why do i hate it SO much when people post things on facebook like "go yemen go!" or "yeah egypt!", status updates cheering revolution? i guess i'm sympathetic to that in that repressive governments are bad and freedom of speech is good, etc. but there's something so sanctimonious and superficial about those kinds of things, something self congratulatory reminiscent of the way westerners like to believe twitter was central to the protests in iran after their election.
moreover, i think it's because a part of me thinks its just a general, indiscriminate love of "revolution." i think i think this because i feel that way myself, i get excited about things that upend the standard order of the news, catastrophes are wonderful to read about and i love when the numbers are high, higher, always more casualties, damages, homeless it's a perverse thing and i don't know how to explain it. but i feel like that same perversity might be at work when people have those status updates who have blind faith in "student protest," "youth uprisings" and assign them this undeniable good that they may not be worthy of. and in part i think loving those protests, those street movements is just a childish romance, a slightly more mature version of how a toddler loves when an earth mover savages the sidewalk, and how these people now dream of lighting things on fire and grabbing any reason to somehow upend things and run into the street. it's romantic and sexy and fun to upend things, may 68 had all the pretty girls after all. but i just wish they would admit that. at least i think so. maybe they just know a lot more than me and have substantive hopes for what all these "youths" might amount to in terms of better government.
i think they just want it to be like the last scene of the dreamers were they run out into the street and are ready to shout and wear a bandana and feel beautiful, idealistic solidarity. i think it's cute but irritating when it seems like they want to say it's substantive. revolution, if it really changes things, and isn't just bandana wearing and pretty girls, means blood and unhappiness and death and all sorts of things that aren't worth saying "go yemen!" for unless one is quite sure one knows what one is cheering FOR rather than just against, tearing up the sidewalk like that ecstatic toddler.
Thursday, January 27, 2011
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
the discreet charm of the bourgeoisie
so funny. their consciences and the way they live so blandly and vilely. the manners! the "after you"! the drowning out of the truths about diplomatic relations with evil south american countries! that long talk about the lamb and infinite other nonsense at the very end is the ultimate nothingness. how can words be so empty?
i don't even know what to make of all the dreams, of the bleeding sergeant, of the sexy resistance fighter. AH the seizieme. the frenetic ugly sex, how ugly they all really are. how rafael goes from one person to the next at the party excusing himself. what hideous consciences those people have, what pettiness.
and then there are so many incomprehensible things, the military manuevers in the yard? the bishop, gardener? the soldier that dreams for everyone else with the blue eyes? everything was so messy and unfinished and scattered but so drily announced. what consummate manners. i want to read about this movie, i want to know what created this. that was hilarious
ah yes and reading through the wikipedia, just how everything is interrupted. how they deal so casually with the absurdity, how inhumanly unflappable they are. the dead man in the restaurant! how is it possible! there is such an ungodly focus on dinner itself that the bizarre episodes are just interruptions of that ultimate desire for that meal without having to say anything. such meaningless evil.
and all the fumbling, pathetic sex they want so desperately to have is also hilarious. what do these people want? why do they act the way they do? what do they fear? the answers to these questions are extremely banal and mundane. to drink a dhrrrryyyy martini properly. you have to respect the super drunk girl, she might be the only one who has thought enough thoughts to realize that their lifestyle demands a certain numbness
had something else to say about this after watching it like 3 times yesterday but it escapes me now. I JUST remembered -- how their voices are drowned out whenever something of great importance is being said, something that firmly contextualizes this movie, anchors it in the real and ugly politics of the world, is reminiscent of how in the play Mary Stuart, Elizabeth, and all the other characters, are deathly afraid of speaking, let alone writing down Mary Stuart's death certificate. it's kind of hilarious in this way, how circumspectly they must tread so as to always foist the guilt on others. right on down to the last man, who is forced to HOLD the signed sheet with no guidance whatsoever as to what he should do with it. or the noble jailer who refuses to kill mary stuart extra judicially. these are all things that cannot be spoken. and that sensibility is reflected in the discreet charm of the bourgeoisie, that hilarious propriety about not countenancing something by not acknowledging it even as you do it. that bull shit hiding, like not kissing the girl with whom you're cheating. these noble, slimy technicalities. so funny
i don't even know what to make of all the dreams, of the bleeding sergeant, of the sexy resistance fighter. AH the seizieme. the frenetic ugly sex, how ugly they all really are. how rafael goes from one person to the next at the party excusing himself. what hideous consciences those people have, what pettiness.
and then there are so many incomprehensible things, the military manuevers in the yard? the bishop, gardener? the soldier that dreams for everyone else with the blue eyes? everything was so messy and unfinished and scattered but so drily announced. what consummate manners. i want to read about this movie, i want to know what created this. that was hilarious
ah yes and reading through the wikipedia, just how everything is interrupted. how they deal so casually with the absurdity, how inhumanly unflappable they are. the dead man in the restaurant! how is it possible! there is such an ungodly focus on dinner itself that the bizarre episodes are just interruptions of that ultimate desire for that meal without having to say anything. such meaningless evil.
and all the fumbling, pathetic sex they want so desperately to have is also hilarious. what do these people want? why do they act the way they do? what do they fear? the answers to these questions are extremely banal and mundane. to drink a dhrrrryyyy martini properly. you have to respect the super drunk girl, she might be the only one who has thought enough thoughts to realize that their lifestyle demands a certain numbness
had something else to say about this after watching it like 3 times yesterday but it escapes me now. I JUST remembered -- how their voices are drowned out whenever something of great importance is being said, something that firmly contextualizes this movie, anchors it in the real and ugly politics of the world, is reminiscent of how in the play Mary Stuart, Elizabeth, and all the other characters, are deathly afraid of speaking, let alone writing down Mary Stuart's death certificate. it's kind of hilarious in this way, how circumspectly they must tread so as to always foist the guilt on others. right on down to the last man, who is forced to HOLD the signed sheet with no guidance whatsoever as to what he should do with it. or the noble jailer who refuses to kill mary stuart extra judicially. these are all things that cannot be spoken. and that sensibility is reflected in the discreet charm of the bourgeoisie, that hilarious propriety about not countenancing something by not acknowledging it even as you do it. that bull shit hiding, like not kissing the girl with whom you're cheating. these noble, slimy technicalities. so funny
Sunday, December 12, 2010
it's raining outside and it's obliterating all the beauty the snow had wrought. Snow, when looking at rain, is clearly an amazing thing. Getting pelted by rain and soaked to my bones reminds you of how fast and simplemindedly it gets to the ground. It's a sort of rain that constitutes the apocryphal Chinese water torture. Rain just drips, it's pleasant patter is really like the relentless chewing of a beaver through a tree, it breaks things down and seeks the lowest point. Rain would probably be happiest if it could just keep falling, if it could mindlessly follow gravity into an infinite, galactic hole.
Snow is not like rain, snow is alive and diversionary. Descartes said that intelligence is in detours, and rain is as stupid as snow is brilliant. Snow hardly even falls from the sky, it floats. If you watch a flake, a flocon, as i learned earlier today, it falls no more reliably than a swooping bird. It is leisurely, carried by the wind. Snow is delicate enough to land on your nose or the tip of your tongue. Snow is balletic and lacey and distractable. It is also constructive. When snow does fall it piles up with the same genius with which termites build those gigantic nests. They know how to fall on each other, they have a collective intelligence each flake is much too flakey to have alone. The soft curves of snowbanks are magical accumulations, they follow the contours of a tree branch or a garbage back and in so doing underline the whole physical landscape, or outline, depending on how you think about it. everything is special when its shape is replicated by immaculate snow.
and so it's awful when rain pelts those drifts, leaving them scarred like a face with bad acne.
apparently rain isn't even an artful, bullet shape, raindrops really look like miniature hamburger buns, a clunkiness equal to their doings.
snow is perched delicately, it's in moving it that it becomes regular old water.
Snow is not like rain, snow is alive and diversionary. Descartes said that intelligence is in detours, and rain is as stupid as snow is brilliant. Snow hardly even falls from the sky, it floats. If you watch a flake, a flocon, as i learned earlier today, it falls no more reliably than a swooping bird. It is leisurely, carried by the wind. Snow is delicate enough to land on your nose or the tip of your tongue. Snow is balletic and lacey and distractable. It is also constructive. When snow does fall it piles up with the same genius with which termites build those gigantic nests. They know how to fall on each other, they have a collective intelligence each flake is much too flakey to have alone. The soft curves of snowbanks are magical accumulations, they follow the contours of a tree branch or a garbage back and in so doing underline the whole physical landscape, or outline, depending on how you think about it. everything is special when its shape is replicated by immaculate snow.
and so it's awful when rain pelts those drifts, leaving them scarred like a face with bad acne.
apparently rain isn't even an artful, bullet shape, raindrops really look like miniature hamburger buns, a clunkiness equal to their doings.
snow is perched delicately, it's in moving it that it becomes regular old water.
also,
Yet, it was beautiful, a single ugly form is ugly, but if it’s replicated, or spectacularly enlarged it becomes something to reckon with. If the dirty wrinkles of a garbage bag were enlarged to be the size of a mountain they would command your awe, in the same way that if you shrunk a mountain to the size of a soup can it might just look like a large turd.
snow is as hardy as a mountain climbers fingers. earlier this morning i walked past an old church that's been converted into apartments. but it still has the old, heavy building blocks that protrude out in the middle of them. they aren't flat like bricks, they have extruding, natural bits. and the snow is perched on any of the most meagerly graspable bits.
snow is as hardy as a mountain climbers fingers. earlier this morning i walked past an old church that's been converted into apartments. but it still has the old, heavy building blocks that protrude out in the middle of them. they aren't flat like bricks, they have extruding, natural bits. and the snow is perched on any of the most meagerly graspable bits.
Sunday, September 12, 2010
playing war
It's really fun to pretend you're at war. Brandishing a banana at your invented enemies makes the world a very exciting place, everything becomes a prop. When you point your banana and shoot to kill, that you yell "boom" or "pow" rather than actually shoot doesn't make it any less fun. When you start using a banana like a gun, the world instantly becomes an exciting place and you become a man with clear motives and fears. When you have a banana gun, you have reason to run uncommonly fast, to dodge behind cars and get greatly increase your blood pressure, you suddenly start seeing things in high definition.
The physical movement that pretending you're holding a gun and that the world is full of danger entails is probably a large part of what makes it so fun, pumping adrenaline makes it impossible to not get caught up in your imagination. If your body plays its part your mind will join in.
Pretending your banana is a gun and the world your enemy is also terrifically entertaining because it lets you construct the world even more egocentric than usual. Buildings and shrubbery and the anonymous pedestrians that populate a city are cold in the sense that they have nothing to do with you, you don't matter. When you play war, you make what was an impersonal structure into a prop in your life, a random person is now your threat and the ferns are their cover. You supply them with a motive that revolves around you and you engage them insistently.
The drab scenery of McGill campus on a rainy, unseasonably cold September Sunday is thrilling when you populate it with nameless assassins and their hideouts. Its perverse and morbid but nonetheless true that a tree is much more exciting when you imagine there is someone ready to kill you (kill in the lighthearted sense, but it would still be disappointing) hiding behind it, you observe it minutely and that care is rewarded. When you are looking so concertedly and suspiciously at something and it moves, it is as rewarding to kill it with your banana as I imagine it must be for a bird watcher to see their bird. The experience is charged with the fear of the murderous world. Even if it turns out to have been a bird, the anticipation of the surveillance alone is animating.
When I was in the south of France I "played war" often with the kids. Theo, 14, and Jules, 8, in particular. Theo had made machine guns out of discarded plywood with which we would hunt each other. If "shot" we had to sulk back to our "base" before resuming the game. You "shot" someone when you yelled out your unique bullet noises while pointing at the other person before they pointed and yelled at you. I suspect everyone has instinctual bullet noises inside of them ready to erupt when they have the chance to point and and yell, we're probably born squealers or boomers, pistols or bazookas. Knowing that Theo or Jules could be anywhere electrified everywhere and made piles of wood or giant "bobines" into props and part of a thrilling, murderous narrative rather than the sleepy, meaningless stuff they really are. It was like a video game.
Video games are the obvious thing to relate all this too, playing war is like being in a role playing game shooter, rpg shooter. But its also much better and I think much more innocuous because your body is the motor and locus of the excitement rather than the visuals of a TV screen. There's no blood and guts implied in all the electrifying narrative world I've been describing, it originates from and is fueled by a more general notion of "getting" him or her before they "get" you which makes the heart pump and, until physical exhaustion, a self perpetuating excitement.
The physical movement that pretending you're holding a gun and that the world is full of danger entails is probably a large part of what makes it so fun, pumping adrenaline makes it impossible to not get caught up in your imagination. If your body plays its part your mind will join in.
Pretending your banana is a gun and the world your enemy is also terrifically entertaining because it lets you construct the world even more egocentric than usual. Buildings and shrubbery and the anonymous pedestrians that populate a city are cold in the sense that they have nothing to do with you, you don't matter. When you play war, you make what was an impersonal structure into a prop in your life, a random person is now your threat and the ferns are their cover. You supply them with a motive that revolves around you and you engage them insistently.
The drab scenery of McGill campus on a rainy, unseasonably cold September Sunday is thrilling when you populate it with nameless assassins and their hideouts. Its perverse and morbid but nonetheless true that a tree is much more exciting when you imagine there is someone ready to kill you (kill in the lighthearted sense, but it would still be disappointing) hiding behind it, you observe it minutely and that care is rewarded. When you are looking so concertedly and suspiciously at something and it moves, it is as rewarding to kill it with your banana as I imagine it must be for a bird watcher to see their bird. The experience is charged with the fear of the murderous world. Even if it turns out to have been a bird, the anticipation of the surveillance alone is animating.
When I was in the south of France I "played war" often with the kids. Theo, 14, and Jules, 8, in particular. Theo had made machine guns out of discarded plywood with which we would hunt each other. If "shot" we had to sulk back to our "base" before resuming the game. You "shot" someone when you yelled out your unique bullet noises while pointing at the other person before they pointed and yelled at you. I suspect everyone has instinctual bullet noises inside of them ready to erupt when they have the chance to point and and yell, we're probably born squealers or boomers, pistols or bazookas. Knowing that Theo or Jules could be anywhere electrified everywhere and made piles of wood or giant "bobines" into props and part of a thrilling, murderous narrative rather than the sleepy, meaningless stuff they really are. It was like a video game.
Video games are the obvious thing to relate all this too, playing war is like being in a role playing game shooter, rpg shooter. But its also much better and I think much more innocuous because your body is the motor and locus of the excitement rather than the visuals of a TV screen. There's no blood and guts implied in all the electrifying narrative world I've been describing, it originates from and is fueled by a more general notion of "getting" him or her before they "get" you which makes the heart pump and, until physical exhaustion, a self perpetuating excitement.
Saturday, June 5, 2010
people have to have independent corroboration of their worth, at least i do. family's not enough because they are your family but even a robot could theoretically suffice. just thought of this watching luke skywalker and c3p0 be best friends.
episode 6 was terrible
star wars films were shockingly bad, I was taken aback.
episode 6 was terrible
star wars films were shockingly bad, I was taken aback.
Monday, May 31, 2010
the blob
Alexandra is a large and unpleasant person. She is really cool in the sense that she is really aloof, Alexandra is loath to engage other people. Instead, she drags her heft around the store reminding herself that she comes from a European country and speaks french. Alexandra is the first person I have met who has been anything less than helpful in helping me learn french. This is not surprising given Alexandra's general opposition to learning, she is much too aloof and snooty to have anything to learn for learning requires an earnestness absent in the vast plains of her elephant flesh. I think when anyone is quite so large and wears tiny shorts it is probably inevitable that its looseness and flaccidity will appear. Her massiveness is evident in the way she moves her feet. They are the last thing that moves when she takes a step. She lurches forward and her clodhoppers belatedly join her. She wears these fat black shoes called desert boots. I have a pair, though in green instead of black. They're really nice shoes in theory because they have an excess of material which extends up towards your ankle. it doesn't really serve any purpose but adds structure and novelty and attractiveness to the shoe. On Alexandra's foot, however, there is no excess. Her Desert Boots can barely contain the evidently enormous thing therein, her ankles and toes bursting alike. Bursting might actually seem like a problem for a gigantic person like Alexandra if she didn't have quite so much skin and wasn't so lacking energy, zeal or anything to demonstrate that she is happy to be alive.
Sunday, May 30, 2010
mother Joon-ho Bong
this movie was really beautiful because it humanized and made comprehensible and believable things that are too often the stuff of grotesque tabloids and cursory disgust. it makes a murderous mother into a sane and beautiful individual, well maybe not entirely sane. it was also really amazing because it was about a person following their heart, truly their heart and guided by nothing more than the passionate, awe inspiring love of parenthood and the horrors that arise from that unfaltering, uncompromising love. by the end of the film, i even believe the insecticide thing. i believe it all. what a dangerous and awesome power. its like if the epic mama bears of the forest could think and feel and do beautiful things, could live with nuance, maybe they could some day be like that incredible woman. jin tae is a bit absurd. but still, full of so much mysterious magic. i loved the way it ended with the dancing on the bus. what a terrific film.
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