In 1933, when Black Mountain College opened in Asheville, North Carolina, its artistic director was Josef Albers (1888-1972) the last head of the Bauhaus before the Nazis closed it. The contract for Albers and his wife Anni was offered by the American architect Philip Johnson (1906-2005). By 1935 Walt Disney (1908-1966) got wind of what was up. He rushed to get an interview with Albers explaining that no one had understood so far the artistic implications of the new field of animation. When they met Albers was not amused with Disney’s vision of cute nature. The meeting ended with Albers blowing up saying, “I will not allow any American kitsch to infect the minds of ‘my’ students.”
Disney was astonished but not deterred from his mission. He sensed, however, that Albers’ “will to power” was more sexual and mature than his, which was more neurasthenic and analytic. The comparison made Disney angry. Pretending to leave, he began to question the students away from the watchful eyes of Albers, about the nature of their life at school and who their teachers were. At that moment Disney began to realize just how much he disliked the European attitude of paternalism, which he had just experienced close up. He did, however, discover the way the students “escaped” from the school in the summer. They all went to Chihuahua in Northern Mexico. There the students would eat wild peyote derived from the buttons of the mescal cactus. In its refined form it is mescaline- the hallucinatory crystalline alkaloid: C11H17NO3. The students would, of course, look forward to the summer hiatus, not realizing that the faculty was secretly fostering their use of peyote because of its antispasmodic capabilities. Most of the European faculty knew that sensitive Americans were not used to being taught by artistic tyrants like Josef Albers, Walter Gropius (1883-1969) or Adolf Hitler (1889-1945).
By 1936 Disney was taking mescaline on a regular basis and as a result his most famous work appeared: “Fantasia.” In 1940 it became a staple of American cinema, the year it was launched. While “Fantasia” appealed immediately to children, its adult understanding did not develop until the mid-60’s, years after Black Mountain College ceased to exist. What happened, of course, was that the hippie generation (the cultural grandchild of “Wander Vogels”-“The Wandering Birds”- the German youth after World War I, in a disenfranchised state) was the first group to recognize “Fantasia” as the first American “stoner movie.” What was still not understood was that the entire ensemble was also a vicious satire in the tradition of Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) or Francois-Marie Voltare (1694-1778).
The structure of “Fantasia” consists of eight pieces of fairly well known European musical compositions, spanning the years from the 18th century to the early 20th century. Disney, himself, had never natured musically as his audiences never had, thus allowing him to work his animation to all ultimate degree. In fact what he did to “The Rite of Spring” was considered by the composer Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) to be deemed unforgivable. To these compositions Disney juxtaposed his own animations which acted as programmed literary synesthetic visuals, very much in the vein of the hallucinations one might experience from advanced and compulsive alcoholism, such as seeing “pink elephants.”
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