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| From Untitled Album |
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
I like that there is no redemption, nothing bright and cheerful, i like how cynical and how dark the Hangover is. I loved Zach Galifinkas commitment to his inherent awkwardness, and strangeness as much as i liked Cooper's self aware parody of his own genial privilege.
The homophobia, the racism, the misogyny would be problems to be solved only if the film thought these characters were heroes. They are assholes, the movie is a dark burlesque on white, male, middle class, well moneyed, privilege--consider it more Eating Raoul or Notes on the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills then Knocked Up or The 40 Year Old Virgin.
The difference b/w those two movies and this one, is that in those two everyone is nice, and redeemed, and sweet, things get righted, and desire is well modulated. There is a tenderness in those movies, that well done, is still sopforic. the savagery of this movie, and it's success in the market suggests that we are kind of sick of that kind of faux transgressive qaulity of Apataow, et al and see something genuinely naughty, if not earth shattering in it's taboo.
(also the movie is beautifully shot, the mise en scene is perfect, and the lighting is gorgeous)
The homophobia, the racism, the misogyny would be problems to be solved only if the film thought these characters were heroes. They are assholes, the movie is a dark burlesque on white, male, middle class, well moneyed, privilege--consider it more Eating Raoul or Notes on the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills then Knocked Up or The 40 Year Old Virgin.
The difference b/w those two movies and this one, is that in those two everyone is nice, and redeemed, and sweet, things get righted, and desire is well modulated. There is a tenderness in those movies, that well done, is still sopforic. the savagery of this movie, and it's success in the market suggests that we are kind of sick of that kind of faux transgressive qaulity of Apataow, et al and see something genuinely naughty, if not earth shattering in it's taboo.
(also the movie is beautifully shot, the mise en scene is perfect, and the lighting is gorgeous)
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
five things about freud:
a) the development of women's autonomy, and esp. sexual autonomy in the late 19th century, needed a certain amount of rigour
b) the rise of freud's rep allowed this rigour, so in the great american instinct towards absorbing before understanding, they took him as part of their discourses before he was properly translated and disperesed.
c) they used freud then, along with Ellis and Carepenter among others, as a way to legimitize their liberatory sexualiy
d) when freud was properly translated they realised how problematic ideas of absence, the body, penis envy and the like would be to their thesis, and started scrambling for a new kind of intergration.
e) this scrambling, and by extension this americansed freud cauterized (perhaps acciedentally) the flow of discourses about desire that were emerging from this time, and were not resolved until the late 60s
a) the development of women's autonomy, and esp. sexual autonomy in the late 19th century, needed a certain amount of rigour
b) the rise of freud's rep allowed this rigour, so in the great american instinct towards absorbing before understanding, they took him as part of their discourses before he was properly translated and disperesed.
c) they used freud then, along with Ellis and Carepenter among others, as a way to legimitize their liberatory sexualiy
d) when freud was properly translated they realised how problematic ideas of absence, the body, penis envy and the like would be to their thesis, and started scrambling for a new kind of intergration.
e) this scrambling, and by extension this americansed freud cauterized (perhaps acciedentally) the flow of discourses about desire that were emerging from this time, and were not resolved until the late 60s
Monday, June 22, 2009
Dierks Bentley, Sideways.
nauman at the bieannle this year is either the worst thing or the best thing eva, but these fotos are v. pretty.
the grammy drops the polka record instead of thinking critically about what polka can do, for example this:
the realtionship b/w sontag and her son was emotionally incestous, and his work on her diaries and letters was a construction of a v. spec. kind of narrative, that cut the edges of her life.
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| From Untitled Album |
Gran Fury Riot, 1989, Red Paint and Gold Leaf, later remade as a sticker
when saltz, schedjal, and perl (link goes to perl) agree on something, it becomes a kind of canon, this time it is on the poor quality of Bacon's paintings, and his theatrical skills above all. Freud seems to have taken his place in the best british painter post 1960 race (for me, Auberbach at his best is better then Bacon at his worst, and might be an equal to Freud.)(essay: the Teutonic nature of Anglo portraiture: holbein, auberbach, freud)
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Alman Bros, 1970
how does the pope being part of the instution that caused the problems in ireland, et. al beg for forgiveness in such a way that would genuinley lead to reconcillation.
first aussie rules football player who happens to be transgendered)
Drunken Hymn Singing.
delicatley knitted organs.
this petition about extending family, and seperating marriage from the state is something i have been saying for years.
Mary Ward the english nun who walked to rome, in order to protest the closing of her order, when the inquistion was burning women at the stake for less, might finally become a priest.
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| From Untitled Album |
Kenny Chesney Climbs into a hot tub last week.
nature red of tooth and claw
it took 2.5b to find out most alternative medicine is bunk.
Like this Josh Clover reading.
i am trying to figure out polke but i really like this small review of his new work, via the ny times.
video of beatles eating flesh off of bones.
three thots on tehran:
a) the state has managed to shut down google and twitter, then twitter and google pops up again.
b) the state continues to kill hundreds of protestors, knowing this is happening, and being able to do nothing consitutes europrivelege.
c) half completed revoultions, in one way or the other, will emerge worse, bloodier then before.
100s of sea shanties.
science badges
ubc gets 1.7m for a sexuality diversity study program in honour of Ms Rule.
Alberta will make more money next year from gambling then oil.
Jim Henson's work from the 50s, for Wilkins Coffee. Fucking hysterical.
15 photos from ascot last week.
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| From Untitled Album |
Original National Park Logo.
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Sunday, June 14, 2009
“Keep two truths in your pocket, and take them out according to the need of the moment. Let one be: ‘For my sake was the world created.’ And the other: ‘I am dust and ashes.’”
...before his death Rabbi Zusya said, "In the coming world, they will not ask me: 'Why were you not Moses' they will ask me: 'Why were you not Zusya?
Two Chasidic stories, via Salamadnours and metafilter
...before his death Rabbi Zusya said, "In the coming world, they will not ask me: 'Why were you not Moses' they will ask me: 'Why were you not Zusya?
Two Chasidic stories, via Salamadnours and metafilter
Friday, June 12, 2009
From the catalog essay for Gray, by James GRrandeu
A distinct arrangement of hatched marks first appeared in 1972 on the far-left canvas of untitled (1972;Musuem Ludwig, Cologne. Johns has frequently recounted glimpsing the pattern on a passing car: "I only saw it of a second, but knew immediately that I was going to use it. It had all the qualities that interest me---literalness, repetitiveness, an obsessive quality, order with dumbness, and the possibility of a complete lack of meaning" (58)
each of these qoutes can be disproven:
there is nothing literal here, the distended bodies, the qouting of optical illusions, the art historical notes, the formal injokes, the explicit quoting of the thantos/eros dialectic in of the even how the catenary has a corperal element that is never mentioned in the grey essays, in johns drawings 1997-2007, or the general survery of johns drawings, even the reclaiming of the domestic that the flagstone pattern could indicate, all of these suggest a continued discourse that verges on the hidden and the mystic.
They do not repeat, or some of them do, but from the false start pastels in 1960, to the tantric detail from 1980-81, the lines cross each other, move left or right, sections tilt, or create a mess, the repeating does not have the geometrically rigour he is hoping for.
i will give him obsessive.
I am assuming that Dumb here means lacking the ability to speak as opposed to stupid, and the flagstone/cross hatch paintings post 1972 do not speak, but the seasons, and some of the art historically based work from the 1980s squawk endlessly, there referents obvious and overripe with meaning. Johns never managed Warhol's blankness, or Rberg's tightly curated webs of carefully constructed referents (ie rberg has the narrative skill that johns lacks) so if it isnt quite a formal order, or a symbolic order or a narrative order, all things that he is pushing forward, then what exactly is being ordered?
and one does not chose terms like false start, or tantric, or flag or target or the critic sees w/o thinking about some kind of meaning.
From Mapping the Mind, same volume, Barbara Rose:
Greenberg had to expunge Johns from the canon for a number of reaons, most pointedly because it was obvious that Kenneth Noland==who Greenberg celebrated--had pilfered the format of his concentric circle painting directly from John's targets. Even more troubling was the fact that if Johns were allowed into the ranks of the chose, the keystone of Greenberg's argument that painterliness was dead would crumble. Greenberg had to admit that Johns had a nice hand. But he dimissed this talent wit h a brash as minor, implying that Johns was nothing more than a hand, ignoring the multitude of new issues that John's paintings placed at the centre of contemporary aesthetic practice. (146)
Noland is a better controlled painter then Johns, Noland's concentric circles were doing different work then John's targets, but she is right, that the four horsemen are still unappreciated for their painterly skills or their draughtsmenship, because critics like greenberg would lose if he admitted it, and because critics post greenberg were not interested in textual authority.
From The Drawings of Jasper Johns, a show at the National Gallery of Art, Washingto, 1991
In 1973 Johns resumed making skin drawings from impressions of parts of the body, Untitled (Study for Skin...) is an impring of a penis. Sunsquent drawings, Skin 1 and Skin II of 1973 are impressions of genitals and buttocks. The drawing in the colleciton of Richard Serra and Clara Weyergraf, is the only skin impression Johns has made of his full torso, with head, arms, and hands...) 173
Untitled 1978:
This graphically vivid work was made the year after Johns Untitled Savarin drawing, in which handprints located near the handles of paintbruses stand in for the craoshatching. Here Johns painted a cross hatch pattern with marks made by his fingerprints and strokes of paint pplied with his fingers. Johns short strokes in the cross hatch paitnings are often bunched in groups of four or five, or six and might be desrcibed as resembling the digits of a hand... (234)
The presence of the body in Johns work is told by rumour, innuendo, gossip, impression, and hint. It is noted obliquley, and this does not change. This is the difference b/w his work and warhol's work.
In Tantric Detail Johns paired explicit sings for sex and death in a matrix of hatch marks to produce one of his most haunting compoisitons. This large charcoal, his only drawing of the shubject, is identical in size to the three oils...like cropse and mirro compositions, Tantric detail is divcided into three horizontal bands, and the hatch marks shift direction at the juncture of each section. Unlike the corpse and the mirror works, however no mirroring is present from one side to the other in the form of idnetically reflecting cross hatch patterns. (255)
A distinct arrangement of hatched marks first appeared in 1972 on the far-left canvas of untitled (1972;Musuem Ludwig, Cologne. Johns has frequently recounted glimpsing the pattern on a passing car: "I only saw it of a second, but knew immediately that I was going to use it. It had all the qualities that interest me---literalness, repetitiveness, an obsessive quality, order with dumbness, and the possibility of a complete lack of meaning" (58)
each of these qoutes can be disproven:
there is nothing literal here, the distended bodies, the qouting of optical illusions, the art historical notes, the formal injokes, the explicit quoting of the thantos/eros dialectic in of the even how the catenary has a corperal element that is never mentioned in the grey essays, in johns drawings 1997-2007, or the general survery of johns drawings, even the reclaiming of the domestic that the flagstone pattern could indicate, all of these suggest a continued discourse that verges on the hidden and the mystic.
They do not repeat, or some of them do, but from the false start pastels in 1960, to the tantric detail from 1980-81, the lines cross each other, move left or right, sections tilt, or create a mess, the repeating does not have the geometrically rigour he is hoping for.
i will give him obsessive.
I am assuming that Dumb here means lacking the ability to speak as opposed to stupid, and the flagstone/cross hatch paintings post 1972 do not speak, but the seasons, and some of the art historically based work from the 1980s squawk endlessly, there referents obvious and overripe with meaning. Johns never managed Warhol's blankness, or Rberg's tightly curated webs of carefully constructed referents (ie rberg has the narrative skill that johns lacks) so if it isnt quite a formal order, or a symbolic order or a narrative order, all things that he is pushing forward, then what exactly is being ordered?
and one does not chose terms like false start, or tantric, or flag or target or the critic sees w/o thinking about some kind of meaning.
From Mapping the Mind, same volume, Barbara Rose:
Greenberg had to expunge Johns from the canon for a number of reaons, most pointedly because it was obvious that Kenneth Noland==who Greenberg celebrated--had pilfered the format of his concentric circle painting directly from John's targets. Even more troubling was the fact that if Johns were allowed into the ranks of the chose, the keystone of Greenberg's argument that painterliness was dead would crumble. Greenberg had to admit that Johns had a nice hand. But he dimissed this talent wit h a brash as minor, implying that Johns was nothing more than a hand, ignoring the multitude of new issues that John's paintings placed at the centre of contemporary aesthetic practice. (146)
Noland is a better controlled painter then Johns, Noland's concentric circles were doing different work then John's targets, but she is right, that the four horsemen are still unappreciated for their painterly skills or their draughtsmenship, because critics like greenberg would lose if he admitted it, and because critics post greenberg were not interested in textual authority.
From The Drawings of Jasper Johns, a show at the National Gallery of Art, Washingto, 1991
In 1973 Johns resumed making skin drawings from impressions of parts of the body, Untitled (Study for Skin...) is an impring of a penis. Sunsquent drawings, Skin 1 and Skin II of 1973 are impressions of genitals and buttocks. The drawing in the colleciton of Richard Serra and Clara Weyergraf, is the only skin impression Johns has made of his full torso, with head, arms, and hands...) 173
Untitled 1978:
This graphically vivid work was made the year after Johns Untitled Savarin drawing, in which handprints located near the handles of paintbruses stand in for the craoshatching. Here Johns painted a cross hatch pattern with marks made by his fingerprints and strokes of paint pplied with his fingers. Johns short strokes in the cross hatch paitnings are often bunched in groups of four or five, or six and might be desrcibed as resembling the digits of a hand... (234)
The presence of the body in Johns work is told by rumour, innuendo, gossip, impression, and hint. It is noted obliquley, and this does not change. This is the difference b/w his work and warhol's work.
In Tantric Detail Johns paired explicit sings for sex and death in a matrix of hatch marks to produce one of his most haunting compoisitons. This large charcoal, his only drawing of the shubject, is identical in size to the three oils...like cropse and mirro compositions, Tantric detail is divcided into three horizontal bands, and the hatch marks shift direction at the juncture of each section. Unlike the corpse and the mirror works, however no mirroring is present from one side to the other in the form of idnetically reflecting cross hatch patterns. (255)
Thursday, June 11, 2009
Tuesday, June 09, 2009
Jay Z's argument for a less formal, more narratively complicated form, and against this sort of work that we are engaging here should piss me off, but it will be a number one record, it rests on a noticeable sample, and it is constructed as a single. (and it has to be remembered that he married/produced one of the masters of this nu:pop, and he is at least partially responsible for Danger Mouse's Grey Album, the first masterpeice of remix culture.)
(except maybe that would be SToke of Genius, whose genius comes from the understanding of pop culture)
But a single that cannot be reduced to a ringtone, to one melodic line, to four words and a catch line, and it is politically engaged, it knows the history of what he is doing. Sinatra at the Opera, abuts to a sly allusion to Kanye's Stronger, for example.
The thing that carries the whole thing, is two fold. The singing and the horns. It is an elegant, extended, and beautifully constructed decimation of Kanye's working questions of earnestness through the formal consideration of artifice. (future question for pop music scholars: compare and contrast ideas of musical authenticity and african american heterosexual masculinity in Stronger and Death of Autotune)
This is working questions of earnestness through the formal consideration of historically minded authenticity. I was going to make some kind of comment about the death of irony--but Kanye is never ironic, and Jay Z here has a sophistication of word craft that flirts with irony, and then disavows it as a legitimate tool to analayse current texts. (Like when he calls the text poltically incorrect, he alludes to art making as an essentially political act---one could insert this is not artistically correct.)
That's a lot of big theory, the song justifies it, the song is so beautiful. He can sing, and the horns at the end, with the sketches of spain flourish, and how the closing sample ends, how those horns flow thru the bass of all of it. Maybe some of it is a conservative instinct--the same kind of eminence grise grumpiness that infects Waylon Marsellis or Stanley Crouch?
Except all of this, I am just riffing, just grasping. This isn't for me, I know it is important, I know it is vital, and I know it is game changing, but I am so outside of the culture, that I am never quite sure why.
(except maybe that would be SToke of Genius, whose genius comes from the understanding of pop culture)
But a single that cannot be reduced to a ringtone, to one melodic line, to four words and a catch line, and it is politically engaged, it knows the history of what he is doing. Sinatra at the Opera, abuts to a sly allusion to Kanye's Stronger, for example.
The thing that carries the whole thing, is two fold. The singing and the horns. It is an elegant, extended, and beautifully constructed decimation of Kanye's working questions of earnestness through the formal consideration of artifice. (future question for pop music scholars: compare and contrast ideas of musical authenticity and african american heterosexual masculinity in Stronger and Death of Autotune)
This is working questions of earnestness through the formal consideration of historically minded authenticity. I was going to make some kind of comment about the death of irony--but Kanye is never ironic, and Jay Z here has a sophistication of word craft that flirts with irony, and then disavows it as a legitimate tool to analayse current texts. (Like when he calls the text poltically incorrect, he alludes to art making as an essentially political act---one could insert this is not artistically correct.)
That's a lot of big theory, the song justifies it, the song is so beautiful. He can sing, and the horns at the end, with the sketches of spain flourish, and how the closing sample ends, how those horns flow thru the bass of all of it. Maybe some of it is a conservative instinct--the same kind of eminence grise grumpiness that infects Waylon Marsellis or Stanley Crouch?
Except all of this, I am just riffing, just grasping. This isn't for me, I know it is important, I know it is vital, and I know it is game changing, but I am so outside of the culture, that I am never quite sure why.
The Rake's Progress as a narrative construction was used in the 18th century as a way to secularise previous redemption narratives, esp. English folk narratives. Hogarth's material culture created in response to the Rake's Progress continued the securlaisation, while allowing a rising mercentile class to engage in both aspirational instincts and schadenfreude. It became a moral warning, and a lifestyle to lust after. Mad Men is also a Rake's Progress, but about the loss of liberal social values, as opposed to religious texts. It allows an unstable post-mercentaile class to enjoy taboos of gender and class, while being well hidden as a narrative of social control/satire. This essay uses the narrative of the Rake
s Progress as used by Hogarth, Mad Men, and the surrounding material culture of both texts as a way to discuss how we use formerly religious language to construct secular narratives.
also, OMFG DON DRApER, SLAP ME AROUND, AND THEN FUCK ME, HARD.
s Progress as used by Hogarth, Mad Men, and the surrounding material culture of both texts as a way to discuss how we use formerly religious language to construct secular narratives.
also, OMFG DON DRApER, SLAP ME AROUND, AND THEN FUCK ME, HARD.
Sunday, June 07, 2009
Proposal:
The Church of Scotland began ordaining women in 1968, The Evangelical Lutheran Assembly of America began ordaining women in 1978, and The Anglican Church of Canada began ordaining women in 1973, and the Episcopal church of the United States began ordaining women in 1976, and the Community of Christ began in 1984. The Church of Scotland, ECLA, Anglicans and Episcopal churches had conventions, protests, arguments, and formal discourses. The prayers of the faithful had a distinctly liturgical edge. The Community of Christ's ordination was more personal, and much less formal.
Each of these churches has a history of dissent, and were considered schismatic from a larger group of Christians. Each of these churches risked (or continue to risk) further schismatic behaviour by their desire to integrate women, and each of these has discourses that allow for the possibility of women as priests decades before this desire was actualised. Allowing women to become priests was a streaming together of allowed and disallowed discourses, of behaviour that was forbidden, with a desire towards explicit dissent. There was something (or many things) that happened in the 1970s that allowed for this dissent to be formalised, and then integrated.
All of the churches that are not in the Community of Christ have a European heritage, which carries the weight of ecclesiastical jurisprudence. There are minutes, codicils, reports to the primates or bishops, and other such textual examples of hierarchy. The Community of Christ, dissenting from a church that is ambiguously Christian, has a difficult relationship with liturgy and does not have the same relationship with ordination as the more traditional churches, makes their place in this break problematic.
I am hoping, by textual deconstruction and rhetorical/liturgical analysis to find a liturgical tradition within LDS communities of dissent, and trace the implications of that tradition into a discussion of women's ordination within those communities. I want to juxtapose these relationships with the dissent traditions in more mainstream protestant circles, and note the intersections between their ordination of women. At the end, using archival sources, hymn books, testimony, news reports, ecclesiastical documents, and historical sources, I hope to come to a gendered understanding of how LDS deas of women's role in the creation, ownership and maintaining of religious language differ from other protestant cultures.
The Church of Scotland began ordaining women in 1968, The Evangelical Lutheran Assembly of America began ordaining women in 1978, and The Anglican Church of Canada began ordaining women in 1973, and the Episcopal church of the United States began ordaining women in 1976, and the Community of Christ began in 1984. The Church of Scotland, ECLA, Anglicans and Episcopal churches had conventions, protests, arguments, and formal discourses. The prayers of the faithful had a distinctly liturgical edge. The Community of Christ's ordination was more personal, and much less formal.
Each of these churches has a history of dissent, and were considered schismatic from a larger group of Christians. Each of these churches risked (or continue to risk) further schismatic behaviour by their desire to integrate women, and each of these has discourses that allow for the possibility of women as priests decades before this desire was actualised. Allowing women to become priests was a streaming together of allowed and disallowed discourses, of behaviour that was forbidden, with a desire towards explicit dissent. There was something (or many things) that happened in the 1970s that allowed for this dissent to be formalised, and then integrated.
All of the churches that are not in the Community of Christ have a European heritage, which carries the weight of ecclesiastical jurisprudence. There are minutes, codicils, reports to the primates or bishops, and other such textual examples of hierarchy. The Community of Christ, dissenting from a church that is ambiguously Christian, has a difficult relationship with liturgy and does not have the same relationship with ordination as the more traditional churches, makes their place in this break problematic.
I am hoping, by textual deconstruction and rhetorical/liturgical analysis to find a liturgical tradition within LDS communities of dissent, and trace the implications of that tradition into a discussion of women's ordination within those communities. I want to juxtapose these relationships with the dissent traditions in more mainstream protestant circles, and note the intersections between their ordination of women. At the end, using archival sources, hymn books, testimony, news reports, ecclesiastical documents, and historical sources, I hope to come to a gendered understanding of how LDS deas of women's role in the creation, ownership and maintaining of religious language differ from other protestant cultures.
Saturday, June 06, 2009
local council elections in the uk, mostly conserative, with a strong showing of libdems, and no new seats for the bnp mean that cameron will most likely win the national election, with a solid libdem majority.
a) cameron is not thatcher.
b) labour are so fucked up, that i am okay with this.
c) esp. since the libdems will provide a solid correction to conseratives most egregious excesses.
to make it canuck for a second, i am willing for a solid liberal majority if the ndp/bq provides a solid corrective to jean and pauls' excesses, b/c harper is much closer to thatcher.
this kills me.
a) cameron is not thatcher.
b) labour are so fucked up, that i am okay with this.
c) esp. since the libdems will provide a solid correction to conseratives most egregious excesses.
to make it canuck for a second, i am willing for a solid liberal majority if the ndp/bq provides a solid corrective to jean and pauls' excesses, b/c harper is much closer to thatcher.
this kills me.
Limbaugh makes the arguement against sotmayer for the far right.
fascinating article about prisoners putting on a production of macbeth on in sing sing
LLAMA
PHyllis and Del complicate the whole marraige argument again.
obama's selection of west wing art includes work by people of colour, and artists outside of new york, and art made in the last 45 years, so the wsj commentators are angry.
Slow Horses are a dutch country band, and they are awesome.
bike exif photos are so fucking pretty. and wrench monkees make me worship some of the lower machine gods.
Johnny Cash spent some of the 70s recording his albums in German (I am sort of interested in what Cash did between let's say the end of Vietnam and the American REcords era)
canadiana blog
collection of awful rec leauge injuries.
some beautiful deconstructed needlework
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Still From Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
moose sculptures
the episcopalians have moved onto idelogical purges.
fairly neatural v. extensive discussions of all of Sotomayer's appelate decesions.
18 new abu gharib photos. includes rape, dog attacks, humilation with feces, and corpses. Obama has a democratic/moral responsiblity to release the rest of these photos. Triggering, and not easy to look at.
FREE GOAT
lovely, profoundly lovely bookcase, by Emile Jaques Lehman, so fucking pretty that it might actually be worth 500k euros.
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Joel Fariss above is the Pastor from Mars Hill Church, the reactionary calvinist church, which attempts to be hip, and succeeds in providing succour for the lost in seattle, or at the lost who do not spend much time thinking about theology over all that rock and roll music. What is interesting about the photo is not that it is being used to illustrate a story about how Joel Fariss is going into captial hill (think queen street in toronto or chelsea in new york), and sitting at a popular bar, and talk to people about jesus--it's an old strategy, the jesus people movement of the 70s that eventually gave birth to Rick Warren (and the radical compound in chicago) engaged in it, and that slog is a little worried about it, all of this is banal and sort of expected. What becomes interested is that you cannot tell the difference b/w Joel Fariss' careful hipster costume (kempt but seemingly unkempt beard) and his plymouth brethern. When I wear wranglers and a cowboy shirt out east, there is some amount of class covering that i am doing--in Toronto it says a different message then when i do it in the West, but I understand the baggage that the vestments indicate, that the beard and the shirt could be either christian or hipster costume, it becomes a liminal site where christanity and a secular artistic culture can interact, sort of like sufjan, but more trojan. (frankly, i find him. v. attractive, but the marketing element of the whole thing, how carefully it is constructed to sell people on a life style they might not want to follow, is a little dangerous)
charming, tiny public plaques.
it is great to have cultural workers argue against current copyright protections, to have one of the best known, national treasure poet types say that he is going to vote for the swedish pirate party, more then delightful. Atwood could learn a lesson from Mr Gustafsson (ray read this one)
Douglas Walker's oil on (canvas) paintings at Nicholas Metiver are amazing, I wrote this about them on Lorna's blog: the colours are all 19th century porcleain, like willow ware, with tiny cracks, and so shiny, at first i thot they were enamel or tempera,so immaculate were the surfaces, and so precise were the flaws in the surface, like chiho aoshima but with a profound understanding of anglo-american aesthetic history (both decorative and fine) that i wanted all of the international seires.
big pciture shoots the cheeserolling festival.
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Ellsworth Kelly riffs on Cezanne.
charmed by t his small foto of a cow
Documentary about the art in the Gay Men's Health Crisis centre in New York, with some vintage footage.
tocai shoes, slutty.
Father Cutie's statement admitting his sexual affair, and his moving from the Catholics to the Episcopalians, with some nice scriptural exgesis.
Footage of Times Square in the 70s.
blog about country music in europe.
Filpino's do My Cheating Heart.
these tim gardner paintings really suggest that he is more interesting when he is less ironic.
erotic postcards from the 20s.
life archives of the changing of the gaurds from the 52 and 53, love the fading, underexposed colour.
there is something tragic about these space monkey fotos.
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i want a unicorn tattoo
toronto life used my photo.
Matt Zoller Sietz does that edit adn collate kind of work that can only happen in the digital age, this time making a seemless follow shot out of a dozen films...
on the softening, brightening and adding random dingbats to common brands, including Kraft and Wal Mart.
Anne Toebees interiors are supposed to remind me of the intersection of design and fine art that happened in midcentury, but with their colour, the light, and the tonal shifts, they remind me of an updated vuillard.
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| From Untitled Album |
Dana Shutz, How We Give Birth, 2007
a) look at the Thomas Cole landscape, she is using her body, her femmine body, to mock both american masculine ideas of creation, and the femmine notion of the body as sacred, the subject is distracted by the sublime history of painting, that she almost forgets the child that is emerging out of her cunt. a cunt that should be properly celebrated for it;s life giving properties.
b) the thing is huge, 5x6 feet, the height of a tall human, and the width of a short one.
zip file of all fisk's maps of the mississippi. would make them wallpaper.
eshakti for all yr caftan needs.
 |
| From Untitled Album |
Friday, June 05, 2009
i cannot find a picture of it on the web, which will make my arguement much weaker, but there is a small twombly drawing from 1965, untitled, that is supposed to be a hyacinth (ie lover of apollo, prettier then the prettiest). it was discussed v. briefly in the essay for his catalog of photos, as vaginal. but it wasn't--it was a asshole, being tighter and less concentric then most vaginal images, of a different colour, and with the title's queer heritage, and the status of twombly as master of freudian anality, it cannot be anything else.
(the floral asshole motif is something that twombly would know well; in the sense of rimbaud:
It breathes, humbly lurking amidst the moss,
Still moist from an amorous inclination which follows the gentle dip
Of the white buttocks down to the edge of its scarlet hem.
or ginsberg:
please master can I lick your groin curled with soft blond fur
please master can I touch my tongue to your rosy asshole
but also the greeks--the rawness and the encompassing power of the drawing reminded me of fermets translation of cattalus 96, with his discussion of a vorcious asshole)
twomby's work is all about disappearing into language, or language disappearing though--and reading this essay with its concluding discussions of marriage--and how this was done after the rberg reationship in the late 50s--maybe the drawing is about (ironically) coming out of the anal self, into the glory of vaginal conquest?
(the floral asshole motif is something that twombly would know well; in the sense of rimbaud:
It breathes, humbly lurking amidst the moss,
Still moist from an amorous inclination which follows the gentle dip
Of the white buttocks down to the edge of its scarlet hem.
or ginsberg:
please master can I lick your groin curled with soft blond fur
please master can I touch my tongue to your rosy asshole
but also the greeks--the rawness and the encompassing power of the drawing reminded me of fermets translation of cattalus 96, with his discussion of a vorcious asshole)
twomby's work is all about disappearing into language, or language disappearing though--and reading this essay with its concluding discussions of marriage--and how this was done after the rberg reationship in the late 50s--maybe the drawing is about (ironically) coming out of the anal self, into the glory of vaginal conquest?
Wednesday, June 03, 2009
5 Reasons why Heads Will Roll is Genius. a) Karen O's voice moves past what female work has been allowed in the past. (part rock screamer, part abstracted noise machine, with capabilities of the etheral when needed) b) Nick Zinn's guitar work is processed, noisy, atonal, but muscular. The intellect, and the body t hat combine in making his sounds make him the first new noise coming out the instrument in decades. c) the video is historically minded, acknowledges pop and kitsch, is visually stunning, and is v. funny. It works towards being of that LES art thing, without being irritating at all. (in fact her whole visual package, could be as artifice ridden and aggravating as the gaga, but it isn't...like Bowie ca Aladdin Sane, they realise that no matter how good the music is, people need things to look at. ) d) The synths, the drum fills. e) The band knows how to construct hooks, how to make pop songs, in and out in under 4 minutes. As Animal Collective or Grizzy Bear have proven, this task is difficult. f) I love the line, Glitter over wet streets, silver over everything, the rivers all wet, yr all Chrome. I am in favour of Glitter. g) Indie you can dance too (i mean genuine, full body, hip shaking, head banging, shoulder thrusting DANCE, and that she knows that, that she commands us to dance until we are dead, always love a good carpe diem message) h) that in the middle of all of this corpereal pleasure, there is something menacing, and the menace is part of the text, but does not overwhelm. (i.e. the song could fall apart as some easily digested cautionary tale and it doesn't, it integrates seemingly contradictory messages and intentions) i) that i have heard this for 6 weeks now, and i have conversations about this, and i settle out this must mean something, about why this is a work of genius, and i could go through it, make a list like this, and here i have (this is much too long to be posted, but every new listening, every new replay on the old youtube, i hear something else, i hear something that i am too stupid or too deaf to articulate.) (Like all great works of art, and few great works of pop, it fulfills Browning's maxim: "Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?”" Single of the Year. Single of the motherfucking decade.
Tuesday, June 02, 2009
Theories about religion, he was sure, were “once removed from the vital springs
of conduct and valuation”; historical records and sociological statements about
religion were “thrice removed, and consist for all we know of only congealed,
discoloured, and distorted semblances of real experience. One must,” Starbuck
But (what) tool could one use? At some point Starbuck decided to investigate these elusive
facts in questionnaires that asked for details about “the feelings of divine presence,”
“actual feelings of the sense of communion during the ceremony of communion”
and, above all, what people experienced during conversion episodes.
When Starbuck’s mentor William James got a copy of the
survey he was full of hesitation. “This is New England,” he warned, and “people
here will not reply to an inquisitional document of that sort.”10 Starbuck assured
James that his plan would work. “I wheedle them; I explain that this is the beginning
of a new science in the world—the psychology of religion, and we must have the
acts.”11 But at least initially, James appeared to be right. Starbuck received several
etters of complaint and recrimination...
charts on religious development; graphs correlating conversion with age, gender,
body growth, emotion and temperament; tables measuring the frequency of post-
conversion anxiety, religious doubt and the intensity of certain beliefs. Starbuck was
mapping inner vectors of doubt and depravity, anxiety and ecstasy, taking inventory
of mysterious mental things that had confounded him. He found that there were
many ways to use empirical methods to bring “a little coherency and constancy into
contexts, to use science to “make it possible to comprehend new regions in the
Starbuck, this procedure yielded some crucial gains. It had the effect of making the
divine force behind religious experiences not a terrifying and unpredictable agent
of sudden conversion events but an architect of an orderly universe who might be
admired and understood better by plotting his earthly irruptions and manifestations
The “feeling life,” Starbuck continued, “draws directly from experience, and
not through the mediation of the cognitive processes; that is, it is itself a source
of knowledge.”32 The immediate bodily feeling was constitutive of every mental
act; it was the foundation for thinking, believing, reasoning, and forming opinions.
Religious wisdom, then, was “direct and immediate,” and reports of experience
should not be “blurred and distorted by an over-degree of rationality.”33
Starbuck learned these facts about sensation and perception from James himself,
of conduct and valuation”; historical records and sociological statements about
religion were “thrice removed, and consist for all we know of only congealed,
discoloured, and distorted semblances of real experience. One must,” Starbuck
But (what) tool could one use? At some point Starbuck decided to investigate these elusive
facts in questionnaires that asked for details about “the feelings of divine presence,”
“actual feelings of the sense of communion during the ceremony of communion”
and, above all, what people experienced during conversion episodes.
When Starbuck’s mentor William James got a copy of the
survey he was full of hesitation. “This is New England,” he warned, and “people
here will not reply to an inquisitional document of that sort.”10 Starbuck assured
James that his plan would work. “I wheedle them; I explain that this is the beginning
of a new science in the world—the psychology of religion, and we must have the
acts.”11 But at least initially, James appeared to be right. Starbuck received several
etters of complaint and recrimination...
charts on religious development; graphs correlating conversion with age, gender,
body growth, emotion and temperament; tables measuring the frequency of post-
conversion anxiety, religious doubt and the intensity of certain beliefs. Starbuck was
mapping inner vectors of doubt and depravity, anxiety and ecstasy, taking inventory
of mysterious mental things that had confounded him. He found that there were
many ways to use empirical methods to bring “a little coherency and constancy into
contexts, to use science to “make it possible to comprehend new regions in the
Starbuck, this procedure yielded some crucial gains. It had the effect of making the
divine force behind religious experiences not a terrifying and unpredictable agent
of sudden conversion events but an architect of an orderly universe who might be
admired and understood better by plotting his earthly irruptions and manifestations
The “feeling life,” Starbuck continued, “draws directly from experience, and
not through the mediation of the cognitive processes; that is, it is itself a source
of knowledge.”32 The immediate bodily feeling was constitutive of every mental
act; it was the foundation for thinking, believing, reasoning, and forming opinions.
Religious wisdom, then, was “direct and immediate,” and reports of experience
should not be “blurred and distorted by an over-degree of rationality.”33
Starbuck learned these facts about sensation and perception from James himself,
Approaching the [Gender Identity Disorder] diagnosis strategically involves a series of individuals not quite believing what they say, signing on to language that does not represent the reality it is or should be. The price of using the diagnosis to get what one wants is that one cannot use language to say what one really thinks is true. One pays for one’s freedom, as it were, by sacrificing one’s claim to use language truthfully. Cite Arrow Judith Butler
Monday, June 01, 2009
Explain the ways in which the term redemption and the phrase “salvation lies within” are meaningful to this film?
When one goes to prison, the purpose is supposedly one of rebirth, to move in a kind of monastic isolation from the world, in order to think of the crimes (sins) that you have committed, and to return to society renewed. Andy makes this point when he says that he went into prison “naked as the day you were born”, and when he escapes, he does so with new clothes, and clean shoes. Shawshank Redemption then becomes a tale of what occurred between these places, and sometimes what happened was death, or rape, or destruction, and sometimes it was a kind of miraculous redeeming, a redeeming that was mostly not done by the warden or the guards, but by the people themselves.
In fact, the idea of salvation lying within has multiple meanings, Being inside, is sometimes an extension of the Socratic idea of knowing oneself, but it can be also being inside, being in the prison itself. Andy, after being raped, and almost killed, after having his property destroyed, and having been incredibly lonely, argues this “Forget that... there are places in this world that aren't made out of stone. That there's something inside... that they can't get to, that they can't touch. That's yours.” 1What they cannot touch is protected and extended by the prison so much, that when people are released, or redeemed in the more traditional view of the word, genuine trauma occurs.
The librarian Brooks Hatlen, who has his own power, his own routines, his own rituals, and even his own pet in the prison, and who has been there for 40 or more years when he is released, is killed by the strangeness of the outside world. He is unable to redeem himself. Andy is capable of redeeming himself from the Prison, not because of the Warden or parole boards good graces, but because he had an interior life and was able to keep himself from being bored in prison. He had projects, and hope to get out. There is an intertwining, refusing to be redeemed by the prison or the state, and refusing the states obsessive power over you, means that extending yourself past the prisons and provides a way for the soul to be free. (So he carves the chess set, he does other people's taxes, he writes two letters a week to get a library, he teaches a kid to have a GED, and he plans an immaculate escape)---because working his mind externally, allows for the corporeal self to be trained for whatever the world will bring. There is no need to do good works, the prison is inside, but the mind can be made to work outside the prison, outside the self. Salvation then becomes a modified form of the works gospel, where the desire to escape (i.e. salvation) can only occur internally.
(A good example of this is all in Red's character, he goes through 30 years of parole hearings, begging that he is redeemed, that he is willing and ready to go outside. When the kid that Andy is tutoring is murdered by the corrupt warden, and Andy has escaped, he finally stops playing the games expected of him, he becomes himself and tells the world what he thinks: “There's not a day goes by I don't feel regret. Not because I'm in here, or because you think I should. I look back on the way I was then: a young, stupid kid who committed that terrible crime. I want to talk to him. I want to try and talk some sense to him, tell him the way things are. But I can't. That kid's long gone and this old man is all that's left. I got to live with that. Rehabilitated? It's just a bullshit word. So you go on and stamp your form, sonny, and stop wasting my time. Because to tell you the truth, I don't give a shit. “
To be saved from within is then not giving a shit about the institutions that are keeping you inside, a paradoxical desire for chaos, because when one is so controlled then the self is sapped and lost.
How is Andy A Christ-figure? What does this say to a contemporary North American audience?
Andy suffers. He is set upon by his enemies. He collects a group of people, who are willing to follow him, to listen to his wise counsel. The hole could be considered like descending into the underworld for three days, he is merciful to those who hate him, he is quiet, meek, modest, and patient, slow to anger, but when he is angry, he destroys his enemies. Red's speaks of him like he is John the Baptist, in the wilderness waiting for the messiah to come, and at least one of his followers, tells Andy the truth, and this truth telling results in an explicit martyrdom, engaged at least partially by the state.
The problems or the gaps of this reading do a nice job of explaining the problems with this film. The enemies that he is set upon are homosexuals, so there is a nasty, almost homophobic component to the idea—namely, that Andy is this sainted innocent, whose life is destroyed by murderous queer men, who sublimate his power with sexual violence. Though prison rape is a very real issue, the mythology of the film, and the clear moral boundaries between the villains and heroes suggests that there is a larger attempt towards mythological truth telling then verisimilitudous realism.
This allegorical extension is furthered in the second problem. Andy, with the possible exception of Red is amoral. He cheats, lies, steals, and helps people who are genuinely evil do the same thing. Though he sets up a library to apparently help, it is done for his own vainglory. The library lets him have power and control. It lets him be the same kind of mover or entrepreneur that Red is on a much larger scale, and it allows him to have a project, to not be bored as he is spends decades on his escape plan. This is placed in stark relief at the end, when he escapes to Mexico, with the evil warden's money.
He does not die for the other prisoners, and any help he has to make their lives liveable, to make their lives better is mostly for his own aggrandizement. His co-opting of the Morgan Freeman character, for his resourcefulness and skill, suggest that he does not really spend much time thinking about anything but his own power. He becomes the church mouse mirror of Pretty Boy Floyd or Bonnie and Clyde. Except, it's all so very clean and precise. There is a man who thinks that he is smarter then anyone else, who commits acts of major finical malfeasance in order to only free himself, and if his co worker happened to get out in time, then Red as well.
The audience is allowed any number of outs. Andy is really innocent, so the escape has no real moral problems. The warden is so evil that there are no problems with screwing him over. His friend was let out of jail legitimately by the state, and so, as a criminal (and the only explicit black character) is no longer one thanks to the great skills of this magical white man. They live for the rest of their lives as two straight guys in a vague tropical resort. That's pretty much the current North American character right there—violent homophobia, a suspicion of the state, casual racism, innocent working class white men, venal and evil rulers, and the odd piece of white collar crime forgiven because the person doing it is more moral then the person they are victimizing.
How would you characterise the way in which the Bible is used and how the religious are portrayed in this film?
The first thing that the prisoners hear from the warden, after they are stripped and made anew is that “I believe in two things, discipline and the bible. Trust in the Lord but your ass belongs to me” The first thing that the prisoners receive are a bible and a set of clothes. When Andy's room is tossed, the warden and Andy trade bible verses, adding to this idea that the gospels are to be used as a tool in the extended power games throughout the film. When the library is built, there is emphatically an absence of a religious texts. When the kid who is killed by the Warden, they quote scripture, and when Andy leaves the day of his escape, the bible and the accounting books are interchangeable. Not only interchangeable, but the bible contains the rockhammer which Andy used to escape.
In this reading, the Warden uses the scripture to maintain his power and to hide the copious sins that he is committing. The bible becomes an extension of the state---Lewis' warning against American fascism is embodied in one man. Andy's use of the bible, as a tool of liberation as a way to hide contraband, as a way of finding salvation from within, and as one text among many that give people a generally forward direction. The use of the scripture then becomes an allegorical device that extends this protestant idea that splits those who believe into those who are legalistic, who are followers of the words and not the actions, versus those who are pluralistic, and whose words are an impetuous towards some kind of action.
What is the film's message about the relationship among the human spirit and hope and despair?
Hope is about work. Hope is about knowing oneself. Hope is about realizing one has the power to do small actions over and over again until the task is completed. Hope is lost when comfort is gone, and there is something comforting in the everyday, in knowing when one is fed or allowed to exercise or any of that work. When one gives up hope, one often dies. (like Brooks the librarian, who kills himself because he gave up hope after failing to integrate; or the kid who is killed by the Warden, because he had hope about Andy being proven innocent and worked to get him out.)
Hope is not a good thing in this film. For a film that is supposed to be about the triumph of the human spirit, the desire to be reminded as Andy said, “that there are places in this world that are not made out of stone” is not something that provides comfort. Red responds to that idea “Let me tell you something my friend. Hope is a dangerous thing. Hope can drive a man insane. “
Andy wins the rhetorical argument in the end, when Red is out and travelling with him to Mexico, to live the rest of their lives. But Andy is right, and it is something that the film sort of avoids. Andy embodies the Dickinson idea that
“Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,
But the only thing with feathers in the entire film is Brooks bird, who is released when he is. But the bird flies away, and Brooks never manages it. Prison is difficult. Though the film alludes every so often, to the idea of how dehumanizing this could be, and though the film has a fair amount of violence, the conclusions suggest that hoping will allow you to fly, allow you to be released or to escape and live forever in this paradisical fantasia.
What about the kid, with a family and young children who was killed. He had hope, sometimes quashed, but hope that Andy as an innocent would be released, and that he would be able to return to civilization. He was shot by a corrupt warden. Or what about Red, who was only released, who was only allowed to retain his role in civilization after he admitted he was with out hope. Or even Brooks himself, Brooks crow flew away, but his hope sat on the chest like a weight so heavy he had to kill himself to release it. The film hints but never says something. Hope is a difficult thing, it will curtail you in delusion, it will disappoint you or discipline you as often as it will provide you with something to work towards or look forward to.
Hope and despair are not opposites, one does not despair due to a lack of hope, but hope and despair work together, endlessly feeding off of each other. Red says at the end of the film, just before he sees Andy: “I find I'm so excited, I can barely sit still or hold a thought in my head. I think it's the excitement only a free man can feel, a free man at the start of a long journey whose conclusion is uncertain. I hope I can make it across the border. I hope to see my friend, and shake his hand. I hope the Pacific is as blue as it has been in my dreams. I hope. “ So that by giving up (what could be determined, perhaps) to be false hope, the hope of the structure of the prison, he is released into the wide world, and he finds something resembling true hope—and this true hope ends with some kind of happiness.
It is a hygienic end to an oversimplified story. It forgets Brooks, it forgets the kid being shot, it suggests that corruption is defeated when one bad apple is found and destroyed. It does not talk about the racism that would occur when a black man buys a bus ticket from Maine to Texas. There is this naïve idea throughout that hope makes all borders pliable, be them between human beings or between nations. In the real world, in the south, in the 1960s, there would be encounters with sheriffs, and with border control guards, and the giving up on hope would result in more despair, not something more true and more pure.
How does the message of the plaque relate the film.
Assuming that the plaque means the one that names the library as the Brooks Memorial Library, the plaque relates to the themes of escape, and to returning to the prison, of being inside, and making a site of great psychic destruction into something more normal. The prison killed Brooks, and to place a plaque memorialising this is a logical and culturally appropriate way of marking the site, of confirming the psycho-geographic heritage of death in that place, and also by extension, allowing everyone there to realise that the work being done inside the library walls was work that continued with the traditions that Brooks had been constructing for decades.
That the library would be the front for white collar crime, slave labour, and eventually conspiracy to commit murder, the spirit of Brooks would be aware that the library could not be kept pure, though he was a contraband mule throughout the prison, the library was sanctuary against that kind of behaviour, so the message might also be about the nature of corruption, about what it does to men and places.
At One Point Brooks the Librarian says “All I Want to be back where things made sense and I want have to be afraid all the time” Why does Brooks say this? What does this attitude say about human beings?
Brooks has been in prison since before the 20th century really begun. He had done the same job, in the same place for decades. He had never seen cars, never seen electronic lights, he had never had a job, and never known how to do anything menial. He was used to being told where to go and how to do it. When Red is released, we are reminded that prisoners do not even know how to piss without being told when or how. Brooks is afraid, not of the dangers of the prison, which he has safely avoided for decades, but the strangeness of the outside world. If he goes back to prison, then the structures of official and unofficial behaviour that he has had completed for decades no longer exist, but the bare whispers of life before incarceration are forgotten.
He is afraid not of the dangers that he has faced and developed patterns for, but for dangers that he cannot have any knowledge of, not only how to deal with them, but how to identify them at all. For all of it's problems, the prison is orderly. What the film says about these things is two fold, and they are contradictory. It is saying that human beings do better when being controlled, that having too many options, of being too free after too much time not being free will result in the destruction of self.
But it also says, that a lack of personal autonomy will also destroy ones self. So Red and Andy, have the structure of the prison, know how to play it, and that playing the game in a way that is acceptable to most, results in a reward (escape for Andy, parole for Red). If one does not know how to function without the structure of whatever inside you are, then there is no centre, and if the centre cannot hold, then the resulting mess takes serious collateral damage.
When one goes to prison, the purpose is supposedly one of rebirth, to move in a kind of monastic isolation from the world, in order to think of the crimes (sins) that you have committed, and to return to society renewed. Andy makes this point when he says that he went into prison “naked as the day you were born”, and when he escapes, he does so with new clothes, and clean shoes. Shawshank Redemption then becomes a tale of what occurred between these places, and sometimes what happened was death, or rape, or destruction, and sometimes it was a kind of miraculous redeeming, a redeeming that was mostly not done by the warden or the guards, but by the people themselves.
In fact, the idea of salvation lying within has multiple meanings, Being inside, is sometimes an extension of the Socratic idea of knowing oneself, but it can be also being inside, being in the prison itself. Andy, after being raped, and almost killed, after having his property destroyed, and having been incredibly lonely, argues this “Forget that... there are places in this world that aren't made out of stone. That there's something inside... that they can't get to, that they can't touch. That's yours.” 1What they cannot touch is protected and extended by the prison so much, that when people are released, or redeemed in the more traditional view of the word, genuine trauma occurs.
The librarian Brooks Hatlen, who has his own power, his own routines, his own rituals, and even his own pet in the prison, and who has been there for 40 or more years when he is released, is killed by the strangeness of the outside world. He is unable to redeem himself. Andy is capable of redeeming himself from the Prison, not because of the Warden or parole boards good graces, but because he had an interior life and was able to keep himself from being bored in prison. He had projects, and hope to get out. There is an intertwining, refusing to be redeemed by the prison or the state, and refusing the states obsessive power over you, means that extending yourself past the prisons and provides a way for the soul to be free. (So he carves the chess set, he does other people's taxes, he writes two letters a week to get a library, he teaches a kid to have a GED, and he plans an immaculate escape)---because working his mind externally, allows for the corporeal self to be trained for whatever the world will bring. There is no need to do good works, the prison is inside, but the mind can be made to work outside the prison, outside the self. Salvation then becomes a modified form of the works gospel, where the desire to escape (i.e. salvation) can only occur internally.
(A good example of this is all in Red's character, he goes through 30 years of parole hearings, begging that he is redeemed, that he is willing and ready to go outside. When the kid that Andy is tutoring is murdered by the corrupt warden, and Andy has escaped, he finally stops playing the games expected of him, he becomes himself and tells the world what he thinks: “There's not a day goes by I don't feel regret. Not because I'm in here, or because you think I should. I look back on the way I was then: a young, stupid kid who committed that terrible crime. I want to talk to him. I want to try and talk some sense to him, tell him the way things are. But I can't. That kid's long gone and this old man is all that's left. I got to live with that. Rehabilitated? It's just a bullshit word. So you go on and stamp your form, sonny, and stop wasting my time. Because to tell you the truth, I don't give a shit. “
To be saved from within is then not giving a shit about the institutions that are keeping you inside, a paradoxical desire for chaos, because when one is so controlled then the self is sapped and lost.
How is Andy A Christ-figure? What does this say to a contemporary North American audience?
Andy suffers. He is set upon by his enemies. He collects a group of people, who are willing to follow him, to listen to his wise counsel. The hole could be considered like descending into the underworld for three days, he is merciful to those who hate him, he is quiet, meek, modest, and patient, slow to anger, but when he is angry, he destroys his enemies. Red's speaks of him like he is John the Baptist, in the wilderness waiting for the messiah to come, and at least one of his followers, tells Andy the truth, and this truth telling results in an explicit martyrdom, engaged at least partially by the state.
The problems or the gaps of this reading do a nice job of explaining the problems with this film. The enemies that he is set upon are homosexuals, so there is a nasty, almost homophobic component to the idea—namely, that Andy is this sainted innocent, whose life is destroyed by murderous queer men, who sublimate his power with sexual violence. Though prison rape is a very real issue, the mythology of the film, and the clear moral boundaries between the villains and heroes suggests that there is a larger attempt towards mythological truth telling then verisimilitudous realism.
This allegorical extension is furthered in the second problem. Andy, with the possible exception of Red is amoral. He cheats, lies, steals, and helps people who are genuinely evil do the same thing. Though he sets up a library to apparently help, it is done for his own vainglory. The library lets him have power and control. It lets him be the same kind of mover or entrepreneur that Red is on a much larger scale, and it allows him to have a project, to not be bored as he is spends decades on his escape plan. This is placed in stark relief at the end, when he escapes to Mexico, with the evil warden's money.
He does not die for the other prisoners, and any help he has to make their lives liveable, to make their lives better is mostly for his own aggrandizement. His co-opting of the Morgan Freeman character, for his resourcefulness and skill, suggest that he does not really spend much time thinking about anything but his own power. He becomes the church mouse mirror of Pretty Boy Floyd or Bonnie and Clyde. Except, it's all so very clean and precise. There is a man who thinks that he is smarter then anyone else, who commits acts of major finical malfeasance in order to only free himself, and if his co worker happened to get out in time, then Red as well.
The audience is allowed any number of outs. Andy is really innocent, so the escape has no real moral problems. The warden is so evil that there are no problems with screwing him over. His friend was let out of jail legitimately by the state, and so, as a criminal (and the only explicit black character) is no longer one thanks to the great skills of this magical white man. They live for the rest of their lives as two straight guys in a vague tropical resort. That's pretty much the current North American character right there—violent homophobia, a suspicion of the state, casual racism, innocent working class white men, venal and evil rulers, and the odd piece of white collar crime forgiven because the person doing it is more moral then the person they are victimizing.
How would you characterise the way in which the Bible is used and how the religious are portrayed in this film?
The first thing that the prisoners hear from the warden, after they are stripped and made anew is that “I believe in two things, discipline and the bible. Trust in the Lord but your ass belongs to me” The first thing that the prisoners receive are a bible and a set of clothes. When Andy's room is tossed, the warden and Andy trade bible verses, adding to this idea that the gospels are to be used as a tool in the extended power games throughout the film. When the library is built, there is emphatically an absence of a religious texts. When the kid who is killed by the Warden, they quote scripture, and when Andy leaves the day of his escape, the bible and the accounting books are interchangeable. Not only interchangeable, but the bible contains the rockhammer which Andy used to escape.
In this reading, the Warden uses the scripture to maintain his power and to hide the copious sins that he is committing. The bible becomes an extension of the state---Lewis' warning against American fascism is embodied in one man. Andy's use of the bible, as a tool of liberation as a way to hide contraband, as a way of finding salvation from within, and as one text among many that give people a generally forward direction. The use of the scripture then becomes an allegorical device that extends this protestant idea that splits those who believe into those who are legalistic, who are followers of the words and not the actions, versus those who are pluralistic, and whose words are an impetuous towards some kind of action.
What is the film's message about the relationship among the human spirit and hope and despair?
Hope is about work. Hope is about knowing oneself. Hope is about realizing one has the power to do small actions over and over again until the task is completed. Hope is lost when comfort is gone, and there is something comforting in the everyday, in knowing when one is fed or allowed to exercise or any of that work. When one gives up hope, one often dies. (like Brooks the librarian, who kills himself because he gave up hope after failing to integrate; or the kid who is killed by the Warden, because he had hope about Andy being proven innocent and worked to get him out.)
Hope is not a good thing in this film. For a film that is supposed to be about the triumph of the human spirit, the desire to be reminded as Andy said, “that there are places in this world that are not made out of stone” is not something that provides comfort. Red responds to that idea “Let me tell you something my friend. Hope is a dangerous thing. Hope can drive a man insane. “
Andy wins the rhetorical argument in the end, when Red is out and travelling with him to Mexico, to live the rest of their lives. But Andy is right, and it is something that the film sort of avoids. Andy embodies the Dickinson idea that
“Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,
But the only thing with feathers in the entire film is Brooks bird, who is released when he is. But the bird flies away, and Brooks never manages it. Prison is difficult. Though the film alludes every so often, to the idea of how dehumanizing this could be, and though the film has a fair amount of violence, the conclusions suggest that hoping will allow you to fly, allow you to be released or to escape and live forever in this paradisical fantasia.
What about the kid, with a family and young children who was killed. He had hope, sometimes quashed, but hope that Andy as an innocent would be released, and that he would be able to return to civilization. He was shot by a corrupt warden. Or what about Red, who was only released, who was only allowed to retain his role in civilization after he admitted he was with out hope. Or even Brooks himself, Brooks crow flew away, but his hope sat on the chest like a weight so heavy he had to kill himself to release it. The film hints but never says something. Hope is a difficult thing, it will curtail you in delusion, it will disappoint you or discipline you as often as it will provide you with something to work towards or look forward to.
Hope and despair are not opposites, one does not despair due to a lack of hope, but hope and despair work together, endlessly feeding off of each other. Red says at the end of the film, just before he sees Andy: “I find I'm so excited, I can barely sit still or hold a thought in my head. I think it's the excitement only a free man can feel, a free man at the start of a long journey whose conclusion is uncertain. I hope I can make it across the border. I hope to see my friend, and shake his hand. I hope the Pacific is as blue as it has been in my dreams. I hope. “ So that by giving up (what could be determined, perhaps) to be false hope, the hope of the structure of the prison, he is released into the wide world, and he finds something resembling true hope—and this true hope ends with some kind of happiness.
It is a hygienic end to an oversimplified story. It forgets Brooks, it forgets the kid being shot, it suggests that corruption is defeated when one bad apple is found and destroyed. It does not talk about the racism that would occur when a black man buys a bus ticket from Maine to Texas. There is this naïve idea throughout that hope makes all borders pliable, be them between human beings or between nations. In the real world, in the south, in the 1960s, there would be encounters with sheriffs, and with border control guards, and the giving up on hope would result in more despair, not something more true and more pure.
How does the message of the plaque relate the film.
Assuming that the plaque means the one that names the library as the Brooks Memorial Library, the plaque relates to the themes of escape, and to returning to the prison, of being inside, and making a site of great psychic destruction into something more normal. The prison killed Brooks, and to place a plaque memorialising this is a logical and culturally appropriate way of marking the site, of confirming the psycho-geographic heritage of death in that place, and also by extension, allowing everyone there to realise that the work being done inside the library walls was work that continued with the traditions that Brooks had been constructing for decades.
That the library would be the front for white collar crime, slave labour, and eventually conspiracy to commit murder, the spirit of Brooks would be aware that the library could not be kept pure, though he was a contraband mule throughout the prison, the library was sanctuary against that kind of behaviour, so the message might also be about the nature of corruption, about what it does to men and places.
At One Point Brooks the Librarian says “All I Want to be back where things made sense and I want have to be afraid all the time” Why does Brooks say this? What does this attitude say about human beings?
Brooks has been in prison since before the 20th century really begun. He had done the same job, in the same place for decades. He had never seen cars, never seen electronic lights, he had never had a job, and never known how to do anything menial. He was used to being told where to go and how to do it. When Red is released, we are reminded that prisoners do not even know how to piss without being told when or how. Brooks is afraid, not of the dangers of the prison, which he has safely avoided for decades, but the strangeness of the outside world. If he goes back to prison, then the structures of official and unofficial behaviour that he has had completed for decades no longer exist, but the bare whispers of life before incarceration are forgotten.
He is afraid not of the dangers that he has faced and developed patterns for, but for dangers that he cannot have any knowledge of, not only how to deal with them, but how to identify them at all. For all of it's problems, the prison is orderly. What the film says about these things is two fold, and they are contradictory. It is saying that human beings do better when being controlled, that having too many options, of being too free after too much time not being free will result in the destruction of self.
But it also says, that a lack of personal autonomy will also destroy ones self. So Red and Andy, have the structure of the prison, know how to play it, and that playing the game in a way that is acceptable to most, results in a reward (escape for Andy, parole for Red). If one does not know how to function without the structure of whatever inside you are, then there is no centre, and if the centre cannot hold, then the resulting mess takes serious collateral damage.
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