Archives for posts with tag: America

Movies I’m watching: Bill Maher’s Religulous

February 6, 09 //
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I suppose that BIll Maher’s ego has gotten the best of him and he decided, that he just HAD to make a movie and somehow contribute to the demise of organized religion, which he believes is one of the greatest obstacles to human progress. So he goes around, skewering religious types, ranging from the truck stop evangelicals to your hapless, un-media savvy imam.

Part of the film is autobiographical, in that Maher talks about his own upbringing: his mother is Jewish and his father Catholic, and he was raised a catholic.

Maher’s real beef is with literalists, those whose insistence on various dogma handed down to us from our ancient forebears in the Promised Land impedes the adoption of more liberal and, Maher would say, modern, normal, outlooks and values. Maher knows the Bible fairly well, and of course, he’s a “skilled debater” of sorts, that is, he knows, from being both a standup and TV personality, the art of rhetoric. However, Maher ends up being something less than the Socratic gadfly: He is interested in the truth, yes, but there are greater truths that he is missing out on.

What I mean is this: Nietzsche, for example, was well aware that while organized religion, and in particular the Lutheranism of his father and compatriots, was perhaps a crock of shit, opiates for the many mediocre people of which society is formed, but he knew that humanity’s *religiosity*–was not something that could be so easily jettisoned, replaced by a smirky, Maher-esque Enlightenment reason. How does Maher, for example, think about death: he believes that there is nothing after life, and that at best we ought to remain skeptical about the grand questions. And that attitude is fine, but that begs the question, I think–the religiosity is always going to rear its ugly head, and you can’t expect everyone to just take Maher’s attitude. Not many people, in the history of humanity, have been satisfied with his answers.

Organized religion versus mysticism: this is a theme that i’ve run into a lot recently. I saw a documentary about sufism in Pakistan–a country more known as being, in certain areas at least, a hotbed of militant, retrogressive Islam. And then there was a quote from the French philosopher Henri Bergson, where he said that organized religion was (and here I paraphrase) that which cools what was poured, white-hot, into the soul of man. That is to say, that mysticism is not just a “non-mainstream” type of religion, a la sufism, but is, in fact, the very core of humanity’s religious instinct.

People need to know how to deal with death, and with the issues of meaning.

I don’t mean to entirely negate Maher’s movie just because I think books do a better job of navigating these issues, but hell, they do. And here are the books that I would recommend, having just read or re-read them:

Andre Comte-Sponville: The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality
Henry David Thoreau: Walden
Ernest Becker: The Denial of Death
Christopher Hitchens: God is not Great.

These books run the gamut but, I think, give a good basis for why we ought to be skeptical of organized religions (especially when it becomes the last refuge of charlatans and scoundrels) while remaining, at our core, profoundly religious, mystical, etc.

Movies I’m Watching: The Wrestler

January 12, 09 //
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I’m glad that Mickey Rourke won a Golden Globe for his performance in The Wrestler, because although the movie tends to be fairly predictable overall, this was one of the most honest performances I’ve seen in a while. Now everyone is talking about the Mickey Rourke comeback tour, which made me curious enough about the actor (I haven’t seen his other films) to get 9 1/2 weeks when i came across it at the DVD store. I don’t have anything particularly new or interesting to add to what’s been said about The Wrestler, but i think there are some interesting tidbits about how the movie has been received in other quarters: the Iranian government considers it insulting, after a fictional wrestler in the movie named The Ayatollah gets his Iranian flag smashed by Rourke’s character, while the folks at the WWE, a professional wrestling organization, aren’t too happy with what they considered the stereotyped and negative portrayals of certain wrestling circuits.

Director Aronofsky thinks that professional wrestlers do get shafted when it comes to their working conditions: he considers them actors and entertainers — and believes that they ought to be unionized and eligible for the same types of benefits that SAG members receive. Yet in reality, many wrestlers exist in some kind of legal limbo, not quite athletes, and not quite actors — and when things go awry, or when they simply exhaust their youth, bodies, and 15 minutes of fame, they are left, like Randy the Ram Robinson, out in the cold — oftentimes in desolate places, like New Jersey, the setting for this film.

Anyhow, that’s quite an interesting issue that i would not have ever been aware of otherwise. But good on Mickey Rourke – I’m glad that his career is picking up and that he is being given a second chance to share his talents with the world.

A final note: Marisa Tomei — yowzer, does that woman just get hotter with age?

Movies I’m Watching: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

January 7, 09 //
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I’d heard a lot about this one before actually watching it. It wasn’t a bad movie, all in all, but there wasn’t anything particularly moving about it. It’s based off a F. Scott Fitzgerald movie, which explains some of the richness with which the period–the people, places, zeitgeist of the early 20th century–is depicted. The effects that made the transformation of Benjamin Button from wrinkled and gnarled looking baby to a newborn old man was quite interesting. There is one scene where he leaves home, and although the old on the outside Benjamin already faintly looks like Brad Pitt, his body is still hunched and shriveled, which makes you wonder how they did it, how they grafted Brad Pitt’s face and expressions onto this wizened little body. It must have been similar to what they did for the Hobbits…

In any case, charming fable, but nothing particularly moving, despite the film being about love, life, loss, and the wonders of the human condition, vagaries of destiny, fate, love, all of that.

Performance by Brad Pitt was reasonably good, nothing extraordinary. Cate Blanchett seems to me to excel at whatever role she is given, and this one is no exception, though after seeing her in movies like “No One’s There” or whatever the Dylan fictional biopic was called, where she set a new bar for herself (if not the art of acting in general), this kind of role can only be disappointing in comparison.

A few snippets from a David Foster Wallace appreciation on Newsweek

September 15, 08 //
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This from “David Foster Wallace: An Appreciation by David Gates (Newsweek Books).

I suspect that Wallace was a genius who happened to be a writer, rather than a writer who happened to be a genius-Hemingway, for instance. You can’t imagine Hemingway writing, as Wallace did, a treatise called “Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity” (2004), or winning an undergraduate prize at Amherst College for a thesis on “modal logic,” whatever that may be, or going on to Harvard for graduate study in philosophy after his well-reviewed first novel, “The Broom of the System” (1987) was published-this after getting an MFA in fiction at the University of Arizona. Like Wallace, Hemingway worked as a journalist (in his case, primarily as a war correspondent), but he was an observer while Wallace was an explorer.

This idea of being a genius who happened to be a writer reminds me of a certain person I know, who is/was a math and computer genius but “rebelled” against this side of him and decided, at one point in his early 20s, to pursue an MFA in poetry, which he did, and published some books, did some translation, etc. I don’t know if he is still a writer, or whether or not he has become an architect or something…but anyhow, David Green expounds a bit more on the idea later:

The writer who happens to be a genius—the archetype is Shakespeare—is in love with his words, his story and his people. Wallace-the reverse archetype-surely knew as much about words, stories and people as any writer would ever need to know, but he gave his deepest love to his ideas about them. If the endlessly self-analytical Hamlet had been a writer (aside from that “speech of some twelve or fifteen lines” he composes to insert in “The Murder of Gonzago,” the play within the play), he would have written far more like Wallace than like Shakespeare. Hamlet says that “I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams”; it’s a line that the author of “Infinite Jest” must have taken deeply to heart. Wallace’s encyclopedic self-reflexiveness made his work, at its best, a wonder of the literary world, and at its worst, nearly unreadable.

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Movies I’m Watching: Hell Ride

September 13, 08 //
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Hellride movie poster

Hellride movie poster

Ugh. Roger Ebert thought this movie was shit and I am inclined to agree … it’s too bad, since in some way, the biker western genre is fascinating to me, if only because I have had so little exposure to this piece of Americana. The movie is written and directed by Larry Bishop, who was making biker movies since the 1960s. The reason that I bought the movie (other than the fact that it was, at 7 RMB, quite affordable) is that it had some big names attached to it: Quentin Tarantino executive produced it, and it has Dennis Hopper and David Carradine in it. The guy who plays Comanche — Eric Balfour – is perhaps more well-known to people as Milo from 24 (who got shot in the head trying to protect Nadia). Oh yeah, and there’s the great Vinnie Jones, who is extremely under-utilized in this movie.

The dialogue is meant to be hokey and everything is completely sexualized, but there was one good line from the movie. When David Carradine is being questioned about his role in a murder from 1976 as well as one that just happened, he says “I don’t remember that well, but then again I ain’t Marcel Proust.” Awesome. I don’t mind if Larry Bishop, no doubt in his 60s, wants to search for lost time … I just don’t know if he ought to do it at the expense of those, who like me, still have time to spare and want to make better use of it.

Adbusters: Hipsters and the dead end of western civilization

August 14, 08 //
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http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/79/hipster.html

Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization | Adbusters Culturejammer Headquarters via kwout

OK so this writer lays it on a bit thick, but I think he/she does have a very valid point. He doesn’t see any subculture with cajones, and he/she is right because there is nothing of that sort. Hipsterdom is very much connected, as he points out, to advertising—it’s bourgeois and consumerist at its core, even though the people involved often scorn capitalist labor and slum around.* More importantly, it is a subculture that is not really for or against anything, unless you count being “for fun” as a worthy cause.

And it’s true, to a extent, that point the writer makes about not having really lasting loyalties and affiliations: I think that in America and Europe, they are going to tend to be on the left, politically, but there might not be anything amounting to real, sustained, lasting engagement with the political. They are likely to boo George Bush, and to nod in agreement when Al Gore talks about the impending
environmental disaster, but they don’t really have an urgent need to change the world: in fact,
since that reminds me of Marx’s 11th thesis on Fuerbach, one could say that they don’t even bother much with interpreting the world, much less changing it. The hipster likes his fun as much as the rich man, he just prefers to have it with people who share his particular tastes and aesthetics in party, music, cigarettes, etc. People who know the joys of slouching in bed with a laptop, and playing around with Lomos and gasp, even iPhones.

Mr. Obama goes to Europe (my thoughts)

July 25, 08 //
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I like the title of the IHT article: Obama get’s Europe’s ear, pleasing crowds without specifics. Because, this is exactly what happens with Obama. I know that politicians have to do this whole song and dance–they have to talk about our shared ideals, about WWII, about fighting fascism and communism together, and the new challenges posed by the environment, terrorism, the widening North-South divide, etc. But the rhetoric is just so empty–because it’s hackneyed–and I think that’s why I will never find politics interesting compared to the types of speech that you find in literature or philosophy–or even the dialogues in film.

The only problem is that politics is so much more important in shaping the lives of people–or so we are lead to think–than is literature or the arts. That’s why people hang on Obama’s words and pundits scribble their notes down furiously and give their two cents worth on live TV right after. But in the end, who knows–something some one read in a novel
or saw in a film might affect their deeper sense of what life is, and how to live that life. And in that regard, culture “wins”.

Movies that I’ve watched: Peter Watkins’ Punishment Park

July 14, 08 //
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Punishment Park movie poster

One of the better movies that i’ve seen in awhile. The film, shot like a documentary, takes place in 1970s America, where the Vietnam War wages and on a cultural schism has opened up between those that support the establishment and those that were against the war. What English filmmaker Watkins did was to add a pinch of dystopia to reality. In this alternate-universe USA, dissent has been criminalized and the establishment is even more heavy-handed in its tactics than history was itself. Watkins took the worst aspects of US political history and culture–and extrapolated from there. He took the torture and internment camps and created “Punishment Park”, a place where “criminals” (eg draft-dodgers, organizers, hippies, peaceniks, writers, artists) are taken and given a chance to go free.

Punishment Park is located in what appears to the be the Death Valley or Joshua Tree National Park area in southern CA. It’s scorching hot desert, and the criminals are told to find their way to some American flag about fifty miles away. If they reach there without getting caught, they can go free. If they are caught then they must serve the sentence they were originally handed.

The sentences they hare handed out are manifestly and quite exaggeratingly unjust: they are given 15-20 years, even life sentences, for their dissent. The “tribunal” they face is a kangaroo court, of course, though the senators and housewives and factory workers–who represent the status quo–seem to be genuinely baffled as to why the young people of the 60s are so maladjusted and misbehaved. They believe that these young people are inciting others to violence, for the dastardly purpose of overthrowing the US government.

It’s quite obvious where Watkins stands. He creates this dystopia for this very reason. But what is more interesting is how the psychologies of the characters show the rift in America. The tribunal members characterize the hippies as spoiled kids on the dole who would rather see America destroyed by her communist enemies from within and without rather than lift a finger to help. It’s quite similar, I think, to the cultural divide that we now dub “red” and “blue.” There are bien-pensants on both sides, there are slogans and shibboleths. The DVD was re-released recently and not surprisingly, some of the other commenters on the web have talked about how germane the film’s politics are in the Bush, Patriot Act, Guantanamo Bay world. (
The film was released for only four days in the US before being pulled from theaters.)

A note on the role of the fourth estate: the film crew starts out by asking fairly basic and standard questions of both prisoners and police in Punishment Park (and briefly, of the tribunal members). After one of the policemen at the park is found dead, the policemen get riled up and aggressive, and as a result you get the typical police brutality scenario: threatened cop shoots first and asks questions later, innocent people die needlessly. ONe of the camera/sound guy gets held hostage and is killed by a sniper. The camera continues to roll as billy clubs and guns are used against the criminals. THe camera man is forced out of his moral Switzerland behind the camera: he begs the police to stop, he tries to communicate with the prisoners, and as the killings get more senseless, he protests more vehemently. Finally, he starts cursing the police and telling them that their deeds have been captured on camera for the whole world to see. The cops, at this point, shout back that they don’t care and that journalists just do it all for ratings and money.

I think this is quite interesting, because the question that I believe Watkins seeks to ask: when do those of us who have not yet taken a side have to take a side? Is it our moral obligation to do so?
What should we be doing as we see this drama unfold before our eyes.

Anyhow, I will quote, by way of conclusion, a passage from another short essay on the “Punishment Park”:

Where the hell are we? We’re in the highly radicalized, politicized, and deeply angry world of British filmmaker Peter Watkins, probably the greatest filmmaker that you’ve never heard of. Watkins’s Punishment Park (1971) is his deepest incursion into the American psyche, and the centrality of violence in American political and social life. At the center of Watkins’s films is his foregrounding of style, and key to Watkins’s style is the borrowing of documentary tropes for his quasi-documentary fictions. Beginning with his stunning first two features, The Battle of Culloden (1964) and The War Game (1965), and continuing through his most recent work, the incomparable six-hour epic La Commune: Paris 1871 (2000), Watkins persistently draws attention to the films’ “reality,” which leads savvy viewers to see their patent lack of documentary truth, which in turn brings a realization of the films’ dedication to a truth deeper than documentary, reached through the false screen of doc mise-en-scène. Witness The War Game, where the combination of impassive narration and a verite-style camera reveal the unbearable reality of nuclear catastrophe better than a hundred On the Beaches could ever manage. Watkins is dedicated to two principles above all: returning the blood to the lifeless corpse of history and an uncontrollable need to speak truth to power.

I think the last sentence says it quite well.

An interesting quote from Tristan Tzara

March 20, 08 //
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Ever since stumbling across his grave at the Montparnasse cemetery, I have been not quite obsessed persistently inquisitive about the life and times of the Romanian-French poet Tristan Tzara, one of the founders of the Dadaist movement. I was just looking over his single entry in Wikipedia, and found this quote plastered on the top right side, perhaps signifying it (to the author or whoever it is that has say over these things) as one of his more well-known or oft-quoted sayings:

“I consider America responsible for the shame of our age: the glorification of work, that stupid ideology which has engendered the idea of material progress and the disdain of every utopia or poetry tending toward the perfection of the human soul… I cannot help opposing those influences… with the most violent lunge forward, the idea, and the most creative of actions, idleness.”
Tristan Tzara

Trust a poet to say something like that. And trust me, from somewhere inside my heart, to fully concur or less pretentiously (if that’s possible for me) to second that emotion.

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Old Stranger article about why musicians are moving from Seattle to Portland…

March 18, 08 //
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I dont know why but Portland has been figuring on my mind lately. Probably because I am thinking if there is something better than becoming a lifer in Shanghai or some kind of nomad. As much as I would just love to be able to roam , i think it would get old–maybe it already has, which is why I am thinking along these lines now. Here’s that article from The Stranger on why a lot of Seattle based musicians (and folks from other walks of life I’m sure) are heading south of the border to Portland.

http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Content?oid=59265

Seattle’s Hottest New Hood – Music – The Stranger, Seattle’s Only Newspaper via kwout