Sunday, May 31, 2009
Saturday, May 30, 2009
Friday, May 29, 2009
Thursday, May 28, 2009
What parts of Daniel's Life parallels that of Jesus?
Daniel has any number of elements that are similar to the life of Christ. The first third of the film, after he is asked to rewrite the passion play, he collects disciples. As his relationship with the disciples deepens, his life explicitly begins to parallel the Christ story. He finds an actress who is sleeping with her director, seeking worldly fame as opposed to following her spiritual gifts, this Magdalene figure becomes the lead of three women who eventually witness his death in a hospital and symbolic resurrection, in the corporeal sense of working as an organ donor and the symbolic sense of the dissemination of his writing
But I am getting ahead of myself. The passion play that Daniel recasts as an example of social and political dissent becomes popular as a work itself. In this popularity, men of power come to him, offer him favours. He grows increasingly uncomfortable with these people, with treating the passion of the Christ as another art performance that one does on a Saturday night. The Magdalene figure becomes Daniel's lover, she agrees to do a beer ad. At the audition, she is asked to take her clothes off. Daniel overturns what turns out to be 23 000 dollars in film equipment.
His friends hire a lawyer, who tries to convince Daniel to use his new found success and fame for good. He is Pharisaical, suggesting that selling out one's art becomes an act of heresy. That Daniel refutes him, is the beginning of the end. The passion play, filled with a female Christ, archaeological discussions of the real and the fake, and an ambiguous resurrection is a scandalous desire to return to a purified Christianity, infused with a love for the other, for art, for justice, and for the desire not for churches, but a populist redemption.
The dioceses shuts down the production. Daniel and his actors discuss next moves on the summit of Mount Trembly, like when Christ brought his apostles to Mount Olive, and shows them that he is fully divine and human. Agreeing to go on with the play, in the dark, security corners him, like the soldiers at Gethsemane. He collapses, is turned away from two hospitals, and travels through the city, before dying in a Metro station. After death, he is shot from above on a cruciform bed, and there are scenes of his eyes given to a blind woman, and his heart given to a previously dead man, alluding to his making the blind see, and the Lazarus myth. These scenes are interspersed with three women, including the Magdalene figure bringing the passion play into the world, like Quebecois Phoebes.
What Critique does this film offer about the origin of religious movements.
The new religious movement that is building here, is built from the work of Daniel and his rewriting of the passion play. That the prophecy is both written about and preformed, and that it textually resurrects a play that is so threadbare that it becomes a mockery gives a good general sense of how Arycand feels about the origin of religious movements. That Daniel is asked to make trendy this eternal story, and dies a martyr to his art, when the rewrite is proven too radical cements the central message of the film. This message has a triune formula. First, all new religious movements begin not ex nihlo from other texts. Just as Daniel's disciples and words grow from the catholic culture of old Quebec, so did Christianity grow from Judaism, Secondly, this growth from old movements, must have a logophillic component. Dennis is given a copy of the old script, he finds his disciples reading from a wide variety of scripts, dubbing English pornography or science documentaries to French for example; when he sets to rewrite the Passion play, he goes to the library so often that the librarian assumes that he is an evangelical and attempts to have a discussion of conversion for him. Later, there are rehearsals, in apartments filled with books, and when we finally see the production it is an intertextual exercise, using erotic, scientific, religious, and social texts. Third, that the old movement, and the logophillic tendencies, must have a social component, that constitutes a willingness to change. The actors not only turn down paying gigs to work for free, they rewrite the text with Daniel, argue with him about meaning, live together, and raise a child as well. They eat, drink, and by implication make love as a communal force. Arycands critique of the origin of religion, is that it fails to fulfil this narrative. That those radicals ignore tradition, that those who do not ignore tradition are afraid of text (written words on the page, the old fashioned meaning of the word, not the post modern equivalent where text is something that incorporates meaning) and lastly, that those who do not ignore tradition, and engage with the written words on the page, sully their art (and he assumes that art is a new kind of religion) by doing side work that pays the bills.
The passion play as a dramatic staging of Jesus life, trial and death is preformed in many Chrsitian denomoations...during Lent....How do you think it functions as a ritual for the characters in The Jesus of Montreal?
Remembering that a Christ figure is not Christ, and that Arycand is using the play within the play, to construct a narrative of resistance against much of the Anglophone relationship with Quebec, so that there are several layers in the rituals described here, simulacrum of images that have already been heavily formalised, and even the critiques of these forms have existed since the gnostic thinkers. That said, Lynd's quotation of Catherine Bell's Six Forms of Ritual can be useful here. Bell elcuidates 6 forms of ritual: Formalism, Traditionalism, Invariance, Rule Governance, Sacral Symbolism, and Performance. 1Arycand uses each of these six forms to talk about what it means to be a catholic in Quebec.
He uses the idea of a passion play, of course, and his passion play features many of the forms that have not been changed since the mystery plays in the medieval era. There are 12 stations of the cross, pilgrims travel to each one, and the words/visual images do not change much at all. But he is also aware of how these forms are resistant to change. When the priest and the arch diocese refuse for the play to go on, there is a small and very tight burlesque, playing the passion as Kabuki, New York Method, Romance and traditionally Quebecois. Arycand then is aware of the filmic choices he is making, and how those filmic choices both reinforce a traditionally Catholic relationship to form (for example the lighting, camera movement and close ups in the last performance), update it (the cruciform ed hospital bed), and de-construct it (how the descent from the cross happens with a crane shot that mostly ignores the dead prophet)
The last scene in the Metro station, with the sweeping crane shot, and the elevators taking up most of the mise-en-scene, and that it can still be identified as a desecnsion, suggests that Arycand knows the traditions of Catholicism. But it is not only formal calls. Lync defines traditionalism as a sense that “we have always done it this way, even if we haven't”2 Though the passion play is only 45 years old, any change to it becomes a radical act of violence not only against the church but by Christ Himself. (same way really, that when Mireille is asked to dance and disrobe for the audition, and she is reluctant too, she is told that she is being difficult, that there is no other way of casting for beer ads.
This leads to a discussion of invariance. That things will never change, that any attempts to change the liturgy, to change how actors work, to change how plays are written or how christ is delivered to an audience that dismisses this work will be problematic. This invariance can be understood best when the priest who is sleeping with one of the actors refuses to break the rules about can be performed in the church. The passion play exists in the form that it was convienced in, as a way of bringing pilgrims and not critics to the shrine, and this must not change.
Dennis dies when the mob who comes to see the play overwhelms him. He does not die on the cross, but is brought to catholic hospitals, who refuse to help him and refuse to acknowledge how unwell he is. Though the psychiatrist claims that he is more rational then the judge who is to sentence him, he refuses to live in a world that does not respect his life as an artist or a french candian. It is ironic then that he is brought to a Jewish hospital at the end, an orginzation outside of the required rule governance found in both the social and religious milieu of mid 1980s Montreal.
This religious significance, this using ritual to move to larger truths can be found in the idea of sacral significance. In this way, though it is a gloss on Mark, Jesus of Montreal becomes a post secualr reworking of John 1:1, the sacral significance occurs in the ritual magic that turns words into the flesh of God. In this way Daniel becomes closer and closer to incorporate the flesh of Christ, as he gets closer and closer to the words. The word was made flesh, and by mirrored extension, those who make words make flesh, both symbolically in the sense of other characters embody the word of God.
Though this embodiment is profoundly sacral, that it ties all of the rituals together in a text that is about the metacontextual nature of performance, that it makes the mass, the psychiatric office, pornography, educational television, advertisements, and the passion play as parts of the same spectrum, makes the viewer consider what it means to be a passive viewer, to not perform the linguistic mysteries that both an inbound sense of art, and a religious sense of obligation require of them.
Compare Daniel's crucifxion in the passion play to that of Jesus-movies you may have seen...
Passolini and Arycand have much in common, both outsiders in a traditionally catholic culture, both nervous about American imperialism, both infatuated with the aesthetic history of American Christianity, both attempting to politically engage with a society who is attempting to extract itself from a monoculture, both have read the scriptures, and both are politically far left. So the two should be similar. Except that Passolini understood that the Christian story was about Christ, and attempted to purify it, not bring any of his own socio-cultural baggage into the mix. He hired a queer christ, and his own mother as the Madonna, of course, but that is outside the text, an extra bit when you have spent enough time with the rest of it.
When Passolini attempted to renew the gospel then, or update it, he did not feel the need to add meta-layers and so he did not choose the gospel that was the closest to his social concerns, and he did not film it at the Cine Citta, he went to the south of Italy, lived with his actors and created something that was infused with the spirit of Italian neo-realism, but was uniquely his.
There are things that similar though. Arycand loves Montreal profoundly, loves the people and loves the city in a way that no one else has. This love is difficult, honest, and earnest. The genius of this film and his films in general is that he can make cliché scenes of sentiment seem refreshed. The bohemian actors having dinner together becomes a tender and generous reworking of the last supper, for example. Pasolini loves Italy deeply, loves the city and loves the men, in a way that no one else has. The genius of his films is that he adapts the cultures of European classics with a po-faced earnestness, a believability and emotional rawness that is often not gentle or tender.
That Arycand felt the need to rework the gospel story in order to create a complicated narrative of ethnic ennui suggests that he might not be as trustful of his source material, or at least that he is attrempting to secularise the story. Pasolini though a marxist, believed in the Catholic church. There stories were his stories, this identity is not something you see in the detachment of Arycand's work. Or to put it another way, Arycand is capable of great emotional outpourings, of operatic excess, but these moments hold back to the final scenes, they work as catharsis and completion.
Pasolini's emotions are small, and the work is so unritualistic, and unformalised, that the there is no catharsis, no endings, nothing even close to the Lazarus motif or the blind woman seeing. Arcyand's work is squalid, close to the ground, domestic, and outward seeking. They are shooting from the same playbook, but their traditions, reading, and narrative sense make them create explicitly different works about implicitly similar subjects.
What do you think the role of the priest is in this film?
The priest is a sly and ironic critique He attempts to modernize the passion play, and discusses Daniel's changes as questions of fashions. He is sleeping with one of the actresses, quotes Camus' the Myth of Sisyphus as part of a sermon, would quit the priesthood but is too comfortable with the material comforts (literally the nun's making him breakfast), and later refuses to take moral responsibility for the arch-diocese banning the rewritten play.
This kind of priest has been a staple of French farce since Moliere: arch and decadent, urbane, sexualised, and basically amoral. When he is found in the apartment by Daniel, his lover says “I don't want this to become a bedroom farce” and it is not, because he makes no effort to hide his corruption. In a scene slightly afterwards, he makes excuses for not doing the intellectual work required for his role as university lecturer because his bishop has prevented anyone to have new and non prescribed ideas.
In this sense, with his status as part of the old guard, as engorged and happy as anything, he is a symbolic stand-in for the Church, who always assumes it will have power, who maintains the status qou, and who refuses to notice that change is not only inevitable but happening in front of him. He does not acknowledge the prophetic potential of Daniel, like the Church did not recognize what was new in Quebec society.
How approprite do you think Hamlet's soliloquy is in the film? What does it reveal about the actors understanding of religion?
Hamlet's soliloquy does three things. It secularises the search for eternal truth, which allows for a smoother transition between the religion for religions sake and art as a new kind of faith. It also talks about the nature of person-hood, what makes someone human, which is something that Daniels modified Passion Play mentions directly. Also, because both the priest, some of the actors, and Daniel speak it, it becomes a voice of ambiguity.
If the text can be used by a true believer, a doubting Thomas, and a Pharisees, it confirms the construction of Christ's humanity, and becomes not only a comment on the gnostic idea of a non-divine Christ, but integrative, allowing for another kind of secular set of agreements on how to be human. (Though I am not sure why the used Hamlet and not Racine?)
Jesus of Toronto :
There is nothing unified and iconographic in Toronto's history. The old guard Anglicans and Presbyterian that helped found the city and had most of its hard power for the 19th century were built alongside first nations, Irish Catholics, free thinkers, and non conformists. They sought comfort, but did not have the power of the Catholic church that Montreal did. All of that said, Arycand's work is very much about the 1960s, and being from Montreal, and sorting out what to do with a language, a structure of life, a society and a culture that was distinctly separate from especially Toronto.
There could be a similar sense of isolation in Vancouver, with it's geographical distance and the political problems of for example the Sikhs or the Dukaboors, and coming from Alberta, I know there is a sense of isolation in the prairies, where we give to the east, and do not get nearly as much in return, and the economic solitude of Atlantic Canada is well documented, and Toronto is far from perfect, but it sort of lacks the two things that the film suggests Montreal has: that isolation and a fear of scandal.
If I was to make such a movie, then maybe it could go the other way, sort of make it like Don McKellor's Last Night (which might just be the Jesus of Toronto), where the apocalypse happens to a wide variety of people, and those people walk the city, or have family dinner, or party a bit, or do nothing. That diffusiveness, and diveristy, the quietness, and the communal lack of solitary isolation is essentially a Toronto story, and one that I think works as an interesting companion piece to this work.
So, it would be important to examine the polyglot nature of the city, how it speaks 100+ languages, and has dozens of ethnic groups. My plot would not follow any strict narrative, or connecitons to anything idelogical, but be a set of small and discreet encounters, sometimes with noise, sometimes with silence, that combine the fractured, amorphous nature of the city into a set of impressionistic emotions, but not into one allegory that can only be read by a monoculture. I would set it all over the place, at the Hindu temple in Brampton, the new masjid in the Danforth, at the Cathedral of ST James, and at Moonbeam coffee house in Kensington, around a dining room in Rosedale, and at a loft in Liberty Village, I would have a scene at a pub, and among the dead animals at the ROM, and someone getting a lapdance at the Zanzibar, nothing transcendent, because there is no transcendence here. There are 8 million people, in one of the most decentralised cities, in one of the most decentralised regions, in one of the most decentralised countries trying to figure out what they have in common, which is very little.
Daniel has any number of elements that are similar to the life of Christ. The first third of the film, after he is asked to rewrite the passion play, he collects disciples. As his relationship with the disciples deepens, his life explicitly begins to parallel the Christ story. He finds an actress who is sleeping with her director, seeking worldly fame as opposed to following her spiritual gifts, this Magdalene figure becomes the lead of three women who eventually witness his death in a hospital and symbolic resurrection, in the corporeal sense of working as an organ donor and the symbolic sense of the dissemination of his writing
But I am getting ahead of myself. The passion play that Daniel recasts as an example of social and political dissent becomes popular as a work itself. In this popularity, men of power come to him, offer him favours. He grows increasingly uncomfortable with these people, with treating the passion of the Christ as another art performance that one does on a Saturday night. The Magdalene figure becomes Daniel's lover, she agrees to do a beer ad. At the audition, she is asked to take her clothes off. Daniel overturns what turns out to be 23 000 dollars in film equipment.
His friends hire a lawyer, who tries to convince Daniel to use his new found success and fame for good. He is Pharisaical, suggesting that selling out one's art becomes an act of heresy. That Daniel refutes him, is the beginning of the end. The passion play, filled with a female Christ, archaeological discussions of the real and the fake, and an ambiguous resurrection is a scandalous desire to return to a purified Christianity, infused with a love for the other, for art, for justice, and for the desire not for churches, but a populist redemption.
The dioceses shuts down the production. Daniel and his actors discuss next moves on the summit of Mount Trembly, like when Christ brought his apostles to Mount Olive, and shows them that he is fully divine and human. Agreeing to go on with the play, in the dark, security corners him, like the soldiers at Gethsemane. He collapses, is turned away from two hospitals, and travels through the city, before dying in a Metro station. After death, he is shot from above on a cruciform bed, and there are scenes of his eyes given to a blind woman, and his heart given to a previously dead man, alluding to his making the blind see, and the Lazarus myth. These scenes are interspersed with three women, including the Magdalene figure bringing the passion play into the world, like Quebecois Phoebes.
What Critique does this film offer about the origin of religious movements.
The new religious movement that is building here, is built from the work of Daniel and his rewriting of the passion play. That the prophecy is both written about and preformed, and that it textually resurrects a play that is so threadbare that it becomes a mockery gives a good general sense of how Arycand feels about the origin of religious movements. That Daniel is asked to make trendy this eternal story, and dies a martyr to his art, when the rewrite is proven too radical cements the central message of the film. This message has a triune formula. First, all new religious movements begin not ex nihlo from other texts. Just as Daniel's disciples and words grow from the catholic culture of old Quebec, so did Christianity grow from Judaism, Secondly, this growth from old movements, must have a logophillic component. Dennis is given a copy of the old script, he finds his disciples reading from a wide variety of scripts, dubbing English pornography or science documentaries to French for example; when he sets to rewrite the Passion play, he goes to the library so often that the librarian assumes that he is an evangelical and attempts to have a discussion of conversion for him. Later, there are rehearsals, in apartments filled with books, and when we finally see the production it is an intertextual exercise, using erotic, scientific, religious, and social texts. Third, that the old movement, and the logophillic tendencies, must have a social component, that constitutes a willingness to change. The actors not only turn down paying gigs to work for free, they rewrite the text with Daniel, argue with him about meaning, live together, and raise a child as well. They eat, drink, and by implication make love as a communal force. Arycands critique of the origin of religion, is that it fails to fulfil this narrative. That those radicals ignore tradition, that those who do not ignore tradition are afraid of text (written words on the page, the old fashioned meaning of the word, not the post modern equivalent where text is something that incorporates meaning) and lastly, that those who do not ignore tradition, and engage with the written words on the page, sully their art (and he assumes that art is a new kind of religion) by doing side work that pays the bills.
The passion play as a dramatic staging of Jesus life, trial and death is preformed in many Chrsitian denomoations...during Lent....How do you think it functions as a ritual for the characters in The Jesus of Montreal?
Remembering that a Christ figure is not Christ, and that Arycand is using the play within the play, to construct a narrative of resistance against much of the Anglophone relationship with Quebec, so that there are several layers in the rituals described here, simulacrum of images that have already been heavily formalised, and even the critiques of these forms have existed since the gnostic thinkers. That said, Lynd's quotation of Catherine Bell's Six Forms of Ritual can be useful here. Bell elcuidates 6 forms of ritual: Formalism, Traditionalism, Invariance, Rule Governance, Sacral Symbolism, and Performance. 1Arycand uses each of these six forms to talk about what it means to be a catholic in Quebec.
He uses the idea of a passion play, of course, and his passion play features many of the forms that have not been changed since the mystery plays in the medieval era. There are 12 stations of the cross, pilgrims travel to each one, and the words/visual images do not change much at all. But he is also aware of how these forms are resistant to change. When the priest and the arch diocese refuse for the play to go on, there is a small and very tight burlesque, playing the passion as Kabuki, New York Method, Romance and traditionally Quebecois. Arycand then is aware of the filmic choices he is making, and how those filmic choices both reinforce a traditionally Catholic relationship to form (for example the lighting, camera movement and close ups in the last performance), update it (the cruciform ed hospital bed), and de-construct it (how the descent from the cross happens with a crane shot that mostly ignores the dead prophet)
The last scene in the Metro station, with the sweeping crane shot, and the elevators taking up most of the mise-en-scene, and that it can still be identified as a desecnsion, suggests that Arycand knows the traditions of Catholicism. But it is not only formal calls. Lync defines traditionalism as a sense that “we have always done it this way, even if we haven't”2 Though the passion play is only 45 years old, any change to it becomes a radical act of violence not only against the church but by Christ Himself. (same way really, that when Mireille is asked to dance and disrobe for the audition, and she is reluctant too, she is told that she is being difficult, that there is no other way of casting for beer ads.
This leads to a discussion of invariance. That things will never change, that any attempts to change the liturgy, to change how actors work, to change how plays are written or how christ is delivered to an audience that dismisses this work will be problematic. This invariance can be understood best when the priest who is sleeping with one of the actors refuses to break the rules about can be performed in the church. The passion play exists in the form that it was convienced in, as a way of bringing pilgrims and not critics to the shrine, and this must not change.
Dennis dies when the mob who comes to see the play overwhelms him. He does not die on the cross, but is brought to catholic hospitals, who refuse to help him and refuse to acknowledge how unwell he is. Though the psychiatrist claims that he is more rational then the judge who is to sentence him, he refuses to live in a world that does not respect his life as an artist or a french candian. It is ironic then that he is brought to a Jewish hospital at the end, an orginzation outside of the required rule governance found in both the social and religious milieu of mid 1980s Montreal.
This religious significance, this using ritual to move to larger truths can be found in the idea of sacral significance. In this way, though it is a gloss on Mark, Jesus of Montreal becomes a post secualr reworking of John 1:1, the sacral significance occurs in the ritual magic that turns words into the flesh of God. In this way Daniel becomes closer and closer to incorporate the flesh of Christ, as he gets closer and closer to the words. The word was made flesh, and by mirrored extension, those who make words make flesh, both symbolically in the sense of other characters embody the word of God.
Though this embodiment is profoundly sacral, that it ties all of the rituals together in a text that is about the metacontextual nature of performance, that it makes the mass, the psychiatric office, pornography, educational television, advertisements, and the passion play as parts of the same spectrum, makes the viewer consider what it means to be a passive viewer, to not perform the linguistic mysteries that both an inbound sense of art, and a religious sense of obligation require of them.
Compare Daniel's crucifxion in the passion play to that of Jesus-movies you may have seen...
Passolini and Arycand have much in common, both outsiders in a traditionally catholic culture, both nervous about American imperialism, both infatuated with the aesthetic history of American Christianity, both attempting to politically engage with a society who is attempting to extract itself from a monoculture, both have read the scriptures, and both are politically far left. So the two should be similar. Except that Passolini understood that the Christian story was about Christ, and attempted to purify it, not bring any of his own socio-cultural baggage into the mix. He hired a queer christ, and his own mother as the Madonna, of course, but that is outside the text, an extra bit when you have spent enough time with the rest of it.
When Passolini attempted to renew the gospel then, or update it, he did not feel the need to add meta-layers and so he did not choose the gospel that was the closest to his social concerns, and he did not film it at the Cine Citta, he went to the south of Italy, lived with his actors and created something that was infused with the spirit of Italian neo-realism, but was uniquely his.
There are things that similar though. Arycand loves Montreal profoundly, loves the people and loves the city in a way that no one else has. This love is difficult, honest, and earnest. The genius of this film and his films in general is that he can make cliché scenes of sentiment seem refreshed. The bohemian actors having dinner together becomes a tender and generous reworking of the last supper, for example. Pasolini loves Italy deeply, loves the city and loves the men, in a way that no one else has. The genius of his films is that he adapts the cultures of European classics with a po-faced earnestness, a believability and emotional rawness that is often not gentle or tender.
That Arycand felt the need to rework the gospel story in order to create a complicated narrative of ethnic ennui suggests that he might not be as trustful of his source material, or at least that he is attrempting to secularise the story. Pasolini though a marxist, believed in the Catholic church. There stories were his stories, this identity is not something you see in the detachment of Arycand's work. Or to put it another way, Arycand is capable of great emotional outpourings, of operatic excess, but these moments hold back to the final scenes, they work as catharsis and completion.
Pasolini's emotions are small, and the work is so unritualistic, and unformalised, that the there is no catharsis, no endings, nothing even close to the Lazarus motif or the blind woman seeing. Arcyand's work is squalid, close to the ground, domestic, and outward seeking. They are shooting from the same playbook, but their traditions, reading, and narrative sense make them create explicitly different works about implicitly similar subjects.
What do you think the role of the priest is in this film?
The priest is a sly and ironic critique He attempts to modernize the passion play, and discusses Daniel's changes as questions of fashions. He is sleeping with one of the actresses, quotes Camus' the Myth of Sisyphus as part of a sermon, would quit the priesthood but is too comfortable with the material comforts (literally the nun's making him breakfast), and later refuses to take moral responsibility for the arch-diocese banning the rewritten play.
This kind of priest has been a staple of French farce since Moliere: arch and decadent, urbane, sexualised, and basically amoral. When he is found in the apartment by Daniel, his lover says “I don't want this to become a bedroom farce” and it is not, because he makes no effort to hide his corruption. In a scene slightly afterwards, he makes excuses for not doing the intellectual work required for his role as university lecturer because his bishop has prevented anyone to have new and non prescribed ideas.
In this sense, with his status as part of the old guard, as engorged and happy as anything, he is a symbolic stand-in for the Church, who always assumes it will have power, who maintains the status qou, and who refuses to notice that change is not only inevitable but happening in front of him. He does not acknowledge the prophetic potential of Daniel, like the Church did not recognize what was new in Quebec society.
How approprite do you think Hamlet's soliloquy is in the film? What does it reveal about the actors understanding of religion?
Hamlet's soliloquy does three things. It secularises the search for eternal truth, which allows for a smoother transition between the religion for religions sake and art as a new kind of faith. It also talks about the nature of person-hood, what makes someone human, which is something that Daniels modified Passion Play mentions directly. Also, because both the priest, some of the actors, and Daniel speak it, it becomes a voice of ambiguity.
If the text can be used by a true believer, a doubting Thomas, and a Pharisees, it confirms the construction of Christ's humanity, and becomes not only a comment on the gnostic idea of a non-divine Christ, but integrative, allowing for another kind of secular set of agreements on how to be human. (Though I am not sure why the used Hamlet and not Racine?)
Jesus of Toronto :
There is nothing unified and iconographic in Toronto's history. The old guard Anglicans and Presbyterian that helped found the city and had most of its hard power for the 19th century were built alongside first nations, Irish Catholics, free thinkers, and non conformists. They sought comfort, but did not have the power of the Catholic church that Montreal did. All of that said, Arycand's work is very much about the 1960s, and being from Montreal, and sorting out what to do with a language, a structure of life, a society and a culture that was distinctly separate from especially Toronto.
There could be a similar sense of isolation in Vancouver, with it's geographical distance and the political problems of for example the Sikhs or the Dukaboors, and coming from Alberta, I know there is a sense of isolation in the prairies, where we give to the east, and do not get nearly as much in return, and the economic solitude of Atlantic Canada is well documented, and Toronto is far from perfect, but it sort of lacks the two things that the film suggests Montreal has: that isolation and a fear of scandal.
If I was to make such a movie, then maybe it could go the other way, sort of make it like Don McKellor's Last Night (which might just be the Jesus of Toronto), where the apocalypse happens to a wide variety of people, and those people walk the city, or have family dinner, or party a bit, or do nothing. That diffusiveness, and diveristy, the quietness, and the communal lack of solitary isolation is essentially a Toronto story, and one that I think works as an interesting companion piece to this work.
So, it would be important to examine the polyglot nature of the city, how it speaks 100+ languages, and has dozens of ethnic groups. My plot would not follow any strict narrative, or connecitons to anything idelogical, but be a set of small and discreet encounters, sometimes with noise, sometimes with silence, that combine the fractured, amorphous nature of the city into a set of impressionistic emotions, but not into one allegory that can only be read by a monoculture. I would set it all over the place, at the Hindu temple in Brampton, the new masjid in the Danforth, at the Cathedral of ST James, and at Moonbeam coffee house in Kensington, around a dining room in Rosedale, and at a loft in Liberty Village, I would have a scene at a pub, and among the dead animals at the ROM, and someone getting a lapdance at the Zanzibar, nothing transcendent, because there is no transcendence here. There are 8 million people, in one of the most decentralised cities, in one of the most decentralised regions, in one of the most decentralised countries trying to figure out what they have in common, which is very little.
1 8 Oral sex
2 1337 Elite
3 143 I love you
4 182 I hate you
5 459 I love you
6 1174 Nude club
7 420 Marijuana
8 ADR Address
9 ASL Age/Sex/Location
10 Banana Penis
11 CD9 or Code 9 Parents are around
12 DUM Do You Masturbate?
13 DUSL Do You Scream Loud?
14 FB F*** Buddy
15
16 FMLTWIA F*** Me Like The Whore I Am
17 FOL Fond of Leather
18 GNOC Get Naked On Cam
19 GYPO Get Your Pants Off
20 IAYM I Am Your Master
21 IF/IB In the Front or In the Back
22 IIT Is It Tight?
23 ILF/MD I Love Female/Male Dominance
24 IMEZRU I Am Easy, Are You?
25 IWSN I Want Sex Now
26 J/O Jerking Off
27 KFY or K4Y Kiss For You
28 Kitty Vagina
29 KPC Keeping Parents Clueless
30 MorF Male or Female
31 LMIRL Let's Meet In Real Life
32 MOOS Member Of The Opposite Sex
33 WYCM Will You Call Me?
34 MOS Mom Over Shoulder
35 MPFB My Personal F*** Buddy
36 NALOPKT Not A Lot Of People Know That
37 NIFOC Nude In Front Of The Computer
38 NMU Not Much, You?
39 P911 Parent Alert
40 PAL Parents Are Listening
41 PAW Parents Are Watching
42 PIR Parent In Room
43 POS Parent Over Shoulder or Piece Of Sh**
44 PRON Porn
45 Q2C Quick To Cum
46 RU/18 Are You Over 18?
47 RUH Are You Horny?
48 S2R Send To Receive
49 SorG Straight or Gay
50 TDTM Talk Dirty To Me
2 1337 Elite
3 143 I love you
4 182 I hate you
5 459 I love you
6 1174 Nude club
7 420 Marijuana
8 ADR Address
9 ASL Age/Sex/Location
10 Banana Penis
11 CD9 or Code 9 Parents are around
12 DUM Do You Masturbate?
13 DUSL Do You Scream Loud?
14 FB F*** Buddy
15
16 FMLTWIA F*** Me Like The Whore I Am
17 FOL Fond of Leather
18 GNOC Get Naked On Cam
19 GYPO Get Your Pants Off
20 IAYM I Am Your Master
21 IF/IB In the Front or In the Back
22 IIT Is It Tight?
23 ILF/MD I Love Female/Male Dominance
24 IMEZRU I Am Easy, Are You?
25 IWSN I Want Sex Now
26 J/O Jerking Off
27 KFY or K4Y Kiss For You
28 Kitty Vagina
29 KPC Keeping Parents Clueless
30 MorF Male or Female
31 LMIRL Let's Meet In Real Life
32 MOOS Member Of The Opposite Sex
33 WYCM Will You Call Me?
34 MOS Mom Over Shoulder
35 MPFB My Personal F*** Buddy
36 NALOPKT Not A Lot Of People Know That
37 NIFOC Nude In Front Of The Computer
38 NMU Not Much, You?
39 P911 Parent Alert
40 PAL Parents Are Listening
41 PAW Parents Are Watching
42 PIR Parent In Room
43 POS Parent Over Shoulder or Piece Of Sh**
44 PRON Porn
45 Q2C Quick To Cum
46 RU/18 Are You Over 18?
47 RUH Are You Horny?
48 S2R Send To Receive
49 SorG Straight or Gay
50 TDTM Talk Dirty To Me
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
 |
| From Untitled Album |
Me
major presbyterian, epsicoplian, and lutheran decesions of same sex marriage are expected this summer. while the church of scotland agrees to allow a gay man to become a priest, even move his bf into the manse.
New Robyn with Royskopp.
obama asks for the right for defandents to have lawyers in the room to be cut
Obama's picking of Sotomayer:
a) solid, centre left.
b) smart.
c) will work as a corrective to Robert's strange attitudes vis a vis race.
d) poltically genius in that it firms up a latin base, and makes republicans look like crazy racists when they oppose her.
she isn't who i wanted, but i never get what i want.
7 minutes of an 18 yr old taxidermist, the interesting bit is her use of ebay. She is really calm, really talented, and v. smart. Will go far.
hand drawn cartoons from wwii
Toronto School of Architects guide maps to modernism.
America Is F*cked.......(Graphically at least) from Jess Gibson on Vimeo.
America is Fucked, at least from a design standpoint. (Jesse Gibson is a passionite advocate for good, solid design)
photos and audio from segreated proms in the american south.
cutest photo of a baby anteater ever
a blog of high fashion and street fashion hijabs.
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| From Untitled Album |
Angelina Jolie at 16
interesting discussion of the effectiveness of thot supression
who let the police union buy a section ofa news paper that criticises them? (of course the cops told the san diego union tribune to quit writing stories critical of them.
finally the hyper realism of cali airbursh has its critical history, link goes to a news story with some pretty hot images.
heartland family ministries attempts to remake the I85 from Canada thru to Mexico, in the middle of the contient, a holiness corridor.
if i had time i would discuss how Robinson formally uses the tropes of local news to normalise the structure of something that is really outsiderish, or the rhetoric of violence that they use to express their faith, or such interesting neolgisms as prophetic intercessor,but you have heard that all before, so just make fun of them.
Let's hope Edna O'Brien is reading about the 500 irish women in secret affairs with priests. and the reports of irish schools is growing more abusive, and more corrupt, with the reports having no names, so no prosections.
Lick It Before You Stick It, Denise Le Salle.
the current president of the ANC cannot forget his old revotiuonary ties, or songs with chorsues about machine guns.
a taxonomy of highway overpasses
small in situ video of Alys Fabiola.
australian policy in the northern territory continues to be a disaster.
Holzer's Whitney curator Nicholas Spark seems difficult in this interview with Catherine Spaeth, but that might be because she asks really stupid quesitons.
 |
| From Untitled Album |
The Cover for Brooke Hogan's New Album
france rejects the idea of gender bimorphic disorder.
Charlie STross on video games.
this saltz discussion of the Met Musuem's Picture show has one of the most succint discussions of image creation:
"Appropriation is the idea that ate the art world. Go to any Chelsea gallery or international biennial and you’ll find it. It’s there in paintings of photographs, photographs of advertising, sculpture with ready-made objects, videos using already-existing film. After its hothouse incubation in the seventies, appropriation breathed important new life into art. This life flowered spectacularly over the decades—even if it’s now close to aesthetic kudzu."
woman elected in Kuwait
more discussion of what is allowed and what is forbidden, in FINA's attempts to control technology.
this concrete coffee table fills me with lust
this house fills me with more lust more fotos here
 |
| From Untitled Album |
Norman Foster's New Stadium in Shang hai looks like a vulva.
, here
Governor General Michaëlle Jean, on the first day of her trip to the Arctic, gutted a freshly slaughtered seal, pulled out its raw heart — and ate it.
 |
| From Untitled Album |
Ryman (date and title unknown)
"First ... our task in the present proceeding is not to determine whether the provision at issue is wise or sound as a matter of policy or whether we, as individuals, believe it should be a part of the California Constitution. Regardless of our views as individuals on this question of policy, we recognize as judges and as a court our responsibility to confine our consideration to a determination of the constitutional validity and legal effect of the measure in question. It bears emphasis in this regard that our role is limited to interpreting and applying the principles and rules embodied in the California Constitution, setting aside our own personal beliefs and values."
From the Prop 8 decesion.
From the Prop 8 decesion.
Monday, May 25, 2009
me: explain hegel to me
5:30 PM ingreatcaves: seems like history could be system, that it could have plans for us, which we can anticipate!
me: well thats easy
how can we anticapte it
ingreatcaves: Yes, let's try that through the stamp of taxonomy, crossed with reductive abstractions/
5:31 PM there you go.
me: yr a genius
ingreatcaves: from there, you can make up YOUR OWN taxonomies and speculative structure.
5:32 PM History will be what you say it will be!
5:33 PM me: yr good at this
5:34 PM thank you
now to writing
5:30 PM ingreatcaves: seems like history could be system, that it could have plans for us, which we can anticipate!
me: well thats easy
how can we anticapte it
ingreatcaves: Yes, let's try that through the stamp of taxonomy, crossed with reductive abstractions/
5:31 PM there you go.
me: yr a genius
ingreatcaves: from there, you can make up YOUR OWN taxonomies and speculative structure.
5:32 PM History will be what you say it will be!
5:33 PM me: yr good at this
5:34 PM thank you
now to writing
Aliens and American Civil Religion.
If Bellah is right, and there is an American civil religion, where elements of the empire's civil institutions are constructed religiously, then the Military could be considered a priestly class, or was at least. Set apart, respected and beloved beyond others, they become a group of martyrs and pioneers, protecting civilians, preserving order, and maintaining the conflicted values that make America. They are convinced to become soldiers by the recruiters theistic language, once all male, schools like Annapolis and West Point became seminaries, presidents pray with them and for them, when they die they are sent home with Christian language, and buried under gravestones perpetually cared for, emblazoned with the graphic of faith. The setting apart of this class, with it's own language, is indicative of Bellah's argument: “What people say on solemn occasions need not be taken at face value, but it is often indicative of deep-seated values and commitments that are not made explicit in the course of everyday life.” (From Biblical Religion and Civil Religion, first published by Daedalus, June 1967, found here: http://web.archive.org/web/20050306124338/http://www.robertbellah.com/articles_5.htm).
He starts talking about Kennedy, who gave us Vietnam, and who died in the back of a Cadillac in Texas, was the origin of the last of the periods of Chaos where the American Civil Relgion fell apart. If the civil religions status is to preserve order, to clean and reconstruct chaos so that it becomes once again “the shining city on the hill” (cf Winthrop, Regan) then one has to re-establish the other. Bellah hints that this work would be done, and talks about how language was being manipulated already: “
Those nations that are for the moment “on our side” become “the free world.” A repressive and unstable military dictatorship in South Vietnam becomes “the free people of South Vietnam and their government.” It is then part of the role of America as the New Jerusalem and “the last best hope of earth” to defend such governments with treasure and eventually with blood. When our soldiers are actually dying, it becomes possible to consecrate the struggle further by invoking the great theme of sacrifice. For the majority of the American people who are unable to judge whether the people in South Vietnam (or wherever) are “free like us,” such arguments are convincing. " (ibid)
Remember, that this is the sequel to an original, that was made in 1979, 5 years after the fall of Saigon, and the second in 1986, a decade past. Still fresh wounds in the memory of the body politic, the obsession with making money in the 1980s became in the minds of certain conservatives the rewards of living after the horrors and sacrifices of that decade, and those wars. Like the Terminator films, Predator, Rambo, Commando, and the like, all done in the same few years, they become part of a well of ultra patriotic films with the military successfully destroying often grotesque or mechanical other.
In this film, the monsters are so viscous, so alien, that to commit genocide against them is necessary. The only person who ends up agreeing is the slimy corporate lawyer, who argues for the self-hood of the liberation “clearly important species right to arbitraryly exterminate them” He places this fairly reasonable argument, in the midst of several discussions of saving samples to experiment on them, and eventually tries to impregnate Ripley and the found feral child Newt, with the monsters eggs. His argument against the genocide of an entire planet is an artificial one, intended to get what he wants.
These aliens deserve to be killed, because they killed 157 colonists. The colonists, because they were human or at least humanoid, had more of a place to be on the planet then the natives. That they are willing to kill a child, and because Ripley becomes maternal, constructs these people are monsterious, amoral, fundamentally incapable of reason, when one of the marines asks “how could they cut the power, they are animals”, it becomes the kind of distancing language that America uses for most of its enterprises. The film complicates this language though, this construction of American civil religion and mythology. It criticises capitalism, at least obliquely. It rarely mentions God. It regularly places a child in danger. It allows a woman to destroy the enemy. It fully integrates by gender and race the American military. The robot is the hero. It becomes a more difficult movie then the action movies made at the same time and place.
The corporatism of Reiser's character is considered excessive, his constant mentioning of money over humanity, or property over humanity, makes him almost parodic of the excesses of Regan. When Ripley tells him “I don't know which species is worse, you don't see them fucking each over for a god damn percentage” places those who seek money over the loyalty of the brigade as monstrous, in fact so monstrous that they are worse then the enemies they are fighting.
That God damn is one of the few mentions of God, and it seems vestigial. All of the other signifiers of military experience, the naughty stories, the sexual harassment, the gung -ho attitude, the willingness to die, the camaraderie and even the language is there. The Space Marines have an authentic feel, similar to the real marines. But when they eat they do not say grace, and when they leave to go to the ship, they do not say a naval prayer. It is more common to use the Anglo Saxon language when encountering an enemy then it is to use theistic language. In this way, the rigours, rituals, and linguistic sites of the American military, the priestly class of the American civil religion has replaced the rigours, rituals and linguistic sites of more traditional religious texts.
When I saw Newt almost being killed by Reiser, when she was captured by the aliens after t hat, when she was thought to be killed several times, and when she finally was saved by Ripley thanks to Bishop , it seemed to be a corrective. Think of My Lai, with the American military killing children, or the carpet bombing of Laos or Cambodia, done at the tail end of a war that the Americans lost. The priestly class raped women and killed children. The sense of honour, of devotion to a larger cause was broken (this violation of the American Civil Religion might be why Bellah claimed it as one of the gaps in the central faith).
That the military died before they could do the final rescue, that the rescue was completed by civilians were indicative of this break in the usual structure of discourses around soldiers in the US. That a small girl was the one to be saved from the attack, and that she was saved by another woman, who was willing to be scared, to cry, to mother, and also proved to be able to fly, to operate heavy machinery, and to be adroit with barely any training, guns and flame throwers, that the last scene between Ripley who is trying to save Newt, and the queen who is trying to avenge the killing of her children, becoming a battle of matriarchy gives the viewers another way to think of heroics, outside the phallocentric auspices of both corporate control and military intervention.
That is not to say, that women and people of colour did not commit heroics in this film. Vasquez, a Hispanic woman, who is fully one of the marine corps dies in order to save Ripley, but she is not allowed the emotion of Ripley, and has the training that sublimates the self to the rituals and language of the American military establishment. That Ripley, and the Artifical American are the only two left, allows for a more pluralistic, wider idea of what this civil religion could consist of. So it is patriotic, it allows for the colonists to be good people, and it commits genocide against an other that is too alien, and therefore unsympathetic. It is a movie that maintains the idea of American empire, while problemtaizing some of its more recent excesses. In this way, it attempts towards another kind of progress, one that allows Americans there holy ideas of eminent domain and manifest destiny.
If Bellah is right, and there is an American civil religion, where elements of the empire's civil institutions are constructed religiously, then the Military could be considered a priestly class, or was at least. Set apart, respected and beloved beyond others, they become a group of martyrs and pioneers, protecting civilians, preserving order, and maintaining the conflicted values that make America. They are convinced to become soldiers by the recruiters theistic language, once all male, schools like Annapolis and West Point became seminaries, presidents pray with them and for them, when they die they are sent home with Christian language, and buried under gravestones perpetually cared for, emblazoned with the graphic of faith. The setting apart of this class, with it's own language, is indicative of Bellah's argument: “What people say on solemn occasions need not be taken at face value, but it is often indicative of deep-seated values and commitments that are not made explicit in the course of everyday life.” (From Biblical Religion and Civil Religion, first published by Daedalus, June 1967, found here: http://web.archive.org/web/20050306124338/http://www.robertbellah.com/articles_5.htm).
He starts talking about Kennedy, who gave us Vietnam, and who died in the back of a Cadillac in Texas, was the origin of the last of the periods of Chaos where the American Civil Relgion fell apart. If the civil religions status is to preserve order, to clean and reconstruct chaos so that it becomes once again “the shining city on the hill” (cf Winthrop, Regan) then one has to re-establish the other. Bellah hints that this work would be done, and talks about how language was being manipulated already: “
Those nations that are for the moment “on our side” become “the free world.” A repressive and unstable military dictatorship in South Vietnam becomes “the free people of South Vietnam and their government.” It is then part of the role of America as the New Jerusalem and “the last best hope of earth” to defend such governments with treasure and eventually with blood. When our soldiers are actually dying, it becomes possible to consecrate the struggle further by invoking the great theme of sacrifice. For the majority of the American people who are unable to judge whether the people in South Vietnam (or wherever) are “free like us,” such arguments are convincing. " (ibid)
Remember, that this is the sequel to an original, that was made in 1979, 5 years after the fall of Saigon, and the second in 1986, a decade past. Still fresh wounds in the memory of the body politic, the obsession with making money in the 1980s became in the minds of certain conservatives the rewards of living after the horrors and sacrifices of that decade, and those wars. Like the Terminator films, Predator, Rambo, Commando, and the like, all done in the same few years, they become part of a well of ultra patriotic films with the military successfully destroying often grotesque or mechanical other.
In this film, the monsters are so viscous, so alien, that to commit genocide against them is necessary. The only person who ends up agreeing is the slimy corporate lawyer, who argues for the self-hood of the liberation “clearly important species right to arbitraryly exterminate them” He places this fairly reasonable argument, in the midst of several discussions of saving samples to experiment on them, and eventually tries to impregnate Ripley and the found feral child Newt, with the monsters eggs. His argument against the genocide of an entire planet is an artificial one, intended to get what he wants.
These aliens deserve to be killed, because they killed 157 colonists. The colonists, because they were human or at least humanoid, had more of a place to be on the planet then the natives. That they are willing to kill a child, and because Ripley becomes maternal, constructs these people are monsterious, amoral, fundamentally incapable of reason, when one of the marines asks “how could they cut the power, they are animals”, it becomes the kind of distancing language that America uses for most of its enterprises. The film complicates this language though, this construction of American civil religion and mythology. It criticises capitalism, at least obliquely. It rarely mentions God. It regularly places a child in danger. It allows a woman to destroy the enemy. It fully integrates by gender and race the American military. The robot is the hero. It becomes a more difficult movie then the action movies made at the same time and place.
The corporatism of Reiser's character is considered excessive, his constant mentioning of money over humanity, or property over humanity, makes him almost parodic of the excesses of Regan. When Ripley tells him “I don't know which species is worse, you don't see them fucking each over for a god damn percentage” places those who seek money over the loyalty of the brigade as monstrous, in fact so monstrous that they are worse then the enemies they are fighting.
That God damn is one of the few mentions of God, and it seems vestigial. All of the other signifiers of military experience, the naughty stories, the sexual harassment, the gung -ho attitude, the willingness to die, the camaraderie and even the language is there. The Space Marines have an authentic feel, similar to the real marines. But when they eat they do not say grace, and when they leave to go to the ship, they do not say a naval prayer. It is more common to use the Anglo Saxon language when encountering an enemy then it is to use theistic language. In this way, the rigours, rituals, and linguistic sites of the American military, the priestly class of the American civil religion has replaced the rigours, rituals and linguistic sites of more traditional religious texts.
When I saw Newt almost being killed by Reiser, when she was captured by the aliens after t hat, when she was thought to be killed several times, and when she finally was saved by Ripley thanks to Bishop , it seemed to be a corrective. Think of My Lai, with the American military killing children, or the carpet bombing of Laos or Cambodia, done at the tail end of a war that the Americans lost. The priestly class raped women and killed children. The sense of honour, of devotion to a larger cause was broken (this violation of the American Civil Religion might be why Bellah claimed it as one of the gaps in the central faith).
That the military died before they could do the final rescue, that the rescue was completed by civilians were indicative of this break in the usual structure of discourses around soldiers in the US. That a small girl was the one to be saved from the attack, and that she was saved by another woman, who was willing to be scared, to cry, to mother, and also proved to be able to fly, to operate heavy machinery, and to be adroit with barely any training, guns and flame throwers, that the last scene between Ripley who is trying to save Newt, and the queen who is trying to avenge the killing of her children, becoming a battle of matriarchy gives the viewers another way to think of heroics, outside the phallocentric auspices of both corporate control and military intervention.
That is not to say, that women and people of colour did not commit heroics in this film. Vasquez, a Hispanic woman, who is fully one of the marine corps dies in order to save Ripley, but she is not allowed the emotion of Ripley, and has the training that sublimates the self to the rituals and language of the American military establishment. That Ripley, and the Artifical American are the only two left, allows for a more pluralistic, wider idea of what this civil religion could consist of. So it is patriotic, it allows for the colonists to be good people, and it commits genocide against an other that is too alien, and therefore unsympathetic. It is a movie that maintains the idea of American empire, while problemtaizing some of its more recent excesses. In this way, it attempts towards another kind of progress, one that allows Americans there holy ideas of eminent domain and manifest destiny.
Friday, May 22, 2009
Frak Facebook:
I don't want to frak (or it's less euphemistic cousin, fuck) facebook. I want to make sweet love to it. I want to love it as much as i love blogger, flickr, tumblr, and wordpress. This new digital culture that I have been born into, with 24-7 sateillete, mobile phones, the internet, digital cameras that are basically disposable, cheap and copius memory, and the like, means that one drowns constantly in information. What becomes valuable is not the creation of new media. Everyone creates new media, everyone is prolific, in this post-Warholian fracturalised image bank culture, where every one is a geek and most perversions are satitated, what is required is a curator.
But even that status, has become democratized. What facebook does, and what social media does by extension, is treat everyone who uses it as a curator, with their own rubrick and their own standards. Sometimes you share those standards, and sometimes you do not care, but what facebook does is cut out the professional. Your friends tell you what looks cool, what makes them think, what angers them, what visually excites them, and who turns them on. They send you links from old soul bands in the 70s that might have had one minor regional hit, or a video of a kitten falling off a table, and you watch or listen and sometimes if it is just cool enough, you share it as well.
It seems ironic that for someone who has worked as a curtaor and artist semi-professionally to advocate this world turned upside down radicialism. Print journalists the world over, are having a conniption about the rise of free writing on the web for example, but two things:
a) someone needs to curate the curators, just like someone needs to watch the watchers. This new digital culture needs to have people who are good at pattern recognition so they can point out where the waves are heading.
b) there is something interesting in meta-curatoring, creating collections of work that have already been curated, and placing them into different contexts.
In the last few years, I have curated and made art about image bank culture. I have taken my random picture file and sorted it by colour, to be shown in a digital picture frame; i have made a poster 24 feet long called Movie Stars I Would Like to Fuck, featuring stills from films, have had someone paint panels corresponding to the offically allowed religious symbols on American Miltary graveyards, had someone else shoot reproductions of John's targets at the Wild West shooting range in West Edmonton Mall, and created small editions of photos with such titles as 100 Pick Up Trucks In or Around Fort Saskatchewan Alberta, 5 Fake Flavin's and one Real, or 7 Sexy Lutherans. I have attempted to make a gingerbread house on stage at Buddies while Faith Hill sung "Like I Never Loved at All", and taught hipsters at the Gladstone how to make thanksgiving or valentine craft. In the last year I have taken 2535 photos and shot 2 hours of video, on a pocket sized point and shoot. I took Ed Ruscha at his word and had 100 artists draw a 1950 Ford from Memory. My work, with its high camp and low culture, or high culture and low camp, cannot exist without the social media, the image bank, the insider reference.
The thing is, much of my understanding does not feature video work. For someone who lives by Youtube, it is shameful how much video work has passed me by. I want to be part of the curatorial incubator, because digital culture, in the words of LCD Soundsystem, "a world where I would happily drown", and it is absurd that I know so little of it in traditional video art capbalities. I have the writing, the curatorial, and the art making experience, so I wish to expand my practice into this medium.
I don't want to frak (or it's less euphemistic cousin, fuck) facebook. I want to make sweet love to it. I want to love it as much as i love blogger, flickr, tumblr, and wordpress. This new digital culture that I have been born into, with 24-7 sateillete, mobile phones, the internet, digital cameras that are basically disposable, cheap and copius memory, and the like, means that one drowns constantly in information. What becomes valuable is not the creation of new media. Everyone creates new media, everyone is prolific, in this post-Warholian fracturalised image bank culture, where every one is a geek and most perversions are satitated, what is required is a curator.
But even that status, has become democratized. What facebook does, and what social media does by extension, is treat everyone who uses it as a curator, with their own rubrick and their own standards. Sometimes you share those standards, and sometimes you do not care, but what facebook does is cut out the professional. Your friends tell you what looks cool, what makes them think, what angers them, what visually excites them, and who turns them on. They send you links from old soul bands in the 70s that might have had one minor regional hit, or a video of a kitten falling off a table, and you watch or listen and sometimes if it is just cool enough, you share it as well.
It seems ironic that for someone who has worked as a curtaor and artist semi-professionally to advocate this world turned upside down radicialism. Print journalists the world over, are having a conniption about the rise of free writing on the web for example, but two things:
a) someone needs to curate the curators, just like someone needs to watch the watchers. This new digital culture needs to have people who are good at pattern recognition so they can point out where the waves are heading.
b) there is something interesting in meta-curatoring, creating collections of work that have already been curated, and placing them into different contexts.
In the last few years, I have curated and made art about image bank culture. I have taken my random picture file and sorted it by colour, to be shown in a digital picture frame; i have made a poster 24 feet long called Movie Stars I Would Like to Fuck, featuring stills from films, have had someone paint panels corresponding to the offically allowed religious symbols on American Miltary graveyards, had someone else shoot reproductions of John's targets at the Wild West shooting range in West Edmonton Mall, and created small editions of photos with such titles as 100 Pick Up Trucks In or Around Fort Saskatchewan Alberta, 5 Fake Flavin's and one Real, or 7 Sexy Lutherans. I have attempted to make a gingerbread house on stage at Buddies while Faith Hill sung "Like I Never Loved at All", and taught hipsters at the Gladstone how to make thanksgiving or valentine craft. In the last year I have taken 2535 photos and shot 2 hours of video, on a pocket sized point and shoot. I took Ed Ruscha at his word and had 100 artists draw a 1950 Ford from Memory. My work, with its high camp and low culture, or high culture and low camp, cannot exist without the social media, the image bank, the insider reference.
The thing is, much of my understanding does not feature video work. For someone who lives by Youtube, it is shameful how much video work has passed me by. I want to be part of the curatorial incubator, because digital culture, in the words of LCD Soundsystem, "a world where I would happily drown", and it is absurd that I know so little of it in traditional video art capbalities. I have the writing, the curatorial, and the art making experience, so I wish to expand my practice into this medium.
Mary Henry was one of the best abstract painters in the united states, and had been for more then 4 decades. In her precise, modest, and intellectual way, she was as good as Noland, Riley, early Stella, Jack Bush or Ellsworth Kelly. You have never heard of her because:
a) she was a woman, and we still think of women as less good then men, but you have heard of Riley.
b) she was the wrong age, she was born in 1921, she made work just before the post painterly abstraction hit plus she was just a little bit too old to have the kind of revival that Elizabeth Murrary had before she died, or that Mary Heliman is having now. (it means something that Martin or Riley or Henry were left out of the WACK catalog, but Heliman was included)
c) plus she kept making work in seattle, outside of new york or los angeles (though she spent time in the 60s in california), and though noland,louis, and truitt all made work in DC, they had a major champion, and besides DC is a comfortable train ride to new york. (she could paint big though, After Scaleriti, in Tacoma is 20 feet long), Riley had the power of a movement, Martin had her spirtuality, Henry had none of hose things. it was small and unideological
e) she had no friends in the major critics (though she was taught by Nagy), no lovers in the major musuems, she was too pretty, too small, too decorative, and at the end too fucking good.
only real major peice of criticism of her for the stranger in seattle.
a) she was a woman, and we still think of women as less good then men, but you have heard of Riley.
b) she was the wrong age, she was born in 1921, she made work just before the post painterly abstraction hit plus she was just a little bit too old to have the kind of revival that Elizabeth Murrary had before she died, or that Mary Heliman is having now. (it means something that Martin or Riley or Henry were left out of the WACK catalog, but Heliman was included)
c) plus she kept making work in seattle, outside of new york or los angeles (though she spent time in the 60s in california), and though noland,louis, and truitt all made work in DC, they had a major champion, and besides DC is a comfortable train ride to new york. (she could paint big though, After Scaleriti, in Tacoma is 20 feet long), Riley had the power of a movement, Martin had her spirtuality, Henry had none of hose things. it was small and unideological
e) she had no friends in the major critics (though she was taught by Nagy), no lovers in the major musuems, she was too pretty, too small, too decorative, and at the end too fucking good.
only real major peice of criticism of her for the stranger in seattle.
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Monday, May 18, 2009
I would argue that Metropolis is mostly follows the idea of Myth as a strategy and technique. Constructed in 1927, after the first world war and the middle of the Weimar republic it uses the machine cult aesthetic of his time and place that becomes vehemently anti war, and suspicious of how is consuming and who is literally being consumed.
This can be found in several places. He literally calls the machine that eats the workers Moloch (screencap of Moloch Image), another word for Ba'al, who was what ancient Jews called a Hittite God that was fed babies. This image of Moloch was used frequently by socialists in Europe from the 1900s onward, for example this 1901 issue of the socialist journal The Daily People (Link). It was later used by Ginsberg in the second part of Howl. Ginsberg's parents were Russian Jews, who were familiar with this kind of language, as he hinted in Kaddish.
Moloch is the most literal of the signifier that suggest that Lang's creation “goes into the world and maintains, legitimates certain social structures, and dismisses others” (From the lecture notes). He follows the woman he saw into the underworld against his father's advice, and he negotiates with the woman Maria. It sounds like the beginning of a Campbellite monomyth, a sort of Deco Eurydice and Orpheus. But that she seeks to wait for labour mediators, for the liberation of her (seemingly) permenat withering away of the state suggests that Lang viewed this as a reconstruction of that myth for ideological means. This was noted by the critic Axel Eggelbert in 1928, when he called t he film “an unshakeable dialectic of the class struggle” (quoted by Andreas Hellesson in The Vamp and The Machine, Technology, Sexuality in Fritz Lang's Metropolis (link)
Hellesson's use of sexuality indicates in general how myths of heterosexual romance are co-opted by a system of narrative ideology that “makes certain things true and certain things false. “ (lecture notes) The leader of the upper classes Federson's chief rival for the affections of Feder's mother, who created a robot that looks like her. This robot recasts the primal scene as a Promethean narrative,(screencap) or in other words a mechanical simulacrum of flesh. In this way even sexuality itself is sublimated by the machine. This fear of mechanical reproduction suggests that Lang is using mythology already founded to push an anti technocratic agenda.
From that point on the myth is used to recreate Lang's idea that the machine, and industry, make flesh indistinguishable from flesh, and it corrupts both of them. For example, the robot goes on to dance erotically in a night club; Maria is caught and imprisoned by Federson's heavies and then is basically raped. The robot's dance causes a riot and the sensuous dancing of Maria extends this idea that the flesh of a woman or the flesh of a machine work in conjunction to force workers into a fury. (the idea of a woman sexually exciting workers to riot seems more palatable, more politically acceptable then the workers rising due to more economic conditions, though the results are the same) . That the robot ends up pushing the workers into even greater levels of frenzy, into erotic excess and as a result the workers break down, furthers the idea that Lang is using this text as a way of making flesh flesh, of being worried about what this new industrialism would do to common workers.
The central thrust of Helleson's article points out the difficulty of this crafting of ideology use function into classical myth or biblical myth (the already mentioned Promethean and Eurydice references, but also belly dancing scene that reminds one of Orientalist visions of Jezebel, the Edenic garden scenes of the upper classes before we are introduced to Maria, and that Federson's temple is called New Tower of Babel) Helleson continues: “The imagery of the tower of Babel relates to the technology to myth and legend end The biblical myth is used to construct the ideological message about the division of the labour into the hands that build and the brains that plan and conceive...(ibid, 35). This sense makes eternal, iconic, and formal problems that are about daily life, democratic, and often lack a visual focus.
Lang does not “assume that myths are self evident” and he does use them as a technique or strategy which enacts his own agency, but he does not realise that how he uses these myths for his own purpose can have a problematic history past what the author intended. Myth has a habit of being a bogey man, not easily killed and popping out where it might not belong. In this case, the film is worried about women, (cf Helleson's discussion of technology bringing creation with out the presence of women, ibid 234) paradoxically, and uses two of the central myths about the concerns about women, that they will be created without the presence of men, and that they cannot be controlled when men love them, into a text that allows for the destabilizing power of female flesh, but reinforces traditional attitudes around them. In this way. Lang as the amalgamation and producer of this myth, allows the Weimar lust for and fear of the machine to be imprinted into an already presence fear of women's autonomy. The ideology then becomes fascinatingly accidental.
This can be found in several places. He literally calls the machine that eats the workers Moloch (screencap of Moloch Image), another word for Ba'al, who was what ancient Jews called a Hittite God that was fed babies. This image of Moloch was used frequently by socialists in Europe from the 1900s onward, for example this 1901 issue of the socialist journal The Daily People (Link). It was later used by Ginsberg in the second part of Howl. Ginsberg's parents were Russian Jews, who were familiar with this kind of language, as he hinted in Kaddish.
Moloch is the most literal of the signifier that suggest that Lang's creation “goes into the world and maintains, legitimates certain social structures, and dismisses others” (From the lecture notes). He follows the woman he saw into the underworld against his father's advice, and he negotiates with the woman Maria. It sounds like the beginning of a Campbellite monomyth, a sort of Deco Eurydice and Orpheus. But that she seeks to wait for labour mediators, for the liberation of her (seemingly) permenat withering away of the state suggests that Lang viewed this as a reconstruction of that myth for ideological means. This was noted by the critic Axel Eggelbert in 1928, when he called t he film “an unshakeable dialectic of the class struggle” (quoted by Andreas Hellesson in The Vamp and The Machine, Technology, Sexuality in Fritz Lang's Metropolis (link)
Hellesson's use of sexuality indicates in general how myths of heterosexual romance are co-opted by a system of narrative ideology that “makes certain things true and certain things false. “ (lecture notes) The leader of the upper classes Federson's chief rival for the affections of Feder's mother, who created a robot that looks like her. This robot recasts the primal scene as a Promethean narrative,(screencap) or in other words a mechanical simulacrum of flesh. In this way even sexuality itself is sublimated by the machine. This fear of mechanical reproduction suggests that Lang is using mythology already founded to push an anti technocratic agenda.
From that point on the myth is used to recreate Lang's idea that the machine, and industry, make flesh indistinguishable from flesh, and it corrupts both of them. For example, the robot goes on to dance erotically in a night club; Maria is caught and imprisoned by Federson's heavies and then is basically raped. The robot's dance causes a riot and the sensuous dancing of Maria extends this idea that the flesh of a woman or the flesh of a machine work in conjunction to force workers into a fury. (the idea of a woman sexually exciting workers to riot seems more palatable, more politically acceptable then the workers rising due to more economic conditions, though the results are the same) . That the robot ends up pushing the workers into even greater levels of frenzy, into erotic excess and as a result the workers break down, furthers the idea that Lang is using this text as a way of making flesh flesh, of being worried about what this new industrialism would do to common workers.
The central thrust of Helleson's article points out the difficulty of this crafting of ideology use function into classical myth or biblical myth (the already mentioned Promethean and Eurydice references, but also belly dancing scene that reminds one of Orientalist visions of Jezebel, the Edenic garden scenes of the upper classes before we are introduced to Maria, and that Federson's temple is called New Tower of Babel) Helleson continues: “The imagery of the tower of Babel relates to the technology to myth and legend end The biblical myth is used to construct the ideological message about the division of the labour into the hands that build and the brains that plan and conceive...(ibid, 35). This sense makes eternal, iconic, and formal problems that are about daily life, democratic, and often lack a visual focus.
Lang does not “assume that myths are self evident” and he does use them as a technique or strategy which enacts his own agency, but he does not realise that how he uses these myths for his own purpose can have a problematic history past what the author intended. Myth has a habit of being a bogey man, not easily killed and popping out where it might not belong. In this case, the film is worried about women, (cf Helleson's discussion of technology bringing creation with out the presence of women, ibid 234) paradoxically, and uses two of the central myths about the concerns about women, that they will be created without the presence of men, and that they cannot be controlled when men love them, into a text that allows for the destabilizing power of female flesh, but reinforces traditional attitudes around them. In this way. Lang as the amalgamation and producer of this myth, allows the Weimar lust for and fear of the machine to be imprinted into an already presence fear of women's autonomy. The ideology then becomes fascinatingly accidental.
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