgian Academy, the German Academy, the American Academy, the Uruguayan Academy, and, although I speak almost no English, I am doctor honoris causa of Oxford.
Cocteau:
Rewards indeed! One who accepts these things had better duck, for they are forms of transcendental punishment. And if he is offered them, it is because he has let himself be seen. Yes, he has let perhaps no more than the tip of his ear be seen, but this should not be.
The Golden Sardine:
Cocteau:
This was a very great musician who was thought of as a joker during his lifetime but who was not. To deflate the pompous this musician used to call his compositions by droll titles. His name was Erik Satie.
A propos of Maurice Ravel, who had declined the Légion d'honneur, Satie said, "The point is not to decline the Légion d'honneur. It is more important not to have deserved it." Satie also said, "He declines the Légion d'honneur but his work accepts."
Personally, I hope that all the twaddle, all the tin medals pinned to swallow-tailed coats, all the ribandry of art will have disappeared by the year 2000 and that you are serious and attentive young people.
++ "Herbert Read considered himself an anarchist, albeit in the English quietist tradition of Edward Carpenter and William Morris. Nevertheless, in the 1953 New Year Honours he accepted a knighthood for "services to literature"; this caused Read to be ostracized by most of the anarchist movement."