Caché turns out to be even better than I expected, better than the critics must have said (I avoided reading any reviews but I promise to get around to it one of these days), better still considered in context with Michael Haneke's other films: 7th Continent, Piano Teacher, Funny Games, Code Unknown, Benny's Video, Time of the Wolf.
Caché, in which a family receives mysterious videotapes to show they are under surveillance, legitimately could be analyzed as a movie of:
voyeurism
filmgoing
racism
political turmoil
marriage
sexism
class struggle
coming of age
reality versus dreams
a world where simulation replaces reality
mystery
suspense
I could even imagine a discussion on the purpose of literature as depicted in this film, given that the main character reviews books on a television show.
And so forth. It features Haneke's crisp and meticulous (meticulously Austrian?) filmmaking style. After a fashion, Haneke might be considered the 21st century answer to Alfred Hitchcock. (The Piano Teacher would be his Marnie and Time of the Wolf his Birds. More than one could be his Psycho.)
I particularly like the fact that one watches this movie questioning every step of the way, reformulating an opinion or theory scene by scene, reshaping the mystery as you go, like an endlessly unfolding crossword puzzle. The more you fill in the blanks, the more there is to do, and yet there is satisfaction in having completed each step...
In one scene, the wife, distraught by the turns of events in her family, has coffee with a friend, an adult male for whom there is obviously some attraction. They embrace in the bistro, and one immediately assumes that this event may be secretly observed, videotaped, and used against her. That's what would happen in a typical Hollywood movie, after all. Indeed, when her son disappears overnight and returns angry at his mother, the reasons are left unexplained. There is never the revelation that he saw a tape of her embracing the family friend, although he taunts her with the man's name. There is never any evidence that a tape was made at all.
Caché is one of those movies that ends and makes you shout, "No!" You're not ready, not yet. It's too soon. We haven't finished piecing it together. The final shot is one of great ambiguity. It was only much later, on second viewing, that I realized what characters were shown in the distance. At first, it appears to be just another long shot, a random voyeuristic view outside a school.
The ellipses may be many, but nothing is random. Few movies are so satisfying and engrossing, especially when so much has been carefully left out of the picture.
Friday, June 30, 2006
Wednesday, June 28, 2006
From Russia with Love
"Ernie," I asked when I walked into the room. "You know the Minutemen?"
"Sure," he said without taking his eyes off the television, his lanky body in a white undershirt and jeans sprawled out on the couch. "They sang 'Punk rock changed my life.'"
I was surprised. That was, like 1980, or even earlier, four years before he was born. He was better informed than I thought.
"That's right." The new documentary about the trio had arrived from Nexflix that morning and I was burning copies. "The movie is pretty good. I'm making you one."
I went back upstairs and logged onto the Russian music download website to see about finding some of their music as well. Sure enough, the album was available, Double Nickles on the Dime. I downloaded and burned it, so Ernie could take a copy with him as he drove to Colorado the next morning.
Andrew was also downstairs, equally inert. His marijuana/McDonalds t-shirt ("Millions Stoned") was confirmed by the thin joint he held openly, unlit, in his hand. We hadn't seen him in about a year. He'd been hitchhiking and hopping rails. He was sleeping on a roof in California when the police busted him and bought him a bus ticket back to Champaign.
Lee and I agreed it was probably cheaper for the State of California to deport him back to Illinois than to throw him in jail.
We were actually glad he was accompanying Ernie on the drive. He was sweet, a deliberate freeloader, a dedicated rambler at the tender age of 23. He'd get dropped off in Boulder, where the hippy Rainbow Celebration was about to get underway, before Ernie continued on alone to Telluride, where summer work had become available. Ernie was eager to go. He'd just quit smoking cigarettes two weeks earlier. Maybe he could save some money this time.
"People who say it's harder to quit heroin than cigarettes don't know what they're talking about," he had said. He was a lot easier to talk to when he wasn't smoking. I will miss him. I was glad he was leaving though. Lee had started to cry before they even started packing. He did pack. That was surprising, too. Maybe he even planned a little.
Keane sounds a lot like Coldplay, I decided while delivering today. They're good. I guess it's obvious that the two bands should sound alike, since the lead singers of both bands used to work together in some band or another. Ernie will have none of it. He's very specific of what he likes, but with the new facility of the former Soviet Union website, I can sample a lot of music, more or less legally for the time being.
I burned all the Radiohead albums and printed CD labels for them, using the album covers as art and design, so Lee can tell Amnesiac from Kid A, Hail to the Thief from OK Computer at a glance.
"Happy birthday," I said when I presented them to her in the morning. She was getting ready to make sausages and pancakes for the boys before they left. Their scheduled departure was 8 am, but I wasn't betting on it happening like that. I thought the gift might cheer her up a little. It did.
"But it's not my birthday," she said.
At 8:15, they left. We all hugged.
"Have fun at the Rainbow thing," I told Andrew.
"Oh, I will," he said with certainty.
Lee and I walked slowly back into the house which seemed suddenly deeply empty, purposeless.
"Look," I said. "They left behind the MapQuest plans I printed out for them. I can't believe it."
"Maybe we should call them," Lee immediately said.
"No," I said. "Let them be gone."
Since it was half-price day at That's Rentertainment, I made an excuse to get out of the hammock and leave when it opened at 10 am. They had four of the obscure titles that I had in my Netflix queue, including Mike Kuchar's Sins of the Fleshapoids. That surprised me. Kuchar was part of the San Francisco experimental art scene years ago, a group that included Curt McDowell, the filmmaker I'd stayed with, worked with, and slept with once. He dedicated a movie to me, but that didn't really mean much, since he cranked out his mock Hollywood sex epics with abandon for the San Francisco Art Institute. I never saw the movie of his I had narrated, but I still have a 16mm copy of his Siamese Twin Pinheads on my shelf, with no way to project it.
Curt was one of the first to die with AIDS, well before it even had a name. Another bullet I dodged.
In addition to the Minutemen documentary, which is aptly titled We Jam Econo, the newest Michael Haneke movie, Cache, had arrived on Tuesday from Netflix. It's the last of the Haneke's I have collected. Watching them all, including the interviews with Haneke on each disk, has been a feast, but there's no one I know who has also watched them or cared to, no one to share about them.
I have things ironed out with Netflix in a way I can get four movies a week, including new releases usually on the day of release, burning them and returning them promptly to keep the flow going.
Last week my agent wrote with her usual suggestions, encouraging but not announcing anything. I don't think she really tries, but even so I felt like writing again, now that Ernie has left, my computer is back from repair. I might turn the East Bend book into fiction, into science fiction. It might be better if I don't think in terms of commercial audience.
After the route, Miles comes out to me in the hammock, begging for money.
"I'm your son," he says, pleading. "You should give me money."
"You should work," I say. "Bring me a grape soda. With ice."
"I'm going to be a college student," he said, proud of the fact that he's going to community college at 16, as though that entitled him to plunder my wallet regularly.
We've been looking at historic black colleges. I'm convinced that is the route he should take, probably transferring for his third year. Even if he just humors me to get money, perhaps the idea will rub off on him.
He's driving now. We make daily jaunts through the streets in the Prius. I hold my breath while he maneuvers corners and parking. He's pretty good.
Lee is waiting downstairs. We're going to watch Failure to Launch, the movie we had used to describe Ernie, so to watch it tonight might be timely. I've already made popcorn. It's all I'll have for dinner. Henry called from California. He needs dental work, but I'm not going to think about it right now.
Ernie and Andrew are probably in Colorado already. They could have stayed tonight with my sister in Kansas, but they left the map here by the television. They'll probably just keep driving. They'll be in the mountains soon, probably listening to the Minutemen. Listening to D. Boone sing "punk rock changed my life."
"Learn to pray," I had told Ernie sometime in the past week. "That takes forever."
"Sure," he said without taking his eyes off the television, his lanky body in a white undershirt and jeans sprawled out on the couch. "They sang 'Punk rock changed my life.'"
I was surprised. That was, like 1980, or even earlier, four years before he was born. He was better informed than I thought.
"That's right." The new documentary about the trio had arrived from Nexflix that morning and I was burning copies. "The movie is pretty good. I'm making you one."
I went back upstairs and logged onto the Russian music download website to see about finding some of their music as well. Sure enough, the album was available, Double Nickles on the Dime. I downloaded and burned it, so Ernie could take a copy with him as he drove to Colorado the next morning.
Andrew was also downstairs, equally inert. His marijuana/McDonalds t-shirt ("Millions Stoned") was confirmed by the thin joint he held openly, unlit, in his hand. We hadn't seen him in about a year. He'd been hitchhiking and hopping rails. He was sleeping on a roof in California when the police busted him and bought him a bus ticket back to Champaign.
Lee and I agreed it was probably cheaper for the State of California to deport him back to Illinois than to throw him in jail.
We were actually glad he was accompanying Ernie on the drive. He was sweet, a deliberate freeloader, a dedicated rambler at the tender age of 23. He'd get dropped off in Boulder, where the hippy Rainbow Celebration was about to get underway, before Ernie continued on alone to Telluride, where summer work had become available. Ernie was eager to go. He'd just quit smoking cigarettes two weeks earlier. Maybe he could save some money this time.
"People who say it's harder to quit heroin than cigarettes don't know what they're talking about," he had said. He was a lot easier to talk to when he wasn't smoking. I will miss him. I was glad he was leaving though. Lee had started to cry before they even started packing. He did pack. That was surprising, too. Maybe he even planned a little.
Keane sounds a lot like Coldplay, I decided while delivering today. They're good. I guess it's obvious that the two bands should sound alike, since the lead singers of both bands used to work together in some band or another. Ernie will have none of it. He's very specific of what he likes, but with the new facility of the former Soviet Union website, I can sample a lot of music, more or less legally for the time being.
I burned all the Radiohead albums and printed CD labels for them, using the album covers as art and design, so Lee can tell Amnesiac from Kid A, Hail to the Thief from OK Computer at a glance.
"Happy birthday," I said when I presented them to her in the morning. She was getting ready to make sausages and pancakes for the boys before they left. Their scheduled departure was 8 am, but I wasn't betting on it happening like that. I thought the gift might cheer her up a little. It did.
"But it's not my birthday," she said.
At 8:15, they left. We all hugged.
"Have fun at the Rainbow thing," I told Andrew.
"Oh, I will," he said with certainty.
Lee and I walked slowly back into the house which seemed suddenly deeply empty, purposeless.
"Look," I said. "They left behind the MapQuest plans I printed out for them. I can't believe it."
"Maybe we should call them," Lee immediately said.
"No," I said. "Let them be gone."
Since it was half-price day at That's Rentertainment, I made an excuse to get out of the hammock and leave when it opened at 10 am. They had four of the obscure titles that I had in my Netflix queue, including Mike Kuchar's Sins of the Fleshapoids. That surprised me. Kuchar was part of the San Francisco experimental art scene years ago, a group that included Curt McDowell, the filmmaker I'd stayed with, worked with, and slept with once. He dedicated a movie to me, but that didn't really mean much, since he cranked out his mock Hollywood sex epics with abandon for the San Francisco Art Institute. I never saw the movie of his I had narrated, but I still have a 16mm copy of his Siamese Twin Pinheads on my shelf, with no way to project it.
Curt was one of the first to die with AIDS, well before it even had a name. Another bullet I dodged.
In addition to the Minutemen documentary, which is aptly titled We Jam Econo, the newest Michael Haneke movie, Cache, had arrived on Tuesday from Netflix. It's the last of the Haneke's I have collected. Watching them all, including the interviews with Haneke on each disk, has been a feast, but there's no one I know who has also watched them or cared to, no one to share about them.
I have things ironed out with Netflix in a way I can get four movies a week, including new releases usually on the day of release, burning them and returning them promptly to keep the flow going.
Last week my agent wrote with her usual suggestions, encouraging but not announcing anything. I don't think she really tries, but even so I felt like writing again, now that Ernie has left, my computer is back from repair. I might turn the East Bend book into fiction, into science fiction. It might be better if I don't think in terms of commercial audience.
After the route, Miles comes out to me in the hammock, begging for money.
"I'm your son," he says, pleading. "You should give me money."
"You should work," I say. "Bring me a grape soda. With ice."
"I'm going to be a college student," he said, proud of the fact that he's going to community college at 16, as though that entitled him to plunder my wallet regularly.
We've been looking at historic black colleges. I'm convinced that is the route he should take, probably transferring for his third year. Even if he just humors me to get money, perhaps the idea will rub off on him.
He's driving now. We make daily jaunts through the streets in the Prius. I hold my breath while he maneuvers corners and parking. He's pretty good.
Lee is waiting downstairs. We're going to watch Failure to Launch, the movie we had used to describe Ernie, so to watch it tonight might be timely. I've already made popcorn. It's all I'll have for dinner. Henry called from California. He needs dental work, but I'm not going to think about it right now.
Ernie and Andrew are probably in Colorado already. They could have stayed tonight with my sister in Kansas, but they left the map here by the television. They'll probably just keep driving. They'll be in the mountains soon, probably listening to the Minutemen. Listening to D. Boone sing "punk rock changed my life."
"Learn to pray," I had told Ernie sometime in the past week. "That takes forever."
EL CHINO Y EL ARROZ
Un hombre estaba poniendo flores en la tumba de su esposa, cuando vio a un
hombre chino poniendo un plato con arroz en la tumba vecina. El hombre se
dirigió al chino y le preguntó:
-"Disculpe señor, ¿de verdad cree usted que el difunto vendrá a comer el
arroz? -"Sí", responde el chino, "cuando el suyo
venga a oler sus flores..."
Moraleja: Respetar las opiniones del otro, es una de las mayores virtudes
que un ser humano puede tener. Las personas son diferentes, por lo tanto
actúan diferente y piensan diferente. No juzgues...solamente comprende..., y
si no lo PUEDES comprender...OLVÍDALO.
Recuerda las 5 simples reglas para ser feliz:
1. Libera tu corazón del odio.
2. Libera tu mente de preocupaciones.
3. Vive sencillamente.
4. Da más.
5. Espera menos.
Envejecer es obligatorio, crecer es opcional.
--
"I have no idea what I am talking about. I am trapped in this body and I can't get out." -- Thom Yorke, Radiohead
hombre chino poniendo un plato con arroz en la tumba vecina. El hombre se
dirigió al chino y le preguntó:
-"Disculpe señor, ¿de verdad cree usted que el difunto vendrá a comer el
arroz? -"Sí", responde el chino, "cuando el suyo
venga a oler sus flores..."
Moraleja: Respetar las opiniones del otro, es una de las mayores virtudes
que un ser humano puede tener. Las personas son diferentes, por lo tanto
actúan diferente y piensan diferente. No juzgues...solamente comprende..., y
si no lo PUEDES comprender...OLVÍDALO.
Recuerda las 5 simples reglas para ser feliz:
1. Libera tu corazón del odio.
2. Libera tu mente de preocupaciones.
3. Vive sencillamente.
4. Da más.
5. Espera menos.
Envejecer es obligatorio, crecer es opcional.
--
"I have no idea what I am talking about. I am trapped in this body and I can't get out." -- Thom Yorke, Radiohead
Monday, June 26, 2006
A folk-jazz riff on the rift
Lee and I lay on the couch last night watching Neil Young in "Heart of Gold." Her legs were on my lap, the kittens nibbled on her toes, the children were out, and although the band did sing some old songs, they were mostly from his recent album, new to me. The music bathed us in waves of joy and sadness, a glorious shock and rich vein of feeling I wasn't really prepared for. It made me feel old and timeless.
The concert connected neatly with the book I'd read that morning as I rocked outside under the trees in the hammock, Andrew Holleran's "Grief." A brief read, an elegant tone poem, certainly based on his own life, about AIDS and loss and family and friends and Mary Todd Lincoln, too. As in Heart of Gold, underlying the book is a current of connection of an artist to his parents. Maybe that was the surprising thing about both works (especially when the country is talking about defining marriage), about how powerful and indelible a stamp the idea of family really is, parents and children. Heart of Gold is dedicated to Young's "daddie" who had died just months before the performance. Young's stage patter and songs related to parents, children, old men and children, and dying...
I finally heard from my agent over the weekend, too. Writing books follows a timeline I am just learning. My last book took three years to write. I don't know why I should expect these two I've been tinkering with should take any less, with no expectation of sales (or even completion, for that matter), and with a wavering sense of audience.
Holleran said in one of many insightful comments thrown out casually that when your parents die, you lose your audience. I'd never thought of it that way. We do things for our parents, or for our children, probably forever, dead or alive.
I think I'm going to be getting somewhere with this fractal of thinking. Maybe or maybe not. We'll see.
I so frequently had told people -- editors, therapists, myself -- that I could only write if I had already sold the story. That I had pitched it to some specific publication and pre-sold it. I couldn't write unless I had that reason to do so, that direction.
But maybe it was audience that I had received, rather than the promise of money, that spurred me on. Money probably didn't have that much to do with it. The stakes were remarkably low in any case. The deadline also provided some additional push. I've often said I'd pay for a deadline. I need a deadline dominatrix. But it was also the incentive of knowing my audience, knowing who would be buying my material, and -- in turn -- knowing who I was supposed to be. My own persona came into focus when that audience was defined for me.
When the Crockhead wrote his reviews of The Sting and then A Prairie Home Companion, he made fun of people who analyze movies, who discriminate, who invent in their determinations about art. I don't know if he was joking or serious when he said all New York critics kowtow to Frank Rich. I guess it was supposed to be funny, but I think his audience believed him, just the way the Gazette readership will believe Nora's letter, nod their heads in agreement, and reconfirm their prejudices.
There are different ways to review movies. Two of them are:
a) to judge them
b) to interpret them
Maybe interpretation is false, pretentious, and unnecessary. But for me, the act of interpretation itself provides meaning. It opens a window to what one audience member, the critic, sees. It allows me, as another audience member, to participate in the work of art rather than merely consume.
If there is nothing to interpret, there's no reason to go. I try to enjoy the popcorn and the projection, but I generally prefer more protein in my intake.
Writing for blogs, I'm not sure who the audience is. Maybe I prefer to define it in my own mind. Maybe I prefer to write for an anonymous or even imaginary person spying on me. This is perverse perhaps. I forget who once said "everything is better through a keyhole." Maybe I did. Or Andy Warhol. There's something delicious to me about home movies found at a garage sale, watching an incomplete picture, being able to fill in the blanks. I like YouTube videos without context. Apart from the aspects of voyeurism and exhibitionism, with blogs there is the sense of the audience being a mystery, a fantasy. So, no, I don't want comments on my blog. I don't want to know who's watching me. I know God is watching me every minute. I got used to that years ago. It even became that I was able to sin and say "hello, God" at the same time.
Granted, I am crazy. No, not even that. I'm probably insane, which is a the upper class elite of crazy. I recognize that the creative crockpot of anarchy produces both nothing and bubbles of something now and again and there I am, stewing like the helpless victim in a cannibal's lunch.
I think stuff should be free. It's the lesson Abbie Hoffman taught me that I could never shake. I have gone to the movies for twenty, thirty years without paying for them. A sense of privilege is hard to give up. My press pass probably is what kept me in this small town, if you want to know the truth of it. I found it too hard to give up that entitlement. Because I had publications to write for, to review things, I could go to New York once or twice a year and see scores of Broadway and off-Broadway shows, I could eat at the best four-star restaurants to review -- Le Cirque, Chantarelle, Jean-Pierre's -- when otherwise I could not get past the door.
And I developed a sense that if I had to pay for these things, I did not enjoy them. If I paid for them, they became evaluated according to cost. Were they worth it? Was the Le Cirque food with Sirio Maccioni's personal attention worth the $500 price tag? (Well, in that case, maybe so. I know, I'm boasting. I apologize.)
When money was involved, I rated these extravagances, these entertainments, according to value and bargain rather than meaning and worth.
All of the above of which is the most incredible way of getting around to the way the Crockhead reviews movies and the way I review movies, the way he approaches art and the way I do.
Using a star system to review things reminds me of singing praise music at church. Why bother with four part harmony, with hymnals and the detail of written music, when you can just cut to the core, praise God, wave your hands, make your point, and be done with it before sharing time, when we can talk about our illnesses and travels?
That's a stretch, praise music and movie reviews. But it's the very kind of interpretation, parallel, comparison, that I find interesting to ponder in my Dada kind of way.
Now, I don't know who crossed the line in our differences, where real anger emerged in place of play. The Crockhead prefers star systems. In the case of a play I liked and recommended, The Pillowman, it became impossible to discuss the merits or demerits of that work because The Crockhead had given it a ZERO star rating. There was no discussion. It was judged and dead. The judgment of star ratings makes it necessary to argue, rather than discuss.
Judgment believes in the possibility of a complete communication, a finality. No home movies found at garage sales. No Stan Brakhage. Interpretation is open-ended. In his various posts, The Crockhead rated me with ZERO stars for my way of accumulating art, which he believes is illegal. But I don't pirate work and I (perhaps narrowly) fall within the guidelines of legality. When I was basking on the beaches of Yugoslavia, a honeymoon financed by sales of reviews of the Zagreb Film Festival (with absolutely no profit, an accepted hand-to-mouth, break-even experience, like my whole life has been), I was trading in my opinions and ideas for the experience.
I think the argument between Crockhead and me happened because of our proximity as much as anything. We rubbed each other's edges somehow. I parodied, not entirely fairly, some of the ways he reviews movies. The Crockhead believes that my parody was unfair because it infringed on his good name, or his audience's perception of his good name, but if he is honest, he should recognize that it might be a little more complicated than just that. Otherwise, he could have simply asked me more strongly to indicate the authorship rather than denounce me as a liar and a thief.
The Crockhead parodied film analysis and claimed that all analytical critics flock together as one. He has the right to that view. (I want to remind him that, when I stood all alone in criticizing Mark Robert's "Rantoul and Die," he provided half a dozen other critics who had lavished praise on the play and asked me, "Why is it you are different?")
Well, that is indeed the question.
What happens now? Nothing. Nothing can change. I'm still an anarchist, as likely to dismiss something one day as honor it the next. The Crockhead is still addicted to compulsive judgment that gives him comfort and a sense of security.
I don't know who wins. I don't care. We should be playing in a band, making folk music, creating something.
There's arguing and there's invention. I know which I aspire to do.
The concert connected neatly with the book I'd read that morning as I rocked outside under the trees in the hammock, Andrew Holleran's "Grief." A brief read, an elegant tone poem, certainly based on his own life, about AIDS and loss and family and friends and Mary Todd Lincoln, too. As in Heart of Gold, underlying the book is a current of connection of an artist to his parents. Maybe that was the surprising thing about both works (especially when the country is talking about defining marriage), about how powerful and indelible a stamp the idea of family really is, parents and children. Heart of Gold is dedicated to Young's "daddie" who had died just months before the performance. Young's stage patter and songs related to parents, children, old men and children, and dying...
I finally heard from my agent over the weekend, too. Writing books follows a timeline I am just learning. My last book took three years to write. I don't know why I should expect these two I've been tinkering with should take any less, with no expectation of sales (or even completion, for that matter), and with a wavering sense of audience.
Holleran said in one of many insightful comments thrown out casually that when your parents die, you lose your audience. I'd never thought of it that way. We do things for our parents, or for our children, probably forever, dead or alive.
I think I'm going to be getting somewhere with this fractal of thinking. Maybe or maybe not. We'll see.
I so frequently had told people -- editors, therapists, myself -- that I could only write if I had already sold the story. That I had pitched it to some specific publication and pre-sold it. I couldn't write unless I had that reason to do so, that direction.
But maybe it was audience that I had received, rather than the promise of money, that spurred me on. Money probably didn't have that much to do with it. The stakes were remarkably low in any case. The deadline also provided some additional push. I've often said I'd pay for a deadline. I need a deadline dominatrix. But it was also the incentive of knowing my audience, knowing who would be buying my material, and -- in turn -- knowing who I was supposed to be. My own persona came into focus when that audience was defined for me.
Did you see this letter in Sunday's paper? Nora Poland of Bellflower wrote: "Why is it that some of our military men fighting in Iraq have to stand trial for the murder of a few people in Iraq but opposing forces can slaughter, beat and behead members of our military? Is this not a war we are fighting? Someone please tell me, where is the justice here?"
Letters like this one are fascinating to me. I don't understand why the Gazette publishes them. They are illogical (at best) and make false assumptions. If a semiotician were chopping it to pieces, he could probably write a book about this letter alone. "The murder of a few people" is dismissive, missing the point that these are civilians and not soldiers, and possibly racist (the whole letter is xenophobic). The phrase "opposing forces can" is what pushes the letter over into stupidity. Who gives them permission? No, opposing forces may not kill. But they do. And this letter is not worth publishing. It reflects upon the ignorance of the populace. It furthers no new ideas.
The Crockhead and I have argued about this. He thinks people's stupidity is revealed when such letters are published. I disagree. If the News-Gazette publishes such letters in order to point out their lack of logic, then they should also publish an editor's disclaimer. They give credibility to the irrational and the unreasonable by publishing Nora's letter. Call me a fascist. It is part of my anarchy that allows me NOT to allow, that allows me to discriminate (another word for taste, isn't it?).When the Crockhead wrote his reviews of The Sting and then A Prairie Home Companion, he made fun of people who analyze movies, who discriminate, who invent in their determinations about art. I don't know if he was joking or serious when he said all New York critics kowtow to Frank Rich. I guess it was supposed to be funny, but I think his audience believed him, just the way the Gazette readership will believe Nora's letter, nod their heads in agreement, and reconfirm their prejudices.
There are different ways to review movies. Two of them are:
a) to judge them
b) to interpret them
Maybe interpretation is false, pretentious, and unnecessary. But for me, the act of interpretation itself provides meaning. It opens a window to what one audience member, the critic, sees. It allows me, as another audience member, to participate in the work of art rather than merely consume.
If there is nothing to interpret, there's no reason to go. I try to enjoy the popcorn and the projection, but I generally prefer more protein in my intake.
Writing for blogs, I'm not sure who the audience is. Maybe I prefer to define it in my own mind. Maybe I prefer to write for an anonymous or even imaginary person spying on me. This is perverse perhaps. I forget who once said "everything is better through a keyhole." Maybe I did. Or Andy Warhol. There's something delicious to me about home movies found at a garage sale, watching an incomplete picture, being able to fill in the blanks. I like YouTube videos without context. Apart from the aspects of voyeurism and exhibitionism, with blogs there is the sense of the audience being a mystery, a fantasy. So, no, I don't want comments on my blog. I don't want to know who's watching me. I know God is watching me every minute. I got used to that years ago. It even became that I was able to sin and say "hello, God" at the same time.
Granted, I am crazy. No, not even that. I'm probably insane, which is a the upper class elite of crazy. I recognize that the creative crockpot of anarchy produces both nothing and bubbles of something now and again and there I am, stewing like the helpless victim in a cannibal's lunch.
I think stuff should be free. It's the lesson Abbie Hoffman taught me that I could never shake. I have gone to the movies for twenty, thirty years without paying for them. A sense of privilege is hard to give up. My press pass probably is what kept me in this small town, if you want to know the truth of it. I found it too hard to give up that entitlement. Because I had publications to write for, to review things, I could go to New York once or twice a year and see scores of Broadway and off-Broadway shows, I could eat at the best four-star restaurants to review -- Le Cirque, Chantarelle, Jean-Pierre's -- when otherwise I could not get past the door.
And I developed a sense that if I had to pay for these things, I did not enjoy them. If I paid for them, they became evaluated according to cost. Were they worth it? Was the Le Cirque food with Sirio Maccioni's personal attention worth the $500 price tag? (Well, in that case, maybe so. I know, I'm boasting. I apologize.)
When money was involved, I rated these extravagances, these entertainments, according to value and bargain rather than meaning and worth.
All of the above of which is the most incredible way of getting around to the way the Crockhead reviews movies and the way I review movies, the way he approaches art and the way I do.
Using a star system to review things reminds me of singing praise music at church. Why bother with four part harmony, with hymnals and the detail of written music, when you can just cut to the core, praise God, wave your hands, make your point, and be done with it before sharing time, when we can talk about our illnesses and travels?
That's a stretch, praise music and movie reviews. But it's the very kind of interpretation, parallel, comparison, that I find interesting to ponder in my Dada kind of way.
Now, I don't know who crossed the line in our differences, where real anger emerged in place of play. The Crockhead prefers star systems. In the case of a play I liked and recommended, The Pillowman, it became impossible to discuss the merits or demerits of that work because The Crockhead had given it a ZERO star rating. There was no discussion. It was judged and dead. The judgment of star ratings makes it necessary to argue, rather than discuss.
Judgment believes in the possibility of a complete communication, a finality. No home movies found at garage sales. No Stan Brakhage. Interpretation is open-ended. In his various posts, The Crockhead rated me with ZERO stars for my way of accumulating art, which he believes is illegal. But I don't pirate work and I (perhaps narrowly) fall within the guidelines of legality. When I was basking on the beaches of Yugoslavia, a honeymoon financed by sales of reviews of the Zagreb Film Festival (with absolutely no profit, an accepted hand-to-mouth, break-even experience, like my whole life has been), I was trading in my opinions and ideas for the experience.
I think the argument between Crockhead and me happened because of our proximity as much as anything. We rubbed each other's edges somehow. I parodied, not entirely fairly, some of the ways he reviews movies. The Crockhead believes that my parody was unfair because it infringed on his good name, or his audience's perception of his good name, but if he is honest, he should recognize that it might be a little more complicated than just that. Otherwise, he could have simply asked me more strongly to indicate the authorship rather than denounce me as a liar and a thief.
The Crockhead parodied film analysis and claimed that all analytical critics flock together as one. He has the right to that view. (I want to remind him that, when I stood all alone in criticizing Mark Robert's "Rantoul and Die," he provided half a dozen other critics who had lavished praise on the play and asked me, "Why is it you are different?")
Well, that is indeed the question.
What happens now? Nothing. Nothing can change. I'm still an anarchist, as likely to dismiss something one day as honor it the next. The Crockhead is still addicted to compulsive judgment that gives him comfort and a sense of security.
I don't know who wins. I don't care. We should be playing in a band, making folk music, creating something.
There's arguing and there's invention. I know which I aspire to do.
Sunday, June 25, 2006
Doors
What happened during hammock time today: 8:45 am to 11:50 am:
The New Yorker insisted I devour three articles in a row. All relevant. To me anyway. Review of the Timothy Leary biography (Harcourt $28). Author Robert Greenfield. Critic Louis Menand sprinkles his review with all the cool references, unattributed, like saying Leary (and "many people in those days") "started out on Burgundy but soon hit the harder stuff" and The Doors of Perception and then remarks about Leary's scary smile "a rictus somewhere between a beatific, what-me-worry grin and a movie star's frozen stare into the flashbulbs." It was really Alan Watts or Aldous Huxley who legitimized acid for the seekers; Leary was the P.T. Barnum. No one wanted to be like him. Ultimately, acid died out because the social context was lost and, as the story so rightly concludes, "the LSD experience is completely suggestible. People on the drug see and feel what they expect to see and feel... If they expect that the secret of the universe will be revealed to them, then that's what they will find. An illusion, no doubt, but it's as close as we're likely to get."
Flip past "Briefly Noted" to a review of the Dada exhibit at MOMA. Quote: "Dada was and remains a drug, of the hallucinogenic type. What young self-styled bohemian of the past ninety years hasn't got at least briefly high on it? I sure did, back in the sixties." Critic: Peter Schjeldahl.
Turn page to a reassessment of Radiohead, which gets a surprising comparison to the Grateful Dead. And Miles Davis. And the second theme of a Schubert string quartet.
Time to burn new copies of the entire Radiohead oeuvre while waiting for Thom Yorke's solo album, The Eraser, to come out in a couple of weeks.
All this and a $2.50 sisal hammock from Guatemala, plus generic brand diet grape soda.
--
"I have no idea what I am talking about. I am trapped in this body and I can't get out." -- Thom Yorke, Radiohead
The New Yorker insisted I devour three articles in a row. All relevant. To me anyway. Review of the Timothy Leary biography (Harcourt $28). Author Robert Greenfield. Critic Louis Menand sprinkles his review with all the cool references, unattributed, like saying Leary (and "many people in those days") "started out on Burgundy but soon hit the harder stuff" and The Doors of Perception and then remarks about Leary's scary smile "a rictus somewhere between a beatific, what-me-worry grin and a movie star's frozen stare into the flashbulbs." It was really Alan Watts or Aldous Huxley who legitimized acid for the seekers; Leary was the P.T. Barnum. No one wanted to be like him. Ultimately, acid died out because the social context was lost and, as the story so rightly concludes, "the LSD experience is completely suggestible. People on the drug see and feel what they expect to see and feel... If they expect that the secret of the universe will be revealed to them, then that's what they will find. An illusion, no doubt, but it's as close as we're likely to get."
Flip past "Briefly Noted" to a review of the Dada exhibit at MOMA. Quote: "Dada was and remains a drug, of the hallucinogenic type. What young self-styled bohemian of the past ninety years hasn't got at least briefly high on it? I sure did, back in the sixties." Critic: Peter Schjeldahl.
Turn page to a reassessment of Radiohead, which gets a surprising comparison to the Grateful Dead. And Miles Davis. And the second theme of a Schubert string quartet.
Time to burn new copies of the entire Radiohead oeuvre while waiting for Thom Yorke's solo album, The Eraser, to come out in a couple of weeks.
All this and a $2.50 sisal hammock from Guatemala, plus generic brand diet grape soda.
--
"I have no idea what I am talking about. I am trapped in this body and I can't get out." -- Thom Yorke, Radiohead
A post from Bubbles, written in no person
dislike travel spend years living between 14th and Canal. donkey travel has
been a longtime fantasy, or mule. Should have been a shepard. After bike
riding 10 years didn't want to see the world go by fast. a couple of blocks
to the pharmacy can take hours if photographing the flowers and bugs.
Right now there are alot of dried up already bloomed flowers and their
attractive colors are flatter and texture crinckely papery than moist. I
rescued a lady bug off of a cement driveway.
Breastroke with eyes closed. Life is moisture. I just sucked down a 10 mg
valium. a pretty powder blue tastes like candy i want to eat the whole yummy
bottle. Valiums' designers' drug of choice was scotch. He sampled all his
concoctions and valium made him depressed too. It has so much promise in the
beginning then stabs you down the back. My first debut with it went swimming
and it was like that scene in Contact with Jodi Foster when she "travels"
far away but time does not record that she went anywhere, the pool was just
like the dreamy beach where she reconnects with her passed away father,
silky water glowing light and the other swimmers in the slow lane learning
the dog paddle became wonderful sea turtles. Should have let it dissolve
slower and savored. Maybe I will sleep tonight. First thing i check at the
pool is are the turtles here?
The insomnia started long before Lexapro. How do you fall asleep again, I
cant remember. How did I forget? Lexapro makes me more hyper so yes it is
worse. My diet has reversed since Lex. a huge breakfast medium lunch small
dinner. If I should go hungry for more than a few minutes I get depressed
severly. I have very little libido which I love cause I don't have to waste
all that time masturbating in front of a computer sitting in a chair. I
suppose Men are now masturbating at desks rather than in beds or on toilets.
I used to be in a band called LOOB Last Out Of Bellevue, and now this
therapist I have keeps asking me if I have checked in at bellevue yet cause
of I can't remember why. I've already done the Bellevue. And i like turtles.
How many things can you do in a day. My cat and dog are my first priority,
swimming, grooming, walking ,connecting with the wildlife via camera and
fixing lunch for me and kitty cat and cleaning up dog poop and laundry and
emails and a meditation, some doctor appointments and I have not a clue how
on earth people have time left over for a day job, or even part time work.
They should make bush and chenney clean rest stop bathrooms for the rest of
their life.
I had to start Lexapro at 2.5mg as when I took the initial tablet of 10mg I
freaked out and wandered the predawn streets trying to decide which hospital
(burning skin, paper bag breathing) I should get to and thus began my 500 a
day picture taking obsession. Did you know there are no Doctors in the
emergency room at St. Vincents on the weekend. I was there all morning today
and finally I left without being seen after three hours of form filing
waiting sitting lying down then pacing . My Psychiatrist had written out my
prescription improperly and now is on vacation and the hospital refuses to
help as does general practioner. I finally left screaming likin a raving
idiot "what do I have to do to see a fucking doctor around here, slash up my
arms again? I was getting depressed cause of no food. And bad service. Other
people were bleeding just lying there, only nurse assistants. Hoping this
Lexapro works cause the psychiatrist who can't spell or write
properprescriptions says my only hope is lexapro or shock treatment.
love modern city life don't ya.. But it's here or " cookie cutter manicured
green lawns" which make me want to puke my insides out.
Blog whatever you like of this you want. I don't know if I could do my own
blog cause i need someone to write to specifically. Will try to read some of
your book, i think i may have some time ago and like it. I am terrible at
reading. I cannot even have the patience to read a menu in fact. I like
reading emails cause they are correspondence. like ping pong. I try to write
as much as possible in "no person".
If you do blog this stuff maybe change my name? to what? Clover? Thomkin?
Bubbles?
been a longtime fantasy, or mule. Should have been a shepard. After bike
riding 10 years didn't want to see the world go by fast. a couple of blocks
to the pharmacy can take hours if photographing the flowers and bugs.
Right now there are alot of dried up already bloomed flowers and their
attractive colors are flatter and texture crinckely papery than moist. I
rescued a lady bug off of a cement driveway.
Breastroke with eyes closed. Life is moisture. I just sucked down a 10 mg
valium. a pretty powder blue tastes like candy i want to eat the whole yummy
bottle. Valiums' designers' drug of choice was scotch. He sampled all his
concoctions and valium made him depressed too. It has so much promise in the
beginning then stabs you down the back. My first debut with it went swimming
and it was like that scene in Contact with Jodi Foster when she "travels"
far away but time does not record that she went anywhere, the pool was just
like the dreamy beach where she reconnects with her passed away father,
silky water glowing light and the other swimmers in the slow lane learning
the dog paddle became wonderful sea turtles. Should have let it dissolve
slower and savored. Maybe I will sleep tonight. First thing i check at the
pool is are the turtles here?
The insomnia started long before Lexapro. How do you fall asleep again, I
cant remember. How did I forget? Lexapro makes me more hyper so yes it is
worse. My diet has reversed since Lex. a huge breakfast medium lunch small
dinner. If I should go hungry for more than a few minutes I get depressed
severly. I have very little libido which I love cause I don't have to waste
all that time masturbating in front of a computer sitting in a chair. I
suppose Men are now masturbating at desks rather than in beds or on toilets.
I used to be in a band called LOOB Last Out Of Bellevue, and now this
therapist I have keeps asking me if I have checked in at bellevue yet cause
of I can't remember why. I've already done the Bellevue. And i like turtles.
How many things can you do in a day. My cat and dog are my first priority,
swimming, grooming, walking ,connecting with the wildlife via camera and
fixing lunch for me and kitty cat and cleaning up dog poop and laundry and
emails and a meditation, some doctor appointments and I have not a clue how
on earth people have time left over for a day job, or even part time work.
They should make bush and chenney clean rest stop bathrooms for the rest of
their life.
I had to start Lexapro at 2.5mg as when I took the initial tablet of 10mg I
freaked out and wandered the predawn streets trying to decide which hospital
(burning skin, paper bag breathing) I should get to and thus began my 500 a
day picture taking obsession. Did you know there are no Doctors in the
emergency room at St. Vincents on the weekend. I was there all morning today
and finally I left without being seen after three hours of form filing
waiting sitting lying down then pacing . My Psychiatrist had written out my
prescription improperly and now is on vacation and the hospital refuses to
help as does general practioner. I finally left screaming likin a raving
idiot "what do I have to do to see a fucking doctor around here, slash up my
arms again? I was getting depressed cause of no food. And bad service. Other
people were bleeding just lying there, only nurse assistants. Hoping this
Lexapro works cause the psychiatrist who can't spell or write
properprescriptions says my only hope is lexapro or shock treatment.
love modern city life don't ya.. But it's here or " cookie cutter manicured
green lawns" which make me want to puke my insides out.
Blog whatever you like of this you want. I don't know if I could do my own
blog cause i need someone to write to specifically. Will try to read some of
your book, i think i may have some time ago and like it. I am terrible at
reading. I cannot even have the patience to read a menu in fact. I like
reading emails cause they are correspondence. like ping pong. I try to write
as much as possible in "no person".
If you do blog this stuff maybe change my name? to what? Clover? Thomkin?
Bubbles?
Saturday, June 24, 2006
Re: I hate my therapist
Mark,
I am in the backyard in the hammock, my summer refuge. There's really no need to go camping or travel. Apart from being expensive and uncomfortable, travel takes so much time -- to plan, to pack, to prepare, and to recover once you return. I've traveled plenty and when all is said and done, I almost think it is the liberation of being immersed in a different language and anonymity that are the biggest benefits.
That is why I've taken to submerging myself in Spanish in as many ways as possible. Some days I try to do everything in Spanish or French.
With this letter, I've also decided to send everything I write to one of my blogs. Maybe my personality will shape up that way into something more consistent. Someone, maybe Mark Twain -- I should look it up in Bartlett's or Google -- said "The secret is to treat everyone the same way." I think I may have different ways of writing, at least, to different people. If all my letters end up in the same place on my blog, maybe it will help define myself, although that would be a first.
I also wish I could include your letter on the blog, since it was so interesting. But you might object, even though the government and who knows who else has access to any email we send, if they're really interested.
If you recognize your delusions as such, are they really delusions? Tell your psychiatrist I used to have a license plate that read HLOOSN 8 (hallucinate). You might give him fashion advice, too.
I have no experience with Lexapro, but it sounds good to me. With Prozac, you feel nothing. Nothing. I truly think I could and should stop taking it, but people tell me I am cranky when I have stopped. (I think probably I'm just less compliant, less willing to do the things they want me to do.)
Maybe I'll look into Lexapro, but I enjoy sleeping. That's one thing about Prozac. When you start at least, you dream in new ways.
I'd better end before the computer battery runs down. I've got the new Andrew Holleran novel, Grief, here to read. It's short. I like short books. I read three plays recently -- The History Boys, Well, and Shining City -- and they were all wonderful. And short.
If you are interested in reading my book about Guatemala, let me know. I'd be interested in your opinion of it, although I think I need to revise it into past tense instead of present tense. Two literary agents told me that might make it more effective.
Hope you are enjoying the weekend. The weather here is ideal for a brief moment. Hammock time.
Greg
I am in the backyard in the hammock, my summer refuge. There's really no need to go camping or travel. Apart from being expensive and uncomfortable, travel takes so much time -- to plan, to pack, to prepare, and to recover once you return. I've traveled plenty and when all is said and done, I almost think it is the liberation of being immersed in a different language and anonymity that are the biggest benefits.
That is why I've taken to submerging myself in Spanish in as many ways as possible. Some days I try to do everything in Spanish or French.
With this letter, I've also decided to send everything I write to one of my blogs. Maybe my personality will shape up that way into something more consistent. Someone, maybe Mark Twain -- I should look it up in Bartlett's or Google -- said "The secret is to treat everyone the same way." I think I may have different ways of writing, at least, to different people. If all my letters end up in the same place on my blog, maybe it will help define myself, although that would be a first.
I also wish I could include your letter on the blog, since it was so interesting. But you might object, even though the government and who knows who else has access to any email we send, if they're really interested.
If you recognize your delusions as such, are they really delusions? Tell your psychiatrist I used to have a license plate that read HLOOSN 8 (hallucinate). You might give him fashion advice, too.
I have no experience with Lexapro, but it sounds good to me. With Prozac, you feel nothing. Nothing. I truly think I could and should stop taking it, but people tell me I am cranky when I have stopped. (I think probably I'm just less compliant, less willing to do the things they want me to do.)
Maybe I'll look into Lexapro, but I enjoy sleeping. That's one thing about Prozac. When you start at least, you dream in new ways.
I'd better end before the computer battery runs down. I've got the new Andrew Holleran novel, Grief, here to read. It's short. I like short books. I read three plays recently -- The History Boys, Well, and Shining City -- and they were all wonderful. And short.
If you are interested in reading my book about Guatemala, let me know. I'd be interested in your opinion of it, although I think I need to revise it into past tense instead of present tense. Two literary agents told me that might make it more effective.
Hope you are enjoying the weekend. The weather here is ideal for a brief moment. Hammock time.
Greg
Friday, June 23, 2006
Friends, Work, Money, Sex, Church, Joni Mitchell
Dan and John,
As I was delivering papers today, a bird flew out of one of the mailboxes and into my car, settling unhappily into the back seat. Never a dull moment for the proletariat.
I rewatched part of "End of the Spear," trying to figure out if I should use some clips for a little comic video about naked savages and missionaries. Then I watched "The Family Stone," because I am always taken in by Hollywood sentimentality and romantic comedies set during Christmas time. Both movies made me cry, I am such a sap.
And I took some notes, not on the movie but on the recent flare-up of miscommunication and anger, the likes of which I had not seen since the earliest days of email and mailing lists, back when flame wars were inevitable and routine.
My copy of Joni Mitchell's "Blue" has been missing for a long time. I'm sure I had the vinyl once upon a time and several copies in one format or another over the years. The library copy came the other day and I ripped it to my computer, but still haven't listened to it. I think the line that stuck in my head for years was actually from her first or second album, the song about a person on a dark spiritual search of some kind, getting into "the Zodiac and zen," and then -- and this is the line that always, from the beginning, haunted me a little -- "friends who come to find they can't be friends." Some kind of little pang always went through me when she sang that line, accompanied by her haunting guitar. I never really related to people too well for one reason or another. I never had brothers. I never had that sports-oriented, girls-oriented, bonding thing. I often felt most at home with gay men, but the subculture made me squirm, especially when the gay "lifestyle" started to publicly assert itself.
For reasons of religion, sexuality, and things I might have told my psychiatrist if I'd ever seen one, society in general eluded me. I've had so many jobs I've lost count. Rejection hardly fazes me. Having endured more than a decade of freelance writing, I understood rejection intimately. I may have even thrived on it.
Because I was inept or otherwise incapable of playing social games (you should see me try to wear a tie), inevitably my presence caused discomfort, because people, especially at those failed work situations, expect you to be a part of the social game. And I was no more better at office politics than I was at football. When someone thinks you see through the social role they have assumed, they eventually tire of having you around, puncturing holes in the pretense, which they have come to accept as real. The clothes become the person in reality and they do not want to return to the embarrassment and insecurity of a stripped down state.
I have to compose a long letter to our sister church in Colombia about recent events and plans. I chatted last night with my friend there, Andres, who had just passed his German test in order to get a visa to visit Germany. He was elated and so was I. I'd sent him German language movies to help him study. He's kind of shy and he's never traveled anywhere, even to the ocean. It will be the first time he is in a plane, too.
One of the things I am putting in the letter has to do with the sister church relationship. We on the sister church committee from the beginning have asked ourselves over and over what we can do to strengthen the relationship and "to help." It always seems to involve money, although they've never asked us for money. We've always sent some because we don't know what else to do. But I think we have already achieved something substantial in that relationship in that I feel that the people at the Colombian church are as much my church family as the people at First Menno. I think Andres, at least, also feels the same way. We're always there for each other. We won't starve on some street corner. We'll always have love and support from each other.
I feel that with the two of you as well, although maybe not so clearly. My feelings of alienation extend beyond the workplace and into the church, to some degree. I am definitely alienated from my first church, East Bend, where I've harbored thoughts of "burning down the mission."
Everything I write embarrasses me. My letter in the newspaper tonight embarrasses me. All blog entries embarrass me. I can't help it. I've taken off the "comments" option on The Last Good Name, because I don't really want interaction. I didn't start that particular blog so other people could read it. This makes no sense to some people, but so be it.
I used to write and get read all the time. I have written thousands of articles for publication. I enjoy Ryan Jackson's writing in the News-Gazette a lot and noticed him back before he even had his own column. He gets a lot of responses lately and I hope none of it goes to his head, although it may be too late. I know from my own experience and from that of Ernie that a lot of praise at a young age can wreak havoc in one's development. But I'm as guilty as the next guy. I wrote Jackson a long time ago and encouraged him.
I think the thing he has now and I have let slide is that youthful, careless sense of humor, when you can make fun of stuff and not put a lot of importance on things. I'm not sure in the current flame war when the line was crossed, when gentle chiding and joshing turned into attack. I don't know if it was John or me who took the step too far.
I went insane during the Vietnam War and I do speak literally and I attribute it to the hypocrisy and lies of society and church at that time. My rug of security as a young teen was yanked right out from under me. I got over it. Ernie has never recovered from 9/11. He watched the TV footage over and over that week. He dropped out of high school within months. He has found nothing worth doing, although at the moment he would seem to be getting better. He's going back to Telluride, Colorado, in a week, where he didn't watch news, snowboarded most of the time, and was in a place away from everything he or any of us knew.
The war in Iraq and everything else in the news has been giving me the same feeling of madness that Vietnam did. I would move to Colombia or Guatemala if Lee would let me. When the three prisoners committed suicide recently, and the Guantanamo military head called it an aggressive act of war, I was plunged back into the twilight zone. That's just one instance of a thousand of insanities that sap me of my sense of humor (or perverts it into cynicism and sarcasm).
Anyway, I'm trying to find my Ryan Jackson sense of humor again. I'm sure Jesus laughed his head off. There's always something hilarious going on. Right now, it's this ridiculous blog war. Want me to delete that review of "End of the Spear"? Really, my prose is not that precious to me or anyone else.
Now I'm going out into the hammock, where I have been trying to clock at least an hour if not three a day, to read and find something to laugh about. Maybe a bird will land on me. Or I can just birdwatch.
PG
As I was delivering papers today, a bird flew out of one of the mailboxes and into my car, settling unhappily into the back seat. Never a dull moment for the proletariat.
I rewatched part of "End of the Spear," trying to figure out if I should use some clips for a little comic video about naked savages and missionaries. Then I watched "The Family Stone," because I am always taken in by Hollywood sentimentality and romantic comedies set during Christmas time. Both movies made me cry, I am such a sap.
And I took some notes, not on the movie but on the recent flare-up of miscommunication and anger, the likes of which I had not seen since the earliest days of email and mailing lists, back when flame wars were inevitable and routine.
My copy of Joni Mitchell's "Blue" has been missing for a long time. I'm sure I had the vinyl once upon a time and several copies in one format or another over the years. The library copy came the other day and I ripped it to my computer, but still haven't listened to it. I think the line that stuck in my head for years was actually from her first or second album, the song about a person on a dark spiritual search of some kind, getting into "the Zodiac and zen," and then -- and this is the line that always, from the beginning, haunted me a little -- "friends who come to find they can't be friends." Some kind of little pang always went through me when she sang that line, accompanied by her haunting guitar. I never really related to people too well for one reason or another. I never had brothers. I never had that sports-oriented, girls-oriented, bonding thing. I often felt most at home with gay men, but the subculture made me squirm, especially when the gay "lifestyle" started to publicly assert itself.
For reasons of religion, sexuality, and things I might have told my psychiatrist if I'd ever seen one, society in general eluded me. I've had so many jobs I've lost count. Rejection hardly fazes me. Having endured more than a decade of freelance writing, I understood rejection intimately. I may have even thrived on it.
Because I was inept or otherwise incapable of playing social games (you should see me try to wear a tie), inevitably my presence caused discomfort, because people, especially at those failed work situations, expect you to be a part of the social game. And I was no more better at office politics than I was at football. When someone thinks you see through the social role they have assumed, they eventually tire of having you around, puncturing holes in the pretense, which they have come to accept as real. The clothes become the person in reality and they do not want to return to the embarrassment and insecurity of a stripped down state.
I have to compose a long letter to our sister church in Colombia about recent events and plans. I chatted last night with my friend there, Andres, who had just passed his German test in order to get a visa to visit Germany. He was elated and so was I. I'd sent him German language movies to help him study. He's kind of shy and he's never traveled anywhere, even to the ocean. It will be the first time he is in a plane, too.
One of the things I am putting in the letter has to do with the sister church relationship. We on the sister church committee from the beginning have asked ourselves over and over what we can do to strengthen the relationship and "to help." It always seems to involve money, although they've never asked us for money. We've always sent some because we don't know what else to do. But I think we have already achieved something substantial in that relationship in that I feel that the people at the Colombian church are as much my church family as the people at First Menno. I think Andres, at least, also feels the same way. We're always there for each other. We won't starve on some street corner. We'll always have love and support from each other.
I feel that with the two of you as well, although maybe not so clearly. My feelings of alienation extend beyond the workplace and into the church, to some degree. I am definitely alienated from my first church, East Bend, where I've harbored thoughts of "burning down the mission."
Everything I write embarrasses me. My letter in the newspaper tonight embarrasses me. All blog entries embarrass me. I can't help it. I've taken off the "comments" option on The Last Good Name, because I don't really want interaction. I didn't start that particular blog so other people could read it. This makes no sense to some people, but so be it.
I used to write and get read all the time. I have written thousands of articles for publication. I enjoy Ryan Jackson's writing in the News-Gazette a lot and noticed him back before he even had his own column. He gets a lot of responses lately and I hope none of it goes to his head, although it may be too late. I know from my own experience and from that of Ernie that a lot of praise at a young age can wreak havoc in one's development. But I'm as guilty as the next guy. I wrote Jackson a long time ago and encouraged him.
I think the thing he has now and I have let slide is that youthful, careless sense of humor, when you can make fun of stuff and not put a lot of importance on things. I'm not sure in the current flame war when the line was crossed, when gentle chiding and joshing turned into attack. I don't know if it was John or me who took the step too far.
I went insane during the Vietnam War and I do speak literally and I attribute it to the hypocrisy and lies of society and church at that time. My rug of security as a young teen was yanked right out from under me. I got over it. Ernie has never recovered from 9/11. He watched the TV footage over and over that week. He dropped out of high school within months. He has found nothing worth doing, although at the moment he would seem to be getting better. He's going back to Telluride, Colorado, in a week, where he didn't watch news, snowboarded most of the time, and was in a place away from everything he or any of us knew.
The war in Iraq and everything else in the news has been giving me the same feeling of madness that Vietnam did. I would move to Colombia or Guatemala if Lee would let me. When the three prisoners committed suicide recently, and the Guantanamo military head called it an aggressive act of war, I was plunged back into the twilight zone. That's just one instance of a thousand of insanities that sap me of my sense of humor (or perverts it into cynicism and sarcasm).
Anyway, I'm trying to find my Ryan Jackson sense of humor again. I'm sure Jesus laughed his head off. There's always something hilarious going on. Right now, it's this ridiculous blog war. Want me to delete that review of "End of the Spear"? Really, my prose is not that precious to me or anyone else.
Now I'm going out into the hammock, where I have been trying to clock at least an hour if not three a day, to read and find something to laugh about. Maybe a bird will land on me. Or I can just birdwatch.
PG
Thursday, June 22, 2006
Vote for Nacho
Algunos quieren saber el razon que prefiero escribir en español.
Well, let me tell you. In the review of Nacho Libre in the News-Gazette, critic Richard Leskosky notes that the movie is filled with untranslated Spanish dialogue as well as bad accents that veer from Ireland to Timbuktu. Sounds like a recommendation to me!
I'm all over those multi-lingual, Umberto Ecoesque polyglot stews. So what if there's only partial comprehension? Isn't there always regardless?
I've certainly learned that the hard way. I can explain something to The Crockhead until I'm blue in the face and he still insists on believing the falsehoods he has programmed into his brain by repeating them so frequently.
I was going to do a tutorial slash analysis of The Crockhead's review of Prairie Home Companion, following the style that Roland Barthes used to dissect Balzac's short story, S/Z. But what's the point? He'll just end up making fun of me as will all of his blogger groupies.
Recently I find contentment in watching the works of Michael Haneke, even with no one to share about them. All the Crockhead wants to do is judge movies, like a consumer policeman. He mistakenly believes that is the purpose of film criticism. Anyone who attempts to do anything more, to see deeper, to analyze or understand, is -- to his way of thinking -- pretentious and, perish the thought, an intellectual.
There so much more and too little time to waste arguing what's better or what's worse and missing the significance entirely, not to mention the pleasure.
So this is Garbo Blog. I will not darken the doorstep of the Crockhead again, the scoffers and mockers, the workers caught in a society of lies with no hope of knowing the truth.
As they say, lo que sea. Whatever.
Well, let me tell you. In the review of Nacho Libre in the News-Gazette, critic Richard Leskosky notes that the movie is filled with untranslated Spanish dialogue as well as bad accents that veer from Ireland to Timbuktu. Sounds like a recommendation to me!
I'm all over those multi-lingual, Umberto Ecoesque polyglot stews. So what if there's only partial comprehension? Isn't there always regardless?
I've certainly learned that the hard way. I can explain something to The Crockhead until I'm blue in the face and he still insists on believing the falsehoods he has programmed into his brain by repeating them so frequently.
I was going to do a tutorial slash analysis of The Crockhead's review of Prairie Home Companion, following the style that Roland Barthes used to dissect Balzac's short story, S/Z. But what's the point? He'll just end up making fun of me as will all of his blogger groupies.
Recently I find contentment in watching the works of Michael Haneke, even with no one to share about them. All the Crockhead wants to do is judge movies, like a consumer policeman. He mistakenly believes that is the purpose of film criticism. Anyone who attempts to do anything more, to see deeper, to analyze or understand, is -- to his way of thinking -- pretentious and, perish the thought, an intellectual.
There so much more and too little time to waste arguing what's better or what's worse and missing the significance entirely, not to mention the pleasure.
So this is Garbo Blog. I will not darken the doorstep of the Crockhead again, the scoffers and mockers, the workers caught in a society of lies with no hope of knowing the truth.
As they say, lo que sea. Whatever.
Wednesday, June 21, 2006
A Guy Thing
Lead someone blindfolded (who also lacks access to the film industry publicity machine) into "A Prairie Home Companion" and, given any five minute segment, it should be immediately obvious that this could only be a film by Robert Altman. And one of his best.
What a felicitous combination of talents. The performers are a joy to watch as they are given long leashes by Altman, who lets them sing, talk all over each other, improvise, laugh, and interact with seeming abandon. Even Lindsay Lohan, despite the tarnish of her public appearances, car wrecks, shopping sprees, and whatever else appears in the tabloids, comes across appealingly and demonstrates her thespian licks.
I even liked the bad jokes sung by Woody Harrelson and John C. Riley. I especially liked the bad jokes. The bad jokes, and Meryl Streep, and Lily Tomlin, and the unnamed musicians in the background, and even Garrison Keeler, whose big head and unhurried demeanor are fascinating to watch.
The movie has been adequately rated, reviewed, and recapped by countless critics already and there's little point in recounting details one more time or giving my own rating, one way or the other.
But given the recent discussions against people who theorize about movies in general -- as opposed to those who give individual consumer reports on specific films (see http://crockheadabroad.blogspot.com for the fray) -- I simply want SIMPLY to point out some possible benefits of watching movies in the context of film history.
Take the "auteur theory." That posits that a film is the product primarily of the director. Of course, most movies are a collective, labor- and cost-intensive art, but you have to blame somebody, right? Why not the director?
Robert Altman was one of the first to use overlapping dialogue, for one thing. Studio execs shook their heads and said, "They're all talking at once!" when he made movies like "California Split" and "Nashville" back in the 1970s. No one has really done this better -- or at all. "A Prairie Home Companion" is like a three-ring circus to watch and listen to.
I never understood why people, such as Pauline Kael, dismissed the auteur theory. Many, if not most, people think of the lead actor, the movie star, as the "owner" of the movie. Have you seen the new Jim Carrey movie?, they will ask. But I prefer to think of "Eternal Sunshine of the Endless Mind" as a film by Charlie Kauffman and Michel Gondry. "The Truman Show" is a Peter Weir film. OK, I'll give you "Bruce Almighty" as a Jim Carrey movie. There was a director, but I'm hesitant to call him an auteur.
Using the auteur theory, you can appreciate the bad movies of Robert Altman, too. I recently watched one of his worst, "Quintet," which was recently released on DVD. (It stars Paul Newman, who has been the talk of that aforementioned argument on another blog in relation to "The Sting" and "Cars.") "Quintet" is set in a frozen future science fiction world (shot in Canada) of violence, board games, and ice. It makes very little sense and has so little sense of humor, Altman must have had stomach cramps throughout the entire shooting. I sometimes think he only wanted to make a movie set in snow and ice to balance the film he shot in rain and night ("McCabe and Mrs. Miller") and to add another genre revision to his belt, science fiction to match the gangster film, the western, the war movie, etc. etc.
By now, Altman has no need to tackle genre films (although "Gosford Park" might be considered his British comedy of manners genre film); he is a genre unto himself.
Visually, "A Prairie Home Companion" brings to mind another great auteur pair: Joseph von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich. A whole batch of their collaborations were recently released in a fine DVD set and watching "The Devil is a Woman" again, I was made dizzy by the insane visual flourishes of even the first ten minutes. Who cares about the story? There are smoke, scrims, fabrics, clashing designs, crowds, clothes, a veritable snowstorm of textures and designs all thrown at once. It is madness. And gorgeous. It can play on in the background like television wallpaper, eye exercises.
"A Prairie Home Companion," particularly in the dressing room scenes of Lily Tomlin and Meryl Streep, uses another madly detailed design scheme, with multiple mirrors, draped clothes, words scribbled on Lindsey Lohan's jeans, intricate visual details abounding that -- combined with the lush and overlapping dialogue -- dazzle the mind more than all the computer generated effects in King Kong and Lord of the Rings combined.
I'll take natural, well thought out mise-en-scene any day over fake computer effects. I'm not as impressed by hoards of attacking Orcs or Trojans as I am by the waving green sea Fellini designed out of garbage bags in "And The Ship Sails On." One is photography and design; the other is data bits.
I have rambled on beyond my time. The point I was trying to make, and I think I have lost by this point, is that the more one studies and compares film, the more one can appreciate and enjoy film. The Crockhead and other know-nothing, Ding an sich film reviewers mock history and theory. I have to go now and return my NetFlix DVDs before the postman arrives. I didn't even get around to Guy Debord or Guy Noir or semiotics, for that matter, but they will have to wait.
Swimming before semiotics, I always say.
What a felicitous combination of talents. The performers are a joy to watch as they are given long leashes by Altman, who lets them sing, talk all over each other, improvise, laugh, and interact with seeming abandon. Even Lindsay Lohan, despite the tarnish of her public appearances, car wrecks, shopping sprees, and whatever else appears in the tabloids, comes across appealingly and demonstrates her thespian licks.
I even liked the bad jokes sung by Woody Harrelson and John C. Riley. I especially liked the bad jokes. The bad jokes, and Meryl Streep, and Lily Tomlin, and the unnamed musicians in the background, and even Garrison Keeler, whose big head and unhurried demeanor are fascinating to watch.
The movie has been adequately rated, reviewed, and recapped by countless critics already and there's little point in recounting details one more time or giving my own rating, one way or the other.
But given the recent discussions against people who theorize about movies in general -- as opposed to those who give individual consumer reports on specific films (see http://crockheadabroad.blogspot.com for the fray) -- I simply want SIMPLY to point out some possible benefits of watching movies in the context of film history.
Take the "auteur theory." That posits that a film is the product primarily of the director. Of course, most movies are a collective, labor- and cost-intensive art, but you have to blame somebody, right? Why not the director?
Robert Altman was one of the first to use overlapping dialogue, for one thing. Studio execs shook their heads and said, "They're all talking at once!" when he made movies like "California Split" and "Nashville" back in the 1970s. No one has really done this better -- or at all. "A Prairie Home Companion" is like a three-ring circus to watch and listen to.
I never understood why people, such as Pauline Kael, dismissed the auteur theory. Many, if not most, people think of the lead actor, the movie star, as the "owner" of the movie. Have you seen the new Jim Carrey movie?, they will ask. But I prefer to think of "Eternal Sunshine of the Endless Mind" as a film by Charlie Kauffman and Michel Gondry. "The Truman Show" is a Peter Weir film. OK, I'll give you "Bruce Almighty" as a Jim Carrey movie. There was a director, but I'm hesitant to call him an auteur.
Using the auteur theory, you can appreciate the bad movies of Robert Altman, too. I recently watched one of his worst, "Quintet," which was recently released on DVD. (It stars Paul Newman, who has been the talk of that aforementioned argument on another blog in relation to "The Sting" and "Cars.") "Quintet" is set in a frozen future science fiction world (shot in Canada) of violence, board games, and ice. It makes very little sense and has so little sense of humor, Altman must have had stomach cramps throughout the entire shooting. I sometimes think he only wanted to make a movie set in snow and ice to balance the film he shot in rain and night ("McCabe and Mrs. Miller") and to add another genre revision to his belt, science fiction to match the gangster film, the western, the war movie, etc. etc.
By now, Altman has no need to tackle genre films (although "Gosford Park" might be considered his British comedy of manners genre film); he is a genre unto himself.
Visually, "A Prairie Home Companion" brings to mind another great auteur pair: Joseph von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich. A whole batch of their collaborations were recently released in a fine DVD set and watching "The Devil is a Woman" again, I was made dizzy by the insane visual flourishes of even the first ten minutes. Who cares about the story? There are smoke, scrims, fabrics, clashing designs, crowds, clothes, a veritable snowstorm of textures and designs all thrown at once. It is madness. And gorgeous. It can play on in the background like television wallpaper, eye exercises.
"A Prairie Home Companion," particularly in the dressing room scenes of Lily Tomlin and Meryl Streep, uses another madly detailed design scheme, with multiple mirrors, draped clothes, words scribbled on Lindsey Lohan's jeans, intricate visual details abounding that -- combined with the lush and overlapping dialogue -- dazzle the mind more than all the computer generated effects in King Kong and Lord of the Rings combined.
I'll take natural, well thought out mise-en-scene any day over fake computer effects. I'm not as impressed by hoards of attacking Orcs or Trojans as I am by the waving green sea Fellini designed out of garbage bags in "And The Ship Sails On." One is photography and design; the other is data bits.
I have rambled on beyond my time. The point I was trying to make, and I think I have lost by this point, is that the more one studies and compares film, the more one can appreciate and enjoy film. The Crockhead and other know-nothing, Ding an sich film reviewers mock history and theory. I have to go now and return my NetFlix DVDs before the postman arrives. I didn't even get around to Guy Debord or Guy Noir or semiotics, for that matter, but they will have to wait.
Swimming before semiotics, I always say.
Monday, June 19, 2006
Saturday, June 17, 2006
The Luck Diet
"I am going to lose weight," she said. "I'm not following a plan. It's luck."
"I smell," she said.
I doubt that, I told her. Let me see.
She lifted her shirt.
Hmmm, I said. Smells like vacation Bible school to me.
She laughed.
A lot of things remind me of vacation Bible school, I said.
I should tell the Crockhead about the article on copyright in the new issue of The New Yorker, how the grandson of James Joyce is ruining scholarship with his use of revised copyright laws. It quotes my hero, Lawrence Lessig.
When you don't care to be a profiteer, copyright is a questionable benefit for an artist.
The novels have jammed up in loci in the skull, claiming corners for themselves and sucking in new references and directions with Hooveresque power, although not J.Edgar or Herbert-like. (When you've been through Herbert and J. Edgar..., as the song goes).
Mark Mothersbaugh did the soundtrack for The Ringer. He was, of course, of the new wave band Devo, which of course had a hit with "Mongoloid." The mentally challenged are telepathic. Telepathy is a vestige of an earlier mental state in human evolution. To be telepathic is not to be wiser, but actually more primitive a development. This is not an original thought.
And then there is the scene in The Ringer in which Johnny Knoxville returns to help his fallen rival in the race. What could be more Mennonite/Amish than this act, lifted directly from the Martyr's Mirror All-Star Winner's (or Loser's) Rankings.
Once again, he said, it reminds me of vacation Bible school.
"What does?" she asks.
Writing these notes in a public place. Testimony given in public, hoping no one notices. Standing on a soapbox for posterity and hoping to be invisible at the same time.
"I smell," she said.
I doubt that, I told her. Let me see.
She lifted her shirt.
Hmmm, I said. Smells like vacation Bible school to me.
She laughed.
A lot of things remind me of vacation Bible school, I said.
I should tell the Crockhead about the article on copyright in the new issue of The New Yorker, how the grandson of James Joyce is ruining scholarship with his use of revised copyright laws. It quotes my hero, Lawrence Lessig.
When you don't care to be a profiteer, copyright is a questionable benefit for an artist.
The novels have jammed up in loci in the skull, claiming corners for themselves and sucking in new references and directions with Hooveresque power, although not J.Edgar or Herbert-like. (When you've been through Herbert and J. Edgar..., as the song goes).
Mark Mothersbaugh did the soundtrack for The Ringer. He was, of course, of the new wave band Devo, which of course had a hit with "Mongoloid." The mentally challenged are telepathic. Telepathy is a vestige of an earlier mental state in human evolution. To be telepathic is not to be wiser, but actually more primitive a development. This is not an original thought.
And then there is the scene in The Ringer in which Johnny Knoxville returns to help his fallen rival in the race. What could be more Mennonite/Amish than this act, lifted directly from the Martyr's Mirror All-Star Winner's (or Loser's) Rankings.
Once again, he said, it reminds me of vacation Bible school.
"What does?" she asks.
Writing these notes in a public place. Testimony given in public, hoping no one notices. Standing on a soapbox for posterity and hoping to be invisible at the same time.
Thursday, June 08, 2006
L'Enfant, take two
The movie at the Art Theatre right now, "L'Enfant," is the most recent film by the Belgian Dardenne brothers, who made "The Son" a few years ago. They make films with the most moral, Christian sensibility since Robert Bresson did 40 years ago, but the films are in no way religious.
Here is one paragraph of a review of "L'Enfant" from the New York Times. I'm sending it because it quotes Crime and Punishment. Also, wanting to know as little as possible about the movie before I saw it, I avoided reviews (even though the film had won the top prize at Cannes in 2005), but I couldn't help learning out of the corner of my eyes that it involved someone who sells his child. This is almost unbearable to watch. But it is a relief that the film does not follow a Hollywood suspense tradition; things are "resolved" rather quickly; and the main focus of the movie is not saving the child but about the character and psychology of the young man who thoughtlessly does the deed and the potential for his eventual redemption.
Here is one paragraph of a review of "L'Enfant" from the New York Times. I'm sending it because it quotes Crime and Punishment. Also, wanting to know as little as possible about the movie before I saw it, I avoided reviews (even though the film had won the top prize at Cannes in 2005), but I couldn't help learning out of the corner of my eyes that it involved someone who sells his child. This is almost unbearable to watch. But it is a relief that the film does not follow a Hollywood suspense tradition; things are "resolved" rather quickly; and the main focus of the movie is not saving the child but about the character and psychology of the young man who thoughtlessly does the deed and the potential for his eventual redemption.
From the NYTimes critic Manohla Dargis: "Why make a film about Bruno? The same might be asked about Raskolnikov. Like Robert Bresson, whose "Pickpocket" informs "L'Enfant" and is itself a loose reworking of "Crime and Punishment," the Dardennes are not interested in passing judgment on a grievously flawed character; that's why God and Hollywood were invented. Since there is no moral ambiguity in the act of selling another human being, there would be no point in such judgment, other than to indulge in some self-satisfied finger-wagging. Rather, what interests the Dardennes — what invests their work with such terrific urgency — is not only how Bruno became the kind of man who would sell a child as casually as a slab of beef, but also whether a man like this, having committed such a repellent offense, can find redemption."
L'Enfant
In the scene in the water, when Bruno saves the his freezing 14-year-old accomplice, there are no edits. It's a continuous take that adds just the amount of authenticity and integrity that one would expect.
"L'Enfant" is of a piece with the other Dardenne movies, in particular a companion to "The Son." The Christian iconography in both films is unmistakeable, although I admit I missed the reference to a young couple and their newborn not having a place to stay for the night... The carpenter and his apprentice in "The Son" was more clearly obvious, although these movies do not evoke symbolism or sermons. They are thoroughly natural, like wood that has been carefully sanded with the grain.
I had avoided reading any reviews until I could see the film, despite the fact that it won last years (2005) Palme D'Or at Cannes. The year passed quickly and the film was worth the wait. From international headlines to a tiny art theatre screening room matinee with only four patrons, how soon the world forgets.
There's even a car and scooter chase. The mean streets are not scenic. But this film is for the ages as much as any Bresson.
Ed and I watched the movie the day after we saw "The Omen." "L'Enfant" was much more frightening, unnerving, unpredictable, and certainly more astute about the question of evil.
You want to contemplate evil in the world? The Omen is a cartoon, a remake of a cartoon at that. I still remembered lines from the first version. There is no way I'd have gone if it weren't that Ed is a horror movie fan and it was free popcorn night. I went to please him and I was glad when it was over and people had stopped talking on their cell phones and I was still licking the salt and caramel flavor from the bottom of my popcorn bucket.
"L'Enfant" is of a piece with the other Dardenne movies, in particular a companion to "The Son." The Christian iconography in both films is unmistakeable, although I admit I missed the reference to a young couple and their newborn not having a place to stay for the night... The carpenter and his apprentice in "The Son" was more clearly obvious, although these movies do not evoke symbolism or sermons. They are thoroughly natural, like wood that has been carefully sanded with the grain.
I had avoided reading any reviews until I could see the film, despite the fact that it won last years (2005) Palme D'Or at Cannes. The year passed quickly and the film was worth the wait. From international headlines to a tiny art theatre screening room matinee with only four patrons, how soon the world forgets.
There's even a car and scooter chase. The mean streets are not scenic. But this film is for the ages as much as any Bresson.
Ed and I watched the movie the day after we saw "The Omen." "L'Enfant" was much more frightening, unnerving, unpredictable, and certainly more astute about the question of evil.
You want to contemplate evil in the world? The Omen is a cartoon, a remake of a cartoon at that. I still remembered lines from the first version. There is no way I'd have gone if it weren't that Ed is a horror movie fan and it was free popcorn night. I went to please him and I was glad when it was over and people had stopped talking on their cell phones and I was still licking the salt and caramel flavor from the bottom of my popcorn bucket.
Sunday, June 04, 2006
Andrew Holleran
"You need the reality to spark you, because that's what you're responding to and that's what you're writing about," he said. "But you've got to fictionalize, too — to make the thing take off."
Mr. Holleran added: "Proust claimed that he had no imagination. And I think it's true in a sense. But on the other hand, he also said that he was against the literature of strict notation. He was infusing his reality with something else. I was relieved when I read that, because you always feel guilty as a writer for not imagining more."
Friday, June 02, 2006
John Howard Yoder
How does one examine the sexual misconduct issue as related to John Howard Yoder?
I know none of the details or gossip. Is it wrong to be curious?
Such a topic is interesting in relation to the legacies of Clinton, Kennedy, and King; to one's personal sexual excesses and inadequacies; to the question of homosexual behavior; and to the religious right's obsession about sexual matters, including voting for "sexual morality" at the expense of a better social ethic of peacemaking, sacrifice, and servanthood...
I know none of the details or gossip. Is it wrong to be curious?
Such a topic is interesting in relation to the legacies of Clinton, Kennedy, and King; to one's personal sexual excesses and inadequacies; to the question of homosexual behavior; and to the religious right's obsession about sexual matters, including voting for "sexual morality" at the expense of a better social ethic of peacemaking, sacrifice, and servanthood...
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