It does include the classic line, when the scientist was insisting on flying the machine alone for the first flight, "there are different kinds of stupidity, there's dignified stupidity, heroic stupidity... but this is just stupid stupidity". For Herzog of course a dangerous flight is not the stupid part, but doing it without a camera on board - that's just stupid stupidity...
Saturday, January 22, 2011
Werner is Cheney
So watching The white diamond, I couldn't quite put my finger on what was a bit... off about it till she said to me "don't bogart that joint Mark Anthony". It's true, they were all stoned. Werner allowed an amazing shift in tone from a man crying about how his dirigible killed a film maker to one of the locals (Mark Anthony - the hero of the film in a way) talking about how great his rooster was. Allowing Herzog to laconically voiceover about how he had to meet this wonderful character. So they took the film ("in celluloid we trust") to the chicken. A minor Herzog really. I like the flexibility he exhibits in going where the situation seems to be leading him (as in Finnisterre where he allows the film to be completely taken over by the beauty and power of the burning oil wells), but none of it is very substantial. He didn't make a nature documentary, he didn't make a documentary about flight, or about British Guyana, or about the waterfall...
Thursday, January 13, 2011
127 Hours
Watched this tonight, as I may have mentioned before my active pursuits mostly include nursing my arthritic joints and raising a glass to the heroic doers of this world, and while we enjoyed it we felt something lacking. It fizzed along very well and at 90 minutes it didn't outstay its welcome. Despite its horrifying premise it wasn't chock full of body horror and actually at its worst it resembled Disney Torture Porn: somehow facile, video game, music video, Tarantino, denaturedviolence purely for aesthetics, shits, and giggles... The shocking violence of the film rarely felt as painful as the single golf club to the knee that resonated with waves of pain throughout Funny Games for example. Which is fine really as the story was much, much more upbeat: pretty Hollywood boys and girls leading the active life. Outdoorsmen youknow.
It was fun. In a music video kind of way. Much more "artistic" than the climbing movies I've been watching lately. And much more shallow.
But fun.
Books for 2011
So this year I'm going to write about 100 books I'm going to read during the year. I know, I'm already behind schedule if I'm only starting now but I did decide a bit late. I will also, of course, cheat. The nature of the cheating will expose itself soon.
Last week I read "Touching the void" by Joe Simpson. We have taken to reading and watching mountain climbing films recently. We both read "Into thin air" by John Krakauer (having enjoyed his Into the wild and Under the banner of heaven) and decided to get our hands on the IMAX movie shot during that season. The climbing sequences in that really hammered home the craziness of the whole endeavour. This led us to watch Scream of stone by Werner Herzog - we're huge Herzog fans - partially due to Reinhold Messner being the climbing consultant. This may not be the greatest narrative film ever. Werner (my pal on facebook) disowned and didn't write the script and the acting is not actually great. But the mountain Cerro Torre, a 2KM needle of ice covered rock with a mushroom shaped summit made of windblown snow, is simply one of the most insane things I have ever seen that anyone would want to try and do a Batclimb all the way up. Back to the void. I read it over a decade ago. A few years ago this would have been a problem but I found myself with no clear memory of details from the book, as distinct from the film, which I watched maybe seven years ago. I have now rectified that by going back to the book and I realise to some extent how this happened.
Even now I read a book like this without fully understanding the climbing. I didn't draw little diagrams to work out the traverses and rappels and how the ropes were anchored during the descent in particular. I certainly wasn't entirely sure what a piton looked like and I think some of the knots and rope climbing techniques I don't really understand. I find that when a book doesn't form a coherent whole in your mind it is easy to forget. This was always the reason I didn't finish books if I really didn't like them: to allow me to forget something best forgotten. Of course in my youth I suffered from too much memory, which is not really a great problem these days. As I've got older I have discovered that if a book on a subject is interesting, it's even more interesting to read 10 or 20. And watch films. Because of that we've ended up reading a few books and watching a few more, and my intray has a few of both piling up. People ask, "what you sit at home reading and watching but don't climb?" to which I invariably reply "what is it about books and films with people losing body parts and lives to cold, ice, wind, hypoxia and falls that would make you want to get up a mountain? Oh, and we do it with the fire on on a COMFY sofa."
Back to the book: this is exactly the kind of extraordinary survival adventure that would make any sane person feel glad of their warm fire. It asks you one really important question over and over again: would you just lie back and die? Now would you? Stand on your dislocated broken knee and walk on broken scree, now would you? Thirsty passing out from pain hallucinating from hunger, now would you? How about now?
Thursday, October 23, 2008
nationalism, rampant crony-capitalism, and liars
Patriotism transmutes individual selfishness into national egoism. Loyalty to a nation is a high form of altruism when compared with lesser loyalties and more parochial interests. It therefore becomes the vehicle of all the altruistic impulses and expresses itself, on occasion, with such fervour that the critical attitude of the individual toward the nation and its enterprises is almost completely destroyed. The unqualified character of this devotion is the very basis of the nation's power and of the freedom to use the power without moral restraint. Thus the unselfishness of individuals makes for the selfishness of nations.
Reinhold Niebuhr Moral Man and Immoral Society 1932
How can you be a republican and absolutely abhor nationalism as I do? Just like that mate, just like that. I disagree that it becomes the vehicle of all the altruistic impulses. I would argue instead that non-altruistic impulses become transformed by regular association rather. Niebuhr calls this vicarious selfishness. This lunch I was also reading an essay about James K. Galbraith's The predator state: how conservatives abandoned the free market and why liberals should too which argues that the counterbalancing forces of big labour, big business and big government have collapsed. They have, he argues, been replaced by a new class
"endowed with vast personal income, freed from the corporation [who] set out to take over the state and run it - not for any ideological project but simply in the way that would bring to them, individually and as a group, the most money, the least disturbed power and the greatest chance of rescue should something go wrong".
And to distinguish why I find this more persuasive than Naomi Klein's Disaster capitalism by analogy: he distinguishes between Cheney and Wolfowitz. Wolfie is a fool. A mad fool and a powerful one, but no more than a fool. An ideologue. He claims to have been SDS (I've never seen him mentioned in histories of the SDS, but whatever) so he was a party line man from the beginning. Whatever the party. And committed to ideological purity. Someone like, ****** for example in Ireland, who went from being a trotskyite official IRA loyalist all the way out to a pathetic apologist for a corrupt taoiseach at the end of his career (and got rewarded with a seat in the second chamber by the morally compromised man himself). Cheney couldn't care less. Rumsfeld could lie unblinkingly on TV about how al queda had massive underground caverns with air conditioning, entertainment centres, libraries, swimming pools etc. on air because he didn't. really. care. At all. About you. About what was best for the world. Cheney's unbridled and unhidden cynicism is breathtaking. And it is they, rather than their ideologue stooges who rule the world. Galbraith's argument that corruption and cronyism (of the state and its interventions in markets) are central to the way capitalism is working now are, no doubt, horrifyingly persuasive to the majority of people in the West. Klein's examination of the disaster capitalism / shock treatment ideologically driven imperative seems now only to be a special case of a greater truth. One needs only to look at the building industry in Ireland if one seeks examples and confirmation closer to home. Look at the financial industry that lived off it. Look at Anglo-Irish bank and their threats to the government of disaster prior to their generous underwriting. The state paid for their risk taking. This is not the "free market" nor is it "capitalism" it is the tools of socialism used for the ultra-rich, the very powerful. And pay great heed to Anglo-Irish's imprecations to the ordinary people that they had better tighten their belts and not seek pay rises in the future. And that public services would have to be cut.
What needs to be cut is the umbilical chord from the state feeding vampires the taxes of the people.
* I am honour bound, by the way - next time I meet him - to bitchslap this macho runt. He wrote after Susan Sontag died that his one regret was that when they met in Sarajevo he didn't put her over his knee and spank her. I believe Sontag was a monster to deal with. But she was a great intellectual and essayist rather than an intellectually stunted hack and apologist in search of power.
She would have kicked his sorry short arse for him too.
Reinhold Niebuhr Moral Man and Immoral Society 1932
How can you be a republican and absolutely abhor nationalism as I do? Just like that mate, just like that. I disagree that it becomes the vehicle of all the altruistic impulses. I would argue instead that non-altruistic impulses become transformed by regular association rather. Niebuhr calls this vicarious selfishness. This lunch I was also reading an essay about James K. Galbraith's The predator state: how conservatives abandoned the free market and why liberals should too which argues that the counterbalancing forces of big labour, big business and big government have collapsed. They have, he argues, been replaced by a new class
"endowed with vast personal income, freed from the corporation [who] set out to take over the state and run it - not for any ideological project but simply in the way that would bring to them, individually and as a group, the most money, the least disturbed power and the greatest chance of rescue should something go wrong".
And to distinguish why I find this more persuasive than Naomi Klein's Disaster capitalism by analogy: he distinguishes between Cheney and Wolfowitz. Wolfie is a fool. A mad fool and a powerful one, but no more than a fool. An ideologue. He claims to have been SDS (I've never seen him mentioned in histories of the SDS, but whatever) so he was a party line man from the beginning. Whatever the party. And committed to ideological purity. Someone like, ****** for example in Ireland, who went from being a trotskyite official IRA loyalist all the way out to a pathetic apologist for a corrupt taoiseach at the end of his career (and got rewarded with a seat in the second chamber by the morally compromised man himself). Cheney couldn't care less. Rumsfeld could lie unblinkingly on TV about how al queda had massive underground caverns with air conditioning, entertainment centres, libraries, swimming pools etc. on air because he didn't. really. care. At all. About you. About what was best for the world. Cheney's unbridled and unhidden cynicism is breathtaking. And it is they, rather than their ideologue stooges who rule the world. Galbraith's argument that corruption and cronyism (of the state and its interventions in markets) are central to the way capitalism is working now are, no doubt, horrifyingly persuasive to the majority of people in the West. Klein's examination of the disaster capitalism / shock treatment ideologically driven imperative seems now only to be a special case of a greater truth. One needs only to look at the building industry in Ireland if one seeks examples and confirmation closer to home. Look at the financial industry that lived off it. Look at Anglo-Irish bank and their threats to the government of disaster prior to their generous underwriting. The state paid for their risk taking. This is not the "free market" nor is it "capitalism" it is the tools of socialism used for the ultra-rich, the very powerful. And pay great heed to Anglo-Irish's imprecations to the ordinary people that they had better tighten their belts and not seek pay rises in the future. And that public services would have to be cut.
What needs to be cut is the umbilical chord from the state feeding vampires the taxes of the people.
* I am honour bound, by the way - next time I meet him - to bitchslap this macho runt. He wrote after Susan Sontag died that his one regret was that when they met in Sarajevo he didn't put her over his knee and spank her. I believe Sontag was a monster to deal with. But she was a great intellectual and essayist rather than an intellectually stunted hack and apologist in search of power.
She would have kicked his sorry short arse for him too.
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
David Foster Wallace
A mate asked about him in an email and this is my reply:
I'm still seriously depressed, no disappointed the way that life does disappoint you, about DFW.
Somebody quoted from American Psycho to me recently when I said something about music and I was just thinking "that is the kind of "ironic" hip, self regarding, smug, empty, vapid, self conciously clever, consumer as creator, dead end of literature and culture that David Foster Wallace demonstrated is the nadir of civilisation. A rallying point, a line to make in the sand and anathema to reject. And now he's dead". I read Infinite Jest and A supposedly fun thing I'll never do again as well as various journalism. He's infuriating, Razor sharp yet obfusticating, earnest, sincere and elusive. Difficult and brilliant to read. I wanted to edit his books with a hammer.
McSweeney's doesn't do it for me, I feel like I'm not part of the joke, not part of the scene. DFW had a terribly self destructive streak, an inability to not analyse, to enjoy, to deliver straight. It's the thread that joins Harvey Pekar to Curb Your Enthusiasm but allied to a fierce and ferociously learned intellect and a genuine and sincere quest to understand modern society, happiness, sadness, horror, television, literature, advertisement, debasement, entertainment, infantilism, addiction, autoeroticism, intoxication, and again and again, sadness and living.
I can't honestly recommend that you read him however.
I'm still seriously depressed, no disappointed the way that life does disappoint you, about DFW.
Somebody quoted from American Psycho to me recently when I said something about music and I was just thinking "that is the kind of "ironic" hip, self regarding, smug, empty, vapid, self conciously clever, consumer as creator, dead end of literature and culture that David Foster Wallace demonstrated is the nadir of civilisation. A rallying point, a line to make in the sand and anathema to reject. And now he's dead". I read Infinite Jest and A supposedly fun thing I'll never do again as well as various journalism. He's infuriating, Razor sharp yet obfusticating, earnest, sincere and elusive. Difficult and brilliant to read. I wanted to edit his books with a hammer.
McSweeney's doesn't do it for me, I feel like I'm not part of the joke, not part of the scene. DFW had a terribly self destructive streak, an inability to not analyse, to enjoy, to deliver straight. It's the thread that joins Harvey Pekar to Curb Your Enthusiasm but allied to a fierce and ferociously learned intellect and a genuine and sincere quest to understand modern society, happiness, sadness, horror, television, literature, advertisement, debasement, entertainment, infantilism, addiction, autoeroticism, intoxication, and again and again, sadness and living.
I can't honestly recommend that you read him however.
Friday, April 11, 2008
Lars and the Real Fantasy
So last night's film Lars and the Real Girl - in contrast to last week's properly creepy the Orphanage -was cute, life affirming and touching. Perhaps not a little twee. We went to it as fans of Six Feet Under (one of the many series that makes me say that current US TV is the golden age. The best in the world. Ever.) I'm sure you know the set up, painfully shy (or actually mentally ill and terrified of contact) young man brings home one of those Real Doll sex toys and it gets integrated into the community when everyone plays along with his delusion that she is real (Brazilian half Danish missionary - the Danish is important, this is a Danish community he lives in). The film had to work hard not to creep me out - I'd just come across the book Still Lovers in work the other week. This is a book of men and their real dolls. Even the shots that weren't creepy were creepy. Really creepy. I mean those shots that didn't look like the aftermath of rape looked like creepy mental illness...
The first big thing they did to avoid the ick factor was they made Lars a serious churchgoer and in his fantasy Bianca (the realdoll) was a missionary so she slept in his brothers house. I'm glad to say that his brother didn't appear to take advantage of her. Leave out the psychobabble gloss they put in - that rubbish appears in all american movies and is no more or less serious than the magic that would be used to explain this in a fairy tale - and we have an incongrous, perhaps surreal device or plot element to make us consider the ordinary surroundings as if they were new. And now we see where the real fantasy is: the community he went to, his church, his work, the local GP who is also a psychiatrist and has hours of time a week to spend chatting to him (who's paying?). Hell the Emergency Room springs into action when he says Bianca is ill. Did he bring her to the local Kaiser Permanente ER? Did they perform a wallet autopsy on a sex doll? How did the insurance underwriters classify the treatment? Was it perhaps experimental and will Lars get a Real Bill be doing a long sequel of overtime to pay for it?
The fantasy is not that a man can love a doll, or that his community will accept it. The fantasy is that the community exists in the first place. Sure, you may think that your church is that community, leeching and tithing your money out of you: but try actually bringing in a sex doll to church.
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Klaus Nomi is cold
I was trying to post this somewhere else, but I couldn't. So I'm putting it here.
I bought the rather fabulous Harmonia Mundi Masterworks - fifty milestones of Western music. I'm not really qualified to make judgments on classical music but I think anyone can spot this is a bargain. And the performances are exellent and the choices have sent me down various avenues (though there is too much baroque for my taste). I loved Purcell's opera King Arthur from which this is from.
It appears to be going for £70 (over 100 yoyos) on Amazon.cock. I bought mine for €40 on Presto - Amazon never delivered so I cancelled. So maybe not such good value any more:)
Addendum: it seems not to be too readily available any more, but Harmonia Mundi have it for £29 English pounds. So that's less than a quid a disc which is alright.
I bought the rather fabulous Harmonia Mundi Masterworks - fifty milestones of Western music. I'm not really qualified to make judgments on classical music but I think anyone can spot this is a bargain. And the performances are exellent and the choices have sent me down various avenues (though there is too much baroque for my taste). I loved Purcell's opera King Arthur from which this is from.
It appears to be going for £70 (over 100 yoyos) on Amazon.cock. I bought mine for €40 on Presto - Amazon never delivered so I cancelled. So maybe not such good value any more:)
Addendum: it seems not to be too readily available any more, but Harmonia Mundi have it for £29 English pounds. So that's less than a quid a disc which is alright.
Thursday, February 21, 2008
Previews
I really meant to write something serious here yesterday. It was to do with sentencing policy and drugs and stuff. But I didn't. I did write some previews of DVDs that arrived in here yesterday so I'll post them instead.
Don't look back (classic DA Pennebaker Bob doc)
Into great silence (god botherers being quiet for once - most popular film in the IFI last year)
20 to life: the life and times of John Sinclair (doc on life of MC5 manager and White Panthers chairman who got 20 years for two joints)
Gram Parsons Fallen Angel (biopic of dilletante heir and musician whose sweethearts of the rodeo, Burrito deluxe, grievous angel etc. are the palimpset for ALL country rock)
South (Shackleton, antartic, in glorious white and white)
Life and debt (mandatory viewing apparently)
Sicko (Moore)
Early cinema primitives and pioneers (you've read about all the films here in media studies books. Now you can watch them too. You lucky lucky people)
Two disc version of Nosferatu (we have the BFI one. I challenge you to find a film this old which still works as well as a film and not just as a historical document)
Lenny - (biopic. Swearing is $$^$ing great. It's big AND it's clever)
Nil by mount (nil by eyes after watching this)
Control (Ian Curtis biopic - for the fans)
Britannia Hospital (was Lyndsey Anderson a ruined genius or just a prick who couldn't be bothered getting on with other people - transpose your opinions on Roy Keane)
Network (it's studied for the script - but there's much more going on. Inchoate rage. The only sensible emotion)
1984 (original poster tag - will ecstasy be a crime? prescient)
Animal farm (the CIA funded one unfortunately - not the famous video nasty)
Deathproof (Tarantino's entry in the torture porn genre)
What have I done to deserve this (perhaps Almadovar's most misanthropic film - a must see)
Coming home (Vietnam film I bought under the mistaken belief that it won the best film O$€£r the year that Apocalypse now and Deer Hunter were out - it didn't. But Hal Ashby is still the forgotten great of 70s US film)
Exiles (Cannes winner 2004)
Chinese Odyssey 2002 (Chinese spoof on Crouching homo hidden hamster)
Myra Beckinridge (legendary "they didn't do that? Did they?" version of Gore Vidal shock sex satire with Racquel Welsh)
Rio Grande (Wayne, O'Hara, River, Big)
Phil Mulloy extreme animation (he tattoos the animations on his schlong, lasers them out, starts again. Looks like a rasher in the microwave for 10 hours.)
Atonement (utter and complete SHITE. waste of two hours. By turns opaque and infuriatingly facile. Keira Knightley isn't even the most annoying thing in it.)
The wire (don't bother - I have it first)
Jury's still out on The Wire - I've watched two episodes and it doesn't strike me as being a radical departure from the genre. Maybe incremental rather than revolutionary.
Don't look back (classic DA Pennebaker Bob doc)
Into great silence (god botherers being quiet for once - most popular film in the IFI last year)
20 to life: the life and times of John Sinclair (doc on life of MC5 manager and White Panthers chairman who got 20 years for two joints)
Gram Parsons Fallen Angel (biopic of dilletante heir and musician whose sweethearts of the rodeo, Burrito deluxe, grievous angel etc. are the palimpset for ALL country rock)
South (Shackleton, antartic, in glorious white and white)
Life and debt (mandatory viewing apparently)
Sicko (Moore)
Early cinema primitives and pioneers (you've read about all the films here in media studies books. Now you can watch them too. You lucky lucky people)
Two disc version of Nosferatu (we have the BFI one. I challenge you to find a film this old which still works as well as a film and not just as a historical document)
Lenny - (biopic. Swearing is $$^$ing great. It's big AND it's clever)
Nil by mount (nil by eyes after watching this)
Control (Ian Curtis biopic - for the fans)
Britannia Hospital (was Lyndsey Anderson a ruined genius or just a prick who couldn't be bothered getting on with other people - transpose your opinions on Roy Keane)
Network (it's studied for the script - but there's much more going on. Inchoate rage. The only sensible emotion)
1984 (original poster tag - will ecstasy be a crime? prescient)
Animal farm (the CIA funded one unfortunately - not the famous video nasty)
Deathproof (Tarantino's entry in the torture porn genre)
What have I done to deserve this (perhaps Almadovar's most misanthropic film - a must see)
Coming home (Vietnam film I bought under the mistaken belief that it won the best film O$€£r the year that Apocalypse now and Deer Hunter were out - it didn't. But Hal Ashby is still the forgotten great of 70s US film)
Exiles (Cannes winner 2004)
Chinese Odyssey 2002 (Chinese spoof on Crouching homo hidden hamster)
Myra Beckinridge (legendary "they didn't do that? Did they?" version of Gore Vidal shock sex satire with Racquel Welsh)
Rio Grande (Wayne, O'Hara, River, Big)
Phil Mulloy extreme animation (he tattoos the animations on his schlong, lasers them out, starts again. Looks like a rasher in the microwave for 10 hours.)
Atonement (utter and complete SHITE. waste of two hours. By turns opaque and infuriatingly facile. Keira Knightley isn't even the most annoying thing in it.)
The wire (don't bother - I have it first)
Jury's still out on The Wire - I've watched two episodes and it doesn't strike me as being a radical departure from the genre. Maybe incremental rather than revolutionary.
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