Sunday, October 26, 2008

2

I can't say I'm so self-assured that I don't have stinging pangs of insecurity when I read somebody snarkily trashing the very things I found most affecting about a movie. Makes me really doubt my own judgment. And, in some cases, I guess, rightly so. "American Beauty," for instance. But: onward.

3

By consumerist/technological/visual culture's totalitarian mediation, maybe? Or by our ever-increasing cynicism and isolation?

1

I really hate writing plot summaries--feels like doing my taxes or something--but, if you didn't know, "Blindness" is based on a book by Jose Saramago in which nameless inhabitants of a nameless, hyper-modern (some amalgam of Rio, Tokyo and Toronto, it seemed) metropolis suddenly go blind. They are quarantined by the government in a filthy militarized hospital with little food and no medicine. Shit then gets very Lord of the Flies. Mark Ruffalo and apocalypse-chaser Julianne Moore are in the movie. So is Danny Glover, who, in his advancing age, is approaching Morgan Freeman-esque Magical Negro territory. Somehow, he pulls it off here.

Tuesday, October 7, 2008

5

As generous and charming as this self-deprecation often was on the page, seeing him speak could be painful. You get the same solipsistic doubling back as in his writing, but without that confident authorial voice. He seems unable to resist the torrent of words and ideas but also unconvinced that anyone would want to listen. Its a little heartbreaking.

4

We see this in lots 20th/21st century art, I think, from Sonic Youth to Jackson Pollack to countless others. An urge to first reflect the world's bracing confusion and noise and then to find new kinds of beauty in that noise.

3

It was this tension, between these urges to critique and to reflect, that caused him, a son of grammar prescriptivists, who would take his students to task for improper written usage, to begin many sentences with rhythmic spoken-language tidbits like, "But and so...".

2

Take, like, personal music players+headphones. There's no doubt that the experience of riding a bus or train, looking out the window, the music thats most beautiful and meaningful to you streaming with fidelity and clarity into your very own ears...well, thats obviously totally amazing. And I think that, for the average person, that level of personal, individual engagement with music is basically unprecedented in human history. But then think about the fact that for most of human history, music served a mainly social function; it was performed and received in an entirely communal setting. Consider, then, how rare meaningful communal experiences of music are these days. Consider also the landscape that you're passing by in that train or bus and how mediated your actual experience of it is. Think about how removed you are from the thing itself. And then think about how isolated you are from the other people on the train. And about what that isolation means for us as public people. That's an unsettling trade-off, right?

1

And I actually drank a Diet Coke before I watched Zabriskie Point, which is pretty rare for me since caffeine makes me feel like I'm made of itchy glass. The movie ruled and the soda tasted pretty dang good.