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"New Year's Eve is like every other night; there is no pause in the march of the universe, no breathless moments of silence among created things that the passage of another twleve months may be noted; and yet no person has quite the same thoughts this evening that come with the coming of darkenss on other nights." Hamilton Wright Mabie.
May this coming year be a good one for you and yours.
"Violence, whether spiritual or physical, is a quest for identity and the meaningful. The less identity, the more violence."
- Marshall McLuhan, 1976
I was surprised and yet not surprised by an article on The Huffington Post blog about the surge in gun purchases after the recent school shootings. The answer to violence is violence? This seems to be the math in our world. Of course, I am sure many would say that they are buying guns for self-protection, rather than to commit an act of violence, as if using a gun in self-defense isn't an act of violence, however it might be justified.
Violence has been on my mind--the shootings, of course, but also because in light of that event, I saw two movies, both of which delayed or altered their premieres, but not their content, so as to create a little breathing room between the launch of the movies and the tragedy of real life.
Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained, was surprisingly restrained in terms of violence (I say that using Tarantino and Tarantino's other films as a benchmark!) until a shootout that must go down in cinema history as one of the bloodiest. I enjoyed this film--I like Tarantino, even as I struggle with the use of violence as theatre, however cartoon-like he crafts it. But the film stands I think as a quite brilliant piece of cinema, and gives us a rarity in cinema--a black hero. Revenge movies have been staple Hollywood fare, but seldom, if ever, is that revenge in the hands, or guns, of a black man. Tarantino mines B movies, spaghetti westerns, blaxploitation to craft a vision of both the cruelty and inhunanity of slavery in a deeply movie and yet sometimes comical and cartoon way. I think there is substance here.
Jack Reacher, is Tom Cruise's latest box-office assault. He plays an off-the-grid ex-army/detective/vigilante something or other. The opening scenes of the film explain the reasons the film was so quickly removed from red-carpet dates. Unlike Django, which gifts us with history as a distancing device, a means of facing truths about ourselves, without having to own the issues directly, this film is set in the now, and it attempts to be a real-world movie, even though it's comic book roots show through the whole time. I went to see it mainy because I fancied wasting a couple of hours and couldn't bear the thought of Hobbits or the Miserables--I hate, hate, hate musicals (with the exception of Moulin Rouge, and maybe Across the Universe..but maybe not). reacher comes across like some cold-heartless brute, whose commitment to justice is matched by a deep ingrained belief that violence is the principle means to that end---it had little redeeming to it--standard Hollywood action/drama thing.
There is lots of violence around-its hard to miss, and to be honest, I don't always want to miss it. I can watch violence, of certain kinds (no horror/slasher/psycho films for me-nor porn-violence like Saving Private Ryan and Passion of the Christ) and get the same satisfaction I am sure others do when I watch it. I loved Fight club and the physical violence, as brutal as it was, didn't phase me at all, in fact I though it brilliant. So my thoughts about the place and function of violence in our societies, is filtered through my own violent fantasies and preferences.
I was struck by the McLuhan quote, it makes a lot of sense to me--McLuhan doesn't always nail it with his observations, but this one is on the money if you ask me. Identity issues have been a central issue in Western culture, and perhaps now gobal-urban culture, for the past fifty or sixty years, maybe longer than that. We don't seem to know who we are anymore, and whatever mechanisms that used to provided some shape to and for identity have either been discarded, devalued or determined to be unhelpful, only to be replaced by..? Well, exactly, identity is motion in the world in which we find ourselves, it is no longer fixed, but is a continual work in progress, if we choose to pay attention, and it is dangerous if we don't. Dangerous in the sense that Mcluhan observes, the less identity, the less sense of our own personhood, the shape of who we are, the more violence serves us as a substitute--violence becomes us or we become violence. Of course, violence is nothing new, it is at the heart of humanity's story--the pages of history, our religions, our achievments bathed in our embrace of violence, and yet, it feels different to me--the contours of it, the way we have rationalized violence--presenting it as the necessary act and the accompanying implication that humanity’s most important means of expression appears through the fights that are waged upon life, for life. I don't know what I'm trying to say, just some thinking-out-loud on a Sunday evening.
This is pretty amazing. Holton Rower creates paintngs using a pouring technique which almost defies the imagination--very 'Paul Smith.' These are images of a 'live pour.' It is much more calculated than simply pouring paint--it would never come out this way---Rower preps the surfaces and doctors the paints so that they pour slowly and he times their drying times and the shapes they flow into.
(more info and images here)
I recently bought this from Clown and Sunset. It's a lovely piece of art/music. It contains an album and is, as the producers say, "an innovative new medium for releasing recorded music. The device is a
smooth metal cube with two headphone jacks and four buttons. It holds an
entire album titled Don't Break My Love. Designed to bring connectivity and a shared listening experience." Initially it was only released in this form, I believe a digital download of the album has recently been made available. The cube has two headphones jacks--it's a bit fragile, but conceptually I think it's really good. As for the music? well C+S is a company run by Nicolar jaar and his music is fantastic.
