30 April 2012
A review of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil:
Robert C. Solomon’s full passage on resentment (the villain of the passions) is available here.
30 January 2011
Peter Joseph says the Zeitgeist Movement is scientific, rational, and based on things that would work in the real world… then he proposes building cities shaped like perfect circles. So, why are existing cities not laid out like circles?
Because they have adapted to make use of the uneven real world terrain of wherever they were founded. Joseph’s inability to recognize this about cities is just one example of his preference for designing a future in his head over looking at what’s actually been successful. If this stuff were actually tried, and I don’t think that’s really the goal, it would be a disaster.
Peter Joseph is a 30-something marimba player who’s dabbled in advertising and in finance. It’s an unadvertised fact that the first Zeitgeist film began as reel footage alongside a percussion performance in NYC. Joseph’s great error is in letting his aesthetic preferences determine his political positions. I can understand this psychological dynamic and might have taken a Zeitgeist turn myself… i.e. by using the metaphorical imagery of Overwhelm to construct an “Overwhelm” political-propaganda video, rope in activist-minded listeners, etc. But that would be unfair to both rational philosophical debate and to art itself.
“Who Wants That Honey?”
Everybody can’t be taken to Everest. There must have been periods in history when it was possible to save the patient through less drastic measures… There must have been periods when, in order to give people a strong or meaningful experience, you wouldn’t have to actually take them to Everest… There was a time when you could have, for instance, just written Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austin, and I’m sure the people who read it had a pretty strong experience. I’m sure they did. Now you’re saying that people today wouldn’t get it, and maybe that’s true. But isn’t there any kind of writing or any kind of play… isn’t it legitimate for writers to try to portray reality so that people can see it? Tell me: Why do we require a trip to Mount Everest in order to be able to perceive one moment of reality? I mean, is Mount Everest more real than New York? Isn’t New York real?
If you could become fully aware of what existed in a cigar store next door to this restaurant, I think it would just blow your brains out. Isn’t there just as much reality to be perceived in the cigar store as there in on Mount Everest? I think that not only is there nothing more real about Mount Everest, I think there’s nothing that different, because reality is uniform in a way. If your own mechanism is operating correctly, it would become irrelevant to go to Mount Everest, and sort of absurd.
-Wallace Shawn
It’s their feeling that there have to be centers now where people can come a reconstruct a new future for the world. Actually, these centers are growing up everywhere now. In a way, these are all attempts at creating a new kind of school, or a new kind of monastery. Björnstrand talks about the concept of ‘reserves’ – islands of safety where history can be remembered, and the human being can continue to function, in order to maintain the species through a dark age.
In other words, we’re talking about an underground, which did exist in a different way during the dark ages in the mystical orders of the church. The purpose of this underground is the find on out to preserve the light… life… the culture… how to keep things living.
I keep thinking that what we need is a new language – a language of the heart…. Some kind of language between people that is a new kind of poetry, that is the poetry of the dancing bee that tells us where the honey is.
-Andre Gregory
All knowledge is occult — forever hidden to the blind. There is no objective underground.
Rob Ager Interviewed by Andrew Dimitrov
Hello, this is Andrew Dimitrov for Shoestring Century. I am privileged to bring to the fore some ideas and insights of Mr. Rob Ager, an independent film analyst, filmmaker and author who hails from Liverpool, England. Mr. Ager is the mind behind Collative Learning Systems, a form of self-therapy which borrows from multiple psychological disciplines in a uniquely structured program. Collative Learning Systems is the name of his self-published book, available on eBay, and CollativeLearning.com is the name of his popular website.
I first encountered Mr. Ager’s work about a year ago, when I stumbled upon his YouTube analyses of Stanley Kubrick’s films. Mr. Ager provoked my intellect in ways untold by his careful analysis of minute diegetic details in Kubrick’s work. His basic thesis of Kubrick’s canon is that Kubrick inserted a vast array of incremental structural details into his films that offer a concurrent dialogue to his overt storylines.
Two prominent examples are his review of The Shining, which suggests that Kubrick transformed Stephen King’s tale of alcoholism and familial collapse into an examination of Native American genocide by the white man, and his review of Eyes Wide Shut, which highlights the aristocratic fascism and patriarchy of millennial Manhattan’s elite, subsumed by the story of marital infidelity which forms only the tip of the story’s iceberg. His reviews of both films and many others are available on YouTube and also at the website CollativeLearning.com. I give it my highest recommendation.
After some back-and-forth, I was privileged to submit to Mr. Ager some questions and we present them to you in interview format, for your listening pleasure only. Mr. Ager, for various reasons, did not consent to an unrehearsed interview, but was gracious enough to send audio files of his voice so that we may simulate the experience for you. So, without further ado, my questions and his answers:
The Interview
Andrew Dimitrov: Mr. Ager, you were the recipient of a lot of bad noise when you identified diegetic features of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange that dealt with conspiracy theories. You didn’t identify yourself as a conspiracy theorist, but nonetheless received backlash for exposing features of the movie that may have supported the idea of global conspiracy. In retrospect, what is it about your review that was so instantly polarizing? (more…)
“I Won’t Leave You ‘Fine’”
Under normal circumstances, I would not have seen Twilight, but I’m glad I did. It’s good to leave one’s cultural comfort zone (and it doesn’t take a trip around the world to do so). Originally published at Empire of Doubt:
This age has tried without success to shut down the romantic. We claim to value human life, despite poisoning and firebombing it on an epic scale, and perhaps we really are quite fond of having it around. But do we exalt it? Do we tremble before human accomplishment? Do we believe our own species can navigate these historical waters, not by transcending or abandoning humanity, but by tapping into humanity’s very strengths – its ingenuity, devotion, and discipline? No, our society tells the youngster that there is no frontier of the human heart, that victory is external, that the best one can do is to score in the 99th percentile or become President. This dull, corporatist definition of human accomplishment has dominated for decades and decades, since at least the reign of World War I’s droll rats. What a relief, then, to see romanticism bubbling rightly back to the surface with the success of films like Twilight.
Twilight is a film enthralled with its characters, be they vampires or everyday folks. Their humanity fills the frame, and it is enough. This naturally appeals to teenage girls, who understand, for example, that high school events are a huge deal and can shape one’s destiny; it will leave cold those wishing to see the “fate of the world” decided by a well-choreographed boat chase (for the action here is poorly executed and irrelevant). Like any decent fiction, Twilight asks what makes for the good life, and offers a compelling answer.
How would you live if you were to live interminably? You might read the canon, compose music, love passionately, be steadfast to your family, dress stylishly and take care of your body. This is how the Cullens, the Übermensch vampire family at the center of the movie, choose to live. Questions of mortality (or immortality) focus the mind on priorities, and so these characters embody romantic author Stephenie Meyer’s values.
These heroic vampires are portrayed not as aberrant but as more fully human than their small-town counterparts. They are more loyal, they appreciate art more deeply, and their jokes are more inventive. While they have stronger animalistic urges as well, their self-restraint is more than up to the task. Frivolity and self-deprecation may be foreign to them, but for the romantic such token weaknesses are not defining human traits. The romantic work portrays an ideal and declares it possible; mediocrity-fanning slogans like “dude, where’s my car?” and “I think I love my wife” are impossible in such a world.
It may look at first a dour landscape, this world of Forks, Washington (home to the events of Twilight and my father’s side of my family). Where’s the ironic detachment? Where’s the academic indecision? This aesthetic seduces with a rare aroma: sincerity. Sincerity is not always serious. The scene in which heart-throbs Bella Swan and Edward Cullen meet in a biology classroom is hilariously overwrought – brimming with sleazy guitar solos, windswept hairdo’s and bit lips – but these effects are not detached kitsch. The scene is funny because the director is brazenly showing how these teens in heat really do feel.
This generation is sick and tired of heroes who are sick and tired. It’s seen what the neurotic, over-psychoanalyzed boomers left us – cities choked in the haze of entropy. Twilight is one example of a broader aesthetic on the wax, one that values excellence, not inside jokes; lasting beauty, not the Pitchfork rating system; bravery and not apologetic slackerism. Romanticism belongs to no medium or era, so long as its philosophy inspires. Meaningfully, the three artists featured most prominently in Twilight’s soundtrack are Claude Debussy, Radiohead and Muse – all, to some degree, musical romantics.
Am I saying that Twilight is a great film? No. But has it deserved to be panned in the cynical way it has been panned by cynical writers who can’t get past the “teenage vampire” thing? Certainly not.
leave a comment