malkaviian · 2 years ago
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Thinking about the effects of Jayce's miscarriage in both him and Phoenix
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pointlesswalks · 3 years ago
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Never Look Away
Biographical films are strange beasts in that they are, perhaps somewhat unfairly, expected to cleave closer to truth than ordinary dramas. Biographical films about artists, moreover, carry the extra burden of attempting to locate the genesis or turning point in an entire artistic style whilst only showing a small part of an artist’s life. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s 2018 film, Never Look Away, is loosely based on the life of German artist, Gerhard Richter, and by the time we get to the end of the 180-plus minute running time, we get the impression that Kurt Barnert (Tom Schilling) – Richter’s stand-in – has become a fully formed artist. How we get there isn’t entirely clear or convincing, but, strangely, it’s not entirely to the detriment of the film.
 The film covers the Kurt’s years as a child living under one totalitarian system, that of the National Socialists’, as a young man living under another, that of the German Democratic Republic, and of his escape with his wife to West Germany where he finally achieves both his personal and critical artistic breakthrough. Complicating matters is that Barnet’s father-in-law, Professor Carl Seeband (Sebastian Koch), is the man responsible for the sterilization and euthanasia of one of Kurt’s aunts.
 Never Look Away was inspired by the revelation in Jürgen Schreiber’s book, Ein Maler aus Deutschland, that Richter’s father-in-law, Heinrich Eufinger, a high-ranking SS-doctor, had actually been responsible for the forced sterilisation of women no longer deemed fit to procreate by the National Socialist regime. One of these women, it turns out, was Richter’s aunt, Marianne Schönfelder, the subject of one of his celebrated photorealistic, blurred paintings, Aunt Marianne (1965). Henckel von Donnersmarck punches up the drama somewhat, and Marianne, an aunt Richter barely knew, has become Elisabeth May, a vibrant young woman, much involved in young Kurt’s life and who is intent on developing his interest in art. It is also this aunt that delivers the invocation of the (English) film’s title, the command to “never look away,” a command that Kurt will carry with him.
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  The film opens in 1937 Dresden at an exhibition of “Degenerate Art” hosted by the Nazi party which includes works by luminaries such as Picasso, Mondrian, Kandinsky and others. The guide explains that the abstractions expressed by these artists can only either be the product of some hereditary disease or otherwise a pernicious attempt to undermine society. The natural conclusion is that creators of such works should, in the latter case, be open to criminal sanction, or that, tellingly, in the former, steps should be taken such that their peculiar “ocular afflictions” are not passed to future generations: the seeds of the Final Solution have already been sown.
 The young Kurt Barnet (Cai Cohrs) is accompanied to the exhibition by his aunt, Elisabeth (Saskia Rosendahl), who quietly confides in Kurt that she rather likes the “degenerate” art that is on display. Elisabeth’s approval of these works isn’t driven by an ideological sensibility – although the Barnert family seem decidedly anti-Nazi – but rather that more clichéd, banal one in which “madness” informs artistic receptivity. Elisabeth suffers from schizophrenia, and the same affliction which can drive her to ecstasy when hearing a symphony of bus horns or when witnessing the pomp of a Nazi parade is what will ultimately see her treated so monstrously by Professor Seeband when she is finally institutionalised .
 Kurt finds Elisabeth the morning after the Nazi parade, naked at the piano, and in the middle of a full-blown psychotic break and rambling about having discovered “the code of the universe.” It is as a result of this breakdown that Elisabeth is forcefully taken to a sanatorium. As she is removed by the nurses, we get an important shot from Kurt’s point-of-view, a shot that comes to represent the film’s most significant recurrent visual motifs. As Kurt lifts his hand up to cover his eyes from the awful scene of his beloved aunt being sedated and forced into an ambulance, the camera focuses on his hand. When his hand drops away, the scene behind it remains blurred. This visual motif will gain significance each time Henckel von Donnersmarck employs it, its significance becomes clearer to the audience such that by the time Kurt produces his first blurred painting, they know exactly how to read it. The key for how to read this motif, however, is present right there the first time we see it, in the very first shot of the film, in fact. The film opens with a blurred shot of the degenerate art exhibition, and the first thing we see in focus is the face of the Nazi tour guide when it comes into the shot before he delivers his polemic against degenerate art.
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  Both Kurt and Professor Seeband find success in the new East German regime: Kurt, by excelling in art school and making a name for himself as a muralist of socialist realism works; and the professor by successfully concealing his past as a Nazi and becoming an “active co-creator of the [the] Socialist Republic.” However, where the professor has slotted quite naturally into the new regime Kurt can’t quite resign himself to the abandonment of innovation and artistic freedom demanded of him in order to make socialist realism art. Once again we see the blurred visual motif at play: as Kurt’s art teacher implores his students to reject the “Ich, ich, ich” of the innovator while paradoxically beseeching them to “Be different, gentlemen. Be different,” artworks by Picasso, Francis Bacon and Max Ernst are continuously coming in and out of focus as they are passed through an episcope. As at the exhibition of degenerate art, the discussion of “ideology” only serves to obscure. It is also at art school where Kurt meets his future wife, another Elisabeth (Paula Beer) who he insists on calling Ellie, and who bears more than a passing resemblance to his now deceased aunt.
 In the West, Kurt finds himself at the mercy of a different, but just as limiting, regime. Where in the East art was made to service the worker’s revolution, in the West, “money is all that counts,” and one doesn’t innovate to make good art but to find the idea that allows one to stand apart from the rest. Kurt’s teacher is Professor Antonius van Verten (Oliver Masucci), a stand-in for Joseph Beuys, who was in actuality for a time a contemporary of Richter. van Verten, dismissed as a maniac by his students, particularly because his idea – making art using only felt and grease – isn’t considered to be interesting, nevertheless locates true freedom in art and urges his students to develop their own subjective abilities without reference to external guidelines. van Verten is intrigued by Kurt but can tell immediately that the work he is creating isn’t reaching its full potential, because there is nothing about it that is true to Kurt. The professor confides to Kurt of his time in the war, of being shot down over Crimea with terrible head wounds that should have killed him. He recalls how Tatar nomads nursed his wounds with grease and wrapped him in felt. van Verten concludes that if he were to distil everything he had learnt in his life, if he had to make a claim about what he truly knew, it would be the feeling of felt and grease. Armed with this, Kurt abandons his first aborted attempts at art, and after a slow start, he paints his first photograph, a painting of Dr. Burghart Kroll (Rainer Bock), architect of the program that saw Kurt’s aunt sterilised and murdered by his father-in-law. A second painting follows, of his beloved aunt, Elisabeth. And in a moment of insight – and we see once again the shot of young Kurt’s hand dropping away from his eyes and the blurred shot of his aunt being taken away – Kurt deliberately brushes his photo-realistic painting over his painting creating a blur.
 Here we come to the jarring contradiction at the heart of the film. The visual motif Henckel von Donnersmarck consistently deploys is of blurred, out of focus shots. In Never Look Away these shots, when out of focus, paradoxically, represent a deeper access to truth. However, the culmination of Kurt’s idea is a composite painting which layers a picture of his aunt, a passport photo of Professor Seeband and the photograph of Kroll – it’s the sort of composite painting that Richter never made. When Professor Seeband sees this painting in Kurt’s studio, he loses his composure for the first time. However, if we consider what exactly spooked Professor Seeband, it’s not that Kurt’s painting, by virtue of being blurred, revealed a deeper truth that otherwise would have remained hidden, but that the painting clearly – with respect to what it represented, not how it represented it – revealed his involvement with Elisabeth’s death. Furthermore, it is inconceivable that Kurt – who knows his father-in-law enjoyed preening around in his SS uniform, who knows he is a world-class gynaecologist who happened to work in a hospital at around the time Elisabeth was treated, who knows his father-in-law deceived Kurt and his wife into having an abortion that he then himself went ahead and performed – fails to see any sort of connection between his painting and his father-in-law’s past.
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Another contradiction is in the nature of reality in Never Look Away. The film is a drama grounded in conventional cinematic realism so that when Elisabeth has her psychotic breakdown and begins to ramble on about the code of the universe we aren’t expected to think for a second that there is a code to the universe. This isn’t to say that the film is spiritually devoid. The moment of artistic transcendence for both Kurt and certainly for Professor van Verten is spiritual, but it is also decidedly not supernatural. Henckel von Donnersmarck undercuts the materialist nature of his film with the inclusion of two sequences. The first comes towards the end of the war when a slightly older Kurt witnesses the bombing of Dresden. As Kurt looks into the Dresden night, shots alternate not only between the planes dropping their bombs and carnage taking place in Dresden, but also of the Russian front, where we witness his brothers die, and of his sister being led into a chamber as the Nazi party prepares to liquidate her. The editing of the shots, in particular with respect to Kurt’s searching eyes, give the sequence distinct impression that Kurt can somehow see or is aware of these other events taking place. Even more troubling is the second sequence. When Elisabeth is first brought to the office of Professor Seeband, she makes her way first to a clock, then comments on a picture drawn by the professor’s daughter, Elly, and then, finally, on learning that she is going to be sterilised, she cowers in a corner of his office. Some twenty years later Kurt has been invited to Professor Seeband’s office in order to paint his portrait. While waiting for the professor, Kurt’s eyes linger on the clock first, then on Elly’s drawing, before widening with fear and turning to the same corner where his aunt had cowered. What are we to make of his preternatural sight?
  Intentionally or not, Henckel von Donnersmarck’s film, with its contradictions and what can only be described as deviations from narrative coherence, somehow works because they echo something of Richter’s pronouncements about his own work. Try to find something about why Richter blurs his photo-realistic paintings... His statements are sometimes contradictory, oftentimes confusing, and never entirely clear; this is not because Richter doesn’t know what he’s talking about but rather because he is either suspicious of or not entirely interested in that sort of precision. After all, this is the man who once said, “To talk about painting is not only difficult but perhaps pointless, too.” At the heart of Never Look Away is a major fabrication, in which the nature of Richter’s relationship to his aunt was entirely embellished. Henckel von Donnersmarck made this change because reality, as it stood, simply didn’t make for a good film. These changes, like the blurring of Richter’s paintings, inexorably lead us to some sort of truth. Perhaps this is why Richter can denounce the film saying it both distorts his biography but still remains too true for him to watch.
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ryanjdonovan · 4 years ago
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DONOVAN’S OSCAR PROGNOSTICATION 2021
We all knew it was coming: The Oscar nominees are now almost literally handpicked by Netflix and Amazon. We thought it would be a few years away, but it's just one more piece of fallout from the pandemic. It won't be long now before I'm making my predictions for the Flixies or the Amazies. (By the way, streamers: I just want to watch the friggin' credits, why is that such a problem??)
In case you haven't been paying attention (and I'm pretty sure you haven't), Nomadland is going to win the big Oscars. Haven't seen Nomadland? Or even heard of it? Or any of the Oscar-nominated films? Or didn't even know the Oscars were happening this year? You're not alone. With no theaters this past year, the non-bingeable, non-Netflix-welcome-screen movies were pretty much an afterthought. (But if you asked the streaming services, the nominees this year each accounted for a billion new subscribers and topped the worldwide digital box office for months.)
Well, I'm here to tell you the Oscars are in fact happening, albeit a few months late. Fear not: my 22nd annual Oscar predictions will provide everything you need to know before the big night. (You don't even need to watch the movies themselves -- reading this article will take you just as long.)
BEST PICTURE:
SHOULD WIN: Minari WILL WIN: Nomadland GLORIOUSLY OMITTED: Pieces Of A Woman INGLORIOUSLY SNUBBED: Ma Rainey's Black Bottom
If you're a fan of capitalism, this is not the year for you. Nominees like Nomadland, Mank, Judas And The Black Messiah, The Trial Of The Chicago 7, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, Hillbilly Elegy, Minari, and The White Tiger are all (to varying degrees) indictments of a capitalist system, or at the very least are suspicious of those who benefit from it, and focus on those left behind. It's certainly fertile ground for angst and high drama, if not belly laughs. (Don't get me started on the ironies of all these movies being distributed by billion-dollar conglomerates. The filmmakers, producers, and actors can tell you that the checks cash just fine.) Like Austin Powers said, "Finally those capitalist pigs will pay for their crimes, eh comrades?"
There is no way for me to talk about Nomadland, which will win Best Picture, without sounding like an a-hole. It's a gorgeous work of art, and a fascinating character study, but I struggled to connect to the story. (You should know that for me as a movie watcher, story is more engaging than artfulness or character. But hey, why can't we have all three?) I wanted to like it, I really did. I'm content to drift along with Fern, the resilient main character played naturally by Frances McDormand, but she has no true objective or antagonist. She's a nomad on the road, either searching or hiding, either with the world or against the world, we're not quite sure which. I thought it might be driving (literally) toward a bigger revelation or resolution, but no. (Same with life, I guess.) It's meandering, reticent, languorous, and ethereal (I'm trying really hard to avoid using the word "boring" here). This is all quite intentional, by the way -- the film moves at the pace of its protagonist, and the effect is palpable. (And don't worry, it's not lost on me that I'm watching this movie about people barely scraping by, on a large ultra-high-def TV on my comfy couch in my warm home under an electric blanket, using a streaming service that the movie's characters probably couldn't access or afford.) Am I wrong about all this? Of course I'm wrong. Every critic out there is doing backflips over this film. And not surprisingly, the movie's mortality themes are playing well with the Academy, whose average age and closeness to death are extremely high. (Like the nomad Swankie, they're all anxious about that final kayak ride down the River Styx.) But beware the movie whose 'user/audience score' is significantly lower than its 'critic score' -- it means that regular people are not quite buying it. For me, the biggest problem with slice-of-life films is that I don't really want to go to movies to experience regular life -- I have life for that. Then again, I'm also a superficial, materialistic a-hole. But you knew that already. (Added intrigue: Hulu, Nomadland's distributor, might score a Best Picture win before Amazon, and gives Amazon a subtle middle-finger in the movie with its depiction of seasonal workers.)
Remember when feel-good movies were a thing? It didn’t mean that there were no conflicts or problems for the characters, it just meant that they were enjoyable to watch, and you came out feeling good about humans. Minari is the rare feel-good Oscar movie, and my personal pick for what should win Best Picture. It easily might have been a tough sit based on the premise: A Korean family moves to rural Arkansas to start a farm, and must overcome a drought, financial calamity, a complete lack of agriculture experience, a crumbling marriage, the son's potentially-deadly heart condition, and a grandmother that drinks all their Mountain Dew. In keeping with Oscar tradition, it could have been a constant assault of upsetting scenes. But instead, it's a warm, sunny, optimistic, funny movie. The family faces struggles and hardships, to be sure, but the story is treated with positivity, not negativity; with a sense of community, not isolation; with an attitude of resolve, not blame. And they get through their problems with mutual support, togetherness, tenderness, humanity, and of course, love. (Not to mention grandma planting some weeds that may or may not miraculously heal physical and emotional wounds.) All these things combine to make it a more engaging experience for me than Nomadland. Not only do I wish this movie would win the Oscar, I wish I could give it a hug.
A lot of pundits think The Trial Of The Chicago 7 has the best chance to upset Nomadland. But I'm not seeing that happen. It was an early favorite and has been getting tons of nominations in the awards run-up, but it hasn't actually been winning much, and seems to be losing steam. (The lack of a Best Director nod is virtually a killer.) I think Minari has a small chance to sneak away with a victory, as it's gotten almost as much universal praise as Nomadland, but hasn't had the same audience. Judas And The Black Messiah is an interesting case, in that it's a late entry that had little early awareness (it didn't plan to be eligible until next year's Oscars), but it scooped several unexpected nominations. Debuting a contender late and taking advantage of recency bias has been a successful strategy in the past, so don't be surprised by a surprise. (Had Shaka King scored the last Director slot over Thomas Vinterberg, I think Judas would be a fairly legitimate threat.)
If you had asked me in September, I would have predicted that Mank would be the wire-to-wire favorite to win Best Picture. Aside from being a prestige David Fincher film (more on him later), it's a smorgasbord of Classic Tales of Hollywood. And the centerpiece couldn't be bolder: It's an homage to, a making of, a dissection of, and political dissertation on Citizen Kane -- only the most deified film of all time. Simply recite the synopsis, describe the film's 1940s black-and-white aesthetic, and mention Gary Oldman's name as the star, and just watch the Oscars come pouring in, right? Well, not quite. It netted 10 nominations, more than any other film, but it's looking like it might not win any of them, certainly not Best Picture. I don't think the film quite knows what it wants to be; at least, I'm not sure what it wants to be. Centered on Herman Mankiewicz, the man credited with co-writing Citizen Kane with Orson Welles, it's a distorted, polemical, impressionistic portrait of a man I barely even knew existed. Though Welles is only briefly portrayed in the film, it demystifies him a bit, suggesting that he's maybe not as responsible for this work of genius as we thought. If the film was framed as "Who actually wrote Citizen Kane?", it would be a little easier to get into. But it feels somewhat academic and circuitous (in a way that Kane itself doesn't). And while the script is clever, it's clever to the point of being confusing. Of course, a film of this pedigree invites a lot of scrutiny, maybe more than any other awards contender (or any film that actually got released this past year, period). It has a lot to appreciate, and surely would benefit from a second viewing. I also can't help but root for the fact that it's been Fincher's passion project for almost a quarter-century. (Then again, tell that to any indie filmmaker who spends their whole life on a single passion project that ends up getting completely ignored, and they’ll tell you where to shove your Fincher pity.) Ultimately, it's an admirable work, but if you're looking for a Rosebud, it's not there.
Promising Young Woman continues to defy expectations. Not only did it rack up six Oscar nominations, it's likely to win one or two of them, and for a while, was gaining on Nomadland for Best Picture. Now that the chips are falling into place, we know it won't win in this category, but it remains one of the most talked-about films of the season. What I like most about the film is not necessarily the literal story (I should have seen the main twist coming a mile away), but the way writer/director Emerald Fennell elevates it in an interesting way. Instead of showing the whole story, she starts her film at the end of a typical revenge thriller (several years after the incident and the legal aftermath). In fact, the victim is not even in the movie, and the victim's best friend is already far along on her path of retribution. (It also challenges the definition of "victim".) The film is not voyeuristically exciting in any way; it's unsettling, but also oddly charming in unexpected ways. The key for me is how it serves as a metaphor for the secrets people keep from loved ones and the toll that it takes on them, and the penances we give ourselves instead of allowing ourselves to heal. It also made me realize that movies could use more Juice Newton. (Paris Hilton, not so much.)
Sound Of Metal and The Father were probably the last two films to make the cut in this category, and are the least likely to win. Their best chances are in other categories. (Pro Tip: If you put the word "sound" in the title of your movie, there's a very good chance you'll win Best Sound.)
I don’t recommend Pieces Of A Woman to anyone who's pregnant, or partners of pregnant women, or anyone planning to have babies anytime in the future, or any partners of anyone planning to have babies anytime in the future, or people hoping to be grandparents anytime in the future, or doctors. (And I'm certain midwives are not giving this a ringing endorsement.) The film starts with an infant death, and then gets worse from there. It's not just an unpleasant experience, it's a series of unrelenting unpleasant experiences: Depression, extra-marital affairs, guilt, a domineering mother, lying, manipulative spouses, abandonment, feelings of inadequacy, sexual dysfunction, litigation, sibling jealousy, public shame, borderline domestic abuse, bribery, courtroom drama, financial problems, baseless blame, and drug addiction. And if that's not upsetting enough, they also manage to throw the Holocaust in there. (This should be a movie sub-genre: "Parade of Horrible Events". This fraternity would include: Manchester By The Sea, Mudbound, Uncut Gems, 12 Years A Slave, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, The Family Stone, and of course, The Revenant.) And then there are the characters. It would be one thing if these were ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. But these are extraordinary a--holes making extraordinary circumstances much worse. It's literally laughable. If I didn't understand what the word 'melodramatic' meant before, I do now. I'm aware that this is based on the experiences of writing/directing spouses Kata Wéber and Kornél Mundruczó, and I don't mean to trivialize their pain or what they went through. Nobody should have to suffer that trauma. And I realize art is a healthy and oftentimes beautiful outlet for grief. But… did I mention the movie is unpleasant? There are certainly wonderful fragments and ideas in here; if the components added up to something moving, I would be much more receptive to it. If I were a snarky (okay, snarkier) reviewer, I might call it "Pieces Of A Better Movie".
Soul is a lovely and inspiring movie, but I'm at the point where I have to judge films by my experience while watching them with children. Try explaining this movie to a 6-year-old. Way too many existential/philosophical/theological questions. I guess it's good for parents who like to talk to their children, but if you're trying to keep your kid occupied and quiet (the reason screens were invented) so you can do something else, it's a bust. (It's no match for the hysterical self-explanatory antics of a certain motor-mouthed, overweight, black-and-white, martial-arts-fighting bear with a penchant for sitting on people's heads and, more importantly, keeping kids silently dumbstruck.) And: Did they have to make the entrance to the afterlife -- a giant bug zapper -- so terrifying? If that's how you get to heaven, what is the entrance to hell like??
BEST ACTOR:
SHOULD WIN: Chadwick Boseman (Ma Rainey's Black Bottom) WILL WIN: Chadwick Boseman (Ma Rainey's Black Bottom) GLORIOUSLY OMITTED: Pete Davidson (The King Of Staten Island) INGLORIOUSLY SNUBBED: Delroy Lindo (Da 5 Bloods)
This one hurts. I usually don't feel a connection to or an overabundance of sympathy for celebrities, but this one genuinely hurts. When Chadwick Boseman wins Best Actor (for Ma Rainey's Black Bottom), it will be a wonderful celebration, but also a painful reminder, not just of who he was, but of who he was yet to be. If ever there was a unanimous vote, this would be it. Before this movie, we had seen him play heroes and outsized personalities, but there had been nothing quite like his role as Levee, the gifted and demonized trumpet player in Ma Rainey's band. His brash, wounded performance is astonishing, revelatory. Since the film debuted after his passing, we can only watch it through the prism of his death. It's hard not to feel parallels: Levee is just starting to scratch the surface of his talent, giving us hints of his abilities with composition and brass before his breakdown; similarly, we have only gotten a taste of Boseman's range and depth. For both the character and the man, we're being deprived of the art he would have created. Boseman's passing makes the performance more resonant and unshakeable, but I think under different circumstances he would still be the front-runner in this race. The only difference would be, we'd assume this would be the first prize of many.
Anthony Hopkins picked an unusual time to go on a hot streak. He recently left a memorable impression on the Marvel Cinematic Universe as Odin, got an Emmy nomination for Westworld, and scored 2 Oscar nominations (after a 22-year drought) -- all after his 80th birthday. This year's nomination, for playing a man slipping into dementia in The Father, probably would have been a favorite to notch him his second Oscar in a different year. He seems like he should be a two-time winner, and we just don't know how many more chances he'll have. (I stand by my declaration that he should have won last year for The Two Popes, over Brad Pitt.) To those aforementioned aging Academy members who fear mortality and probably consider Hopkins a spry young man: Maybe you shouldn't watch this movie.
Riz Ahmed's performance in Sound Of Metal establishes the tone for the entire film, making the experience feel grounded and real. I appreciate how his outward, physical performance is very still, while his internal performance is frenetic, like there's a live wire in his head that he's trying to conceal from the world. His quietness leaves us with an uncertainty that feels like authentic; he's not going to tell us all the answers, because his character is figuring it out as he goes. Speaking of questions, I have a few about his band in the movie (before the hearing loss): Are they any good? What kind of living do they make? Is their cashflow net positive or negative? Are they considered successful (in whatever way you want to define that)? What is their ceiling, commercially and artistically? Are they one lucky break away from making it, or is it a lost cause? Most importantly, if Ahmed and fellow nominee LaKeith Stanfield (Judas And The Black Messiah) had a sad, doleful, wide-eyed staring contest, who would win?
Steven Yeun has been a recognizable face in film and TV (and a prolific voice actor) for a decade, but we haven't really seen him front and center until Minari. And after this bright, heartwarming turn, I think you can expect him to remain in the spotlight for the foreseeable future. His understated and remarkable performance carries this beautiful story of a family finding its path through a new way of life. Despite scant dialogue and minimal exposition, we seem to always know what his character is thinking -- that he's facing daunting odds but has a steel resolve. He and screen partner Yeri Han (who deserves as much credit as Yeun for this film) create one of the most tender crumbling marriages I've seen on screen in a long time. (Though a marriage counselor could have given his character some helpful "dos and don'ts" that might have saved him some headaches.)
What's more improbable, Mank's meandering, decades-long journey to the screen, or the fact that we're supposed to believe 63-year Gary Oldman as a man in his 30s and early 40s? Well, once his performance begins, it's so hammy that you forget all about the ridiculous age discrepancy. He's playing Herman Mankiewicz, whose bombastic writing and sozzled demeanor helped mold the script for Citizen Kane into the legend that it is. It's a bloviated, ostentatious, spectacular exhibition of affectation and panache that only Oldman could pull off. It's a lot of fun. (It must be exhausting to be his wife.) It’s as if Mank wrote the story of his own life... and gave himself the best part.
I'm naming Delroy Lindo for my snubbed choice, for his intense and crushing performance in Da 5 Bloods. I've been hoping he'd get an Oscar nomination for 20 years, and by all accounts, this was going to be his year. Even in the fall, after a slew of critics' awards, he was the odds-on favorite to win. So it was a disappointment that his name wasn't called when nominations were read. For now, he'll have to be content with being everyone's favorite never-nominated actor. (But here's to hoping The Harder They Fall is frickin' amazing, so he can end that drought next year.) There are plenty of honorable mentions this year: Adarsh Gourav (The White Tiger), Mads Mikkelsen (Another Round), and Kingsley Ben-Adir (One Night In Miami) come to mind. (By the way: How often do Kingsley Ben-Adir and Sir Ben Kingsley get each other's take-out orders switched?) But my runner-up is John David Washington (my snubbed pick two years ago), who undoubtedly became an A-List movie star in the past year… but not for the reason you think. Yes, Tenet was a blockbuster and the cinematic story of the summer, but he had special effects and storyline trickery supporting him. Instead, Malcolm And Marie is what stands out to me -- he has nothing but his performance (as abrasive as it is), and he still commands the screen and our attention. When he gets hold of a juicy monologue, he starts cooking… but when he starts dancing on the countertop? Look out.
BEST ACTRESS:
SHOULD WIN: Andra Day (The United States Vs. Billie Holiday) WILL WIN: Andra Day (The United States Vs. Billie Holiday) GLORIOUSLY OMITTED: Anya Taylor-Joy (Emma.) INGLORIOUSLY SNUBBED: Jessie Buckley (I'm Thinking of Ending Things)
Coming down to the wire, we've got a race where three women have a chance to win, and the favorite depends on who you ask and when you ask. Carey Mulligan, Viola Davis, and Andra Day have each won precursor awards, and seem to leapfrog each other daily. Mulligan has been picked by most prognosticators, with Davis right behind. But I'm going to put my untarnished reputation on the line and predict a long-shot upset for Day. (And when that doesn't happen, I'm going to say that I actually thought Mulligan or Davis were more likely.)
Maybe I'm picking Andra Day because she's also my personal favorite, for her star-making debut in The United States Vs. Billie Holiday. The movie itself is serviceable but not stellar (some of the scenes and dialogue are absurdly expository), but Day is an absolute dynamo as the Lady Day. The film is a fairly rounded picture of her life, including her drug abuse, health issues, singing the controversial-at-the-time civil-rights song "Strange Fruit", and an investigation by the U.S. government (hence the title) -- all of which is intriguing for those of us not familiar with her personal story. (I'm sure you'll be shocked to learn that, despite my curmudgeonly ways, I was not in fact alive in the 1940s.) Day has seemingly come out of nowhere, because there was no early hype about the film, and nobody even saw it until a few weeks ago (and even now, it hasn't been seen by nearly as many people as the other contenders). Known primarily as a singer before this (I'm a big fan), she literally transformed her voice (straining her vocal chords, taking up smoking) to capture Billie Holiday's unique vocals. The singing alone might be enough to get her a nomination, but it's the dramatic work that puts her ahead of the field. More than any other nominee, we really get the feeling that she's laying her soul bare onscreen. Even for a seasoned actress, the depth of this performance would be impressive. Her film doesn't have the popularity or momentum that Mulligan's or Davis's do, so she's heading into Oscar night as an underdog. But if voters judge the actresses strictly on performance, not on the movies themselves, she might just pull an upset. And, if you haven't heard Day sing outside this movie, do yourself a favor: Stop reading this article (you might want to do that anyway) and browse her catalogue -- she has the best voice of any contemporary singer, period. Forget Billie Eilish, why isn't Day singing the next James Bond song?
Carey Mulligan returns to the Oscar game for the first time in 11 years, for Promising Young Woman. (Is she bitter that her performance in An Education lost to Sandra Bullock in The Blind Side? Probably not as bitter as I am.) Promising Young Woman is getting a lot of attention and accolades, and much of it is due to Mulligan's strong turn as Cassandra, a woman on a revenge crusade that has taken over her life. It's a layered performance; we see a lot of Cassandra's facades, but we don't know if we ever see the real person. Her best friend's rape and subsequent suicide has left her stunted; by the time we meet Cassandra, she's literally and figuratively become someone else. As rough as it sounds, Mulligan is able to make it… well, 'fun' isn't the right word, but 'enjoyable'. We see Cassandra refusing to sit or be bullied; she has agency and kinetic energy in situations where many do not or cannot. Whether or not the film works rests largely on Mulligan's shoulders; it's a good thing she's such a talented actress, because not many could pull it off. The more people see the film, the more she's been picked to win the prize. Will she get enough support for a victory? (Ms. Bullock, you owe her a vote.)
Out of all the nominated performances this year, Viola Davis's is the most amusing. Playing the titular singer in Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, it's clear she's having blast. When she's onscreen, Davis owns every single inch of it. She doesn't just drink a bottle of Coke, she guzzles the whole thing with gusto and verve, serving notice that this is going to be the most entertaining consumption of soda you've ever seen. And so it is with the rest of the performance. (Though the lip-synching is not particularly believable; but then again, that didn't hurt Rami Malek in Bohemian Rhapsody.) It will be interesting to see what happens on Oscar night. She's been up and down in the predictions. She was down after losing the Golden Globe (it's taken us until now to realize the Globes are a waste of time??), but rebounded strongly with a Screen Actors Guild win. She is universally adored, but she's also won an Oscar already for Fences, so voters may not feel quite as compelled to give it to her overall.
And we haven't even talked about Frances McDormand in Nomadland yet. Early on, this category seemed like a sprint between McDormand and Davis. But when neither won the Golden Globe or Critics' Choice, it became anybody's race. As we near the end of the contest, McDormand has pretty clearly fallen toward the back. I don't think it's her performance; instead, she's been discounted due to her own victorious history. She's already got two Oscars (in 1997 for Fargo and 2018 for Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri); a third one would require extraordinary circumstances. By comparison, it took Meryl Streep 29 years (and a lot of Ls) after her second to get her third. But if McDormand hadn't just won for Three Billboards three years ago, I think she'd be a lock here; Nomadland may even be a superior performance. She's probably the only actor alive that could pull this off; if she gave up acting, this is how I assume she would be living in real life. It's remarkable how she internalizes everything, yet informs the viewer how she's feeling and what she's thinking with very few words, just her physicality. This project seems particularly challenging. Her character doesn't have the answers; she's searching, but she doesn't even know what for. "I'm not homeless. I'm just house-less. Not the same thing, right?" It's as if she's posing the question to herself, and she really doesn't know. She gets lonelier as the journey goes on, a sort-of self-imposed isolation, and the viewer really feels it. (What does she ultimately find? Well, that's one of the frustrating ambiguities of the film. Don't get me started.) No matter what happens in this category, what McDormand will find is Oscar gold: She's a producer on Nomadland, so she's a strong bet to walk away with a Best Picture statuette.
Saying Vanessa Kirby is the best thing in Pieces Of A Woman is a bit of a backhanded compliment. My distaste for the film was made pretty clear in the Best Picture section, and anybody acting opposite Shia LaBeouf is going to look like Streep. But Kirby is legitimately great, and I think a welcome surprise to those who know her from the Mission: Impossible and Fast & Furious franchises. (And how many fans of The Crown thought Kirby would beat Claire Foy to an Oscar nomination? Don't lie.) Kirby makes the most of her role as an unpleasant person in an unpleasant situation enduring a barrage of unpleasant events surrounded by really unpleasant people. (An infant tragedy is the least of their problems.) But ultimately the film fails her, and unfortunately I don't really believe what any character is doing in this movie. Her nomination has been bolstered by a whopper of an opening scene: a 24-minute single-shot of a childbirth that ends horrifically. But I can't help but feel like the shot comes off as gimmicky; the immediacy of the scene was effective, but the filmmakers seemed to choose stylistic camera movement and choreography over intimacy and realness. The scene may be emotionally truthful, but hoo-eey, Kirby is dialed up. (My personal favorite ridiculous scene? When she's on the subway, wistfully watching children giggling pleasantly and behaving like angels. Ahhh, seems so blissful. Have you ever taken kids on public transportation? They would be fighting, screaming, climbing over the seats, kicking her, throwing goldfish everywhere, getting yelled at by the parents, bumping into passengers, licking the handrails, wiping snot on seats, and saying inappropriate things to strangers. That's parenthood.)
When the movie gods decided to create a remake that would be the exact opposite of what I would like, they conjured up Emma.. (That's "Emma.", with a period at the end of the title. Seriously. It's a "period" piece. Get it?) Anya Taylor-Joy is undoubtedly talented, but she's a letdown as the fabled matchmaker. She also believes that she can bleed on cue. With regard to her climactic scene: "I was in the moment enough that my nose really started bleeding." Wow. No words. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but her performance actually makes me miss Gwyneth.
BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR:
SHOULD WIN: LaKeith Stanfield (Judas And The Black Messiah) WILL WIN: Daniel Kaluuya (Judas And The Black Messiah) GLORIOUSLY OMITTED: Shia LaBeouf (Pieces Of A Woman) INGLORIOUSLY SNUBBED: Glynn Turman (Ma Rainey's Black Bottom)
Can you have a movie with two main characters but no leading actors? If you're wondering why the two stars (and title characters) of Judas And The Black Messiah -- LaKeith Stanfieldand Daniel Kaluuya -- are both competing in the Supporting Actor category, congratulations, you're a human on planet Earth. That's Oscar politics for you, and it's nothing new. They are both unquestionably leads; nevertheless, the shift to Supporting has worked out well for both of them. The assumption was that Stanfield would campaign in the Lead category and Kaluuya in Supporting so as not to cannibalize each other's votes, and to have Kaluuya (the stronger awards bet) compete in the less crowded category. (It's been clear for half a year that Chadwick Boseman would be winning Best Actor.) Stanfield was considered an unrealistic shot to crack the nominees anyway (he was probably 8th for Best Actor, behind Delroy Lindo (Da 5 Bloods) and Tahar Rahim (The Mauritanian)). So when the nominations were read, it was a pleasant shock that he had been slotted in the Supporting Actor category. (And wouldn't you rather have him here than Jared Leto?)
But won't they split the vote, resulting in the very problem they were trying to avoid in the first place? As it turns out, no. Judging from other major awards, voters had made up their minds for Kaluuya long ago, so any votes to support this film will likely go to Kaluuya. It's not hard to see why: As Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, he's dynamic, steely, and charismatic. It's very different -- more confident, self-assured and domineering -- than we've seen him in other roles, like Get Out. (This movie is a like a mini-reunion of Get Out. Dang, now I want a sequel to Get Out.) But I'll be the dissenter, and cast my personal vote for Stanfield. I'm conflicted; they're a close 1-2. But for me, Stanfield's role (as an FBI informant infiltrating the Panthers) has more facets to play, and Stanfield's signature tenderness brings me into the character more. Plus, he also has the bigger challenge: he has to play the Judas (a role he initially didn't want). Like another character actually says to Stanfield in the movie: "This guy deserves an Academy Award."
Leslie Odom Jr.'s quest for an EGOT (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, Tony) has hit a speed bump. Already armed with a G and a T, he was the presumptive favorite heading into the Golden Globes to collect more hardware, for playing singer Sam Cooke in One Night In Miami. But that was before anybody had seen Judas And The Black Messiah. As the lone acting nominee for Miami, he's got a lot of support from anyone looking to honor the film and its stellar cast. And as the singer, he gets to show off his lustrous Hamilton-honed pipes several times. In many ways, he's the most relatable character in Miami, the one that (despite Cooke's fame at the time) seems the most mortal. So though he'll lose Best Supporting Actor, fear not: He's the favorite to win Best Song, and keep the EGOT dream alive. (Unless… 12-time nominee Diane Warren finally gets the sympathy vote for her song for the little-seen The Life Ahead. Wait, you mean she didn't win for Mannequin's "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now"??)
Paul Raci is a fascinating nominee, for Sound of Metal. He was virtually unknown before this movie (best known as Eugene the Animal Control Guy on Parks And Recreation), but his background is intriguing. He's a Vietnam vet who started as a small theater actor in Chicago (he has a Jeff nomination!). With his upbringing as a hearing CODA (Child Of Deaf Adult), he's a frequent player in ASL theater and is the lead singer in an ASL metal band. (Am I the only one who was gotten CODA confused with ACOD (Adult Child Of Divorce)? Is there such a thing as ACODDA (Adult Child Of Deaf Divorced Adults)?) And in the understated role of Joe, who runs a facility for deaf people and serves as a guide for Riz Ahmed's character, he's fantastic. It literally seems like he's been preparing his whole life for the role, and it pays off. (Though upon further examination of his character… Joe seems like a benevolent, trustworthy guy with altruistic motivations, with a shelter focused on mental healing, addiction recovery, and self-sufficiency. But he also appears to foster an environment that isolates its members, severs contact with all loved ones, preys on those who are unstable to begin with, and convinces members that they will struggle if they leave the community. Ultimately Joe runs every aspect of members' lives, and in return expects unwavering devotion and complete submission to his methods. As soon as Ruben says one thing to challenge him, Joe accuses him of sounding like an addict, knowing it will trigger shame and self-doubt, in a clear effort to control his actions. Joe even slyly suggests that he personally knows how to reach heaven, "the kingdom of God". Is there a chance Joe is actually running a cult??)
They may have just picked a name out of a hat to see which member of The Trial Of The Chicago 7 ensemble would get an Oscar nomination (now these are all supporting actors), but however it happened, nomination day was a good day for Sacha Baron Cohen. (He also got a writing nod for Borat 2.) He is effective in the movie -- maybe the best of the bunch -- and it's a (slightly surprising) affirmation that he's a good actor in addition to being a talented performer. Is his performance actually worthy of an Oscar nomination? I'm fairly impressed (except for his I-love-you-too-man scene with the inert Eddie Redmayne, which plays cheap… but you can probably pin that one on Aaron Sorkin). But there are several other people I would have nominated over Cohen. For starters, my snubbed pick, Glynn Turman, is exceptional as a musician holding his own against Chadwick Boseman in Ma Rainey's Black Bottom. (It seems like just yesterday he was the colonel on A Different World, one of his 150+ acting credits.) Honorable mentions include 7-year-old Alan Kim (Minari), Clarke Peters (Da 5 Bloods), Charles Dance (Mank), and Arliss Howard (Mank).
Wow. Shia LaBeouf is not the only repellant part of Pieces Of A Woman, but he's probably the most repellant part. I'm sorry, but anything he does, or is involved in, instantly becomes less believable. At one point he seems to be trying to creepily make out with his wife… while she's actively pushing in labor. Then later, in a distressing "love" scene, he looks like someone who has never had consensual sex with a partner before; I know the film is going for emotional rawness, but it just looks like assault. Bottom line, I have no idea what he's doing in this movie. (And I guess I don't care what he's doing, as long as it's not another Indiana Jones movie.)
BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS:
SHOULD WIN: Yuh-jung Youn (Minari) WILL WIN: Yuh-jung Youn (Minari) GLORIOUSLY OMITTED: Nicole Kidman (The Prom) INGLORIOUSLY SNUBBED: Ellen Burstyn (Pieces Of A Woman)
Oh, sweet revenge. Don't you just love a rematch? It was just two short years ago when Olivia Colman, in a flabbergasting upset, tearfully apologized to presumptive victor Glenn Close in her acceptance speech. (…Or did she condescendingly mock her? We can't be sure about anything in that speech.) Now they are both nominated again -- Colman for The Father, Close for Hillbilly Elegy -- and the bad blood between them couldn't be boiling hotter. Since there are no nominee lunches or in-person media parades this year, I'm assuming they drunk-Zoom each other at all hours and call one another every cruel British and American curse word in the book. Colman even reportedly tweeted, "Glenn, this will be your Hillbilly Elegy: You never won a dang Oscar." Nasty stuff, but nothing unusual during campaign season. Colman is facing a tough challenge (besides playing a woman whose father is in the grips dementia). Voters will be hard-pressed to hand her a victory again so soon (and without any losses). Additionally, she didn't even get nominated for a BAFTA award -- the British Oscar-equivalent -- on her home turf (and they nominate six actors in each category). (But, she would be quick to point out, Close didn't either.) All the talk around The Father is about Anthony Hopkins. Colman is facing extremely long odds.
Which seems to perfectly set up Close to swoop in for the kill. Six months ago, on paper this seemed like a slam dunk. The word was that Hillbilly Elegy featured two of the losing-est actors (Close and Amy Adams) in transformative roles in a heart-wrenching adaptation of a successful book. It was going to exorcise the demons for both of them. Then the movie debuted. And the response was lukewarm. But then the response to the response was harsh. People hated the movie, hated the performances, and hated the participants for shilling shameless Oscar bait. (If you think there's a different kind of Oscar bait, I'm afraid you haven't been paying attention.) The film was weirdly derided as political, and faced a sort of anti-Trump backlash (which I don't understand, considering the movie takes place in the 1990s and early 2010s, when Trump was just known for being an inept USFL football owner and a silly reality-TV host). Entertainment Weekly actually used these words in a single sentence to describe the film: "ham-handed", "smug", "Appalachian poverty porn", and "moralizing soap opera". (I guess people felt about this film the way I felt about A Star Is Born.) And no, the movie is not great; it fades soon after the credits roll. But Close is compelling; at the very least, she's working her tail off. (If you think she's just hamming it up in drag, stay tuned for the end-credits images of the real Mamaw. It's uncanny.) I think the voters really want her to win (but I thought the same thing two years ago). The question is: Do they want her to win for this movie? The answer increasingly seems to be No. The general feeling (which I agree with) is that the role feels a little lacking, and below Close's other lauded performances. People realize that if she wins, it may get dismissed as being a flimsy career-achievement award, which would tarnish it.
So, which one will claim victory this time, leaving the other groveling at her feet, Colman or Close? Neither, it turns out. In a shocking turn of events, Yuh-jung Youn has emerged as a favorite over both of them. (Fortunately, she's blocked Colman and Close on Zoom.) Calling Youn the heart of Minari would be trite. She is, but she's much more than that. She's the conduit for connection: to the children, between the parents, and to the audience. Before her arrival, it feels like there's something missing. (The young son has a heart condition, is constantly chugging Mountain Dew, and is hiding his wet underpants. And the dad thinks he doesn't need a babysitter?) It's when Youn enters the film that the film excels, and we start to feel like part of the family. She also challenges our (and her grandson's) ideas of what a grandmother is (including possibly having magical healing superpowers). A lot of people are looking for a way to reward this film, and this category is its best chance. Heck, even if voters only hear Youn's one line of English dialogue ("Ding-dong broken!" -- referring to her grandson's wiener), that could be enough to win.
Maybe the most curious nomination is for Maria Bakalova, starring in Borat Subsequent Moviefilm as the notorious Kazakh's daughter. A lot of things in the past year would have been impossible to predict, but an unknown Bulgarian actress stealing the spotlight and getting an Oscar nomination for a surprise-release Borat sequel would have to be near the top. And she's actually the only one in this category who's managed to score a nomination from every major organization. She won't win, but her performance (and memes) may live on the longest.
I must be missing something in Mank. (Granted, I haven't watched it the requisite four times in order to truly appreciate it, according to the Fincherists.) But I just don't understand what the fuss is about with Amanda Seyfried. She certainly plays her part well (as Marion Davies, the illicit love interest of William Randolph Hearst and the platonic love interest of Herman Mankiewicz), but I don't see how she elevates it or brings anything extraordinary to it. Her character plays a pivotal role in Citizen Kane (Davies was the inspiration for Kane's second wife), and I presume she's supposed to play a pivotal role in Mank's literary epiphany, but I fail to understand why. (Or maybe I failed to understand her Brooklyn accent.) But more than that, her narrative thread seems distressingly incomplete. She appears to be set up for a meaty final scene, but then her character simply exits, leaving Mankiewicz (and me) baffled. I've been more impressed by her work in other movies, like First Reformed. Of course, perhaps the most significant implication of Seyfried's nomination: Two of the Plastics now have Oscar nominations. (Gretchen, stop trying to make an Oscar nomination happen. It's not going to happen!)
Just in case there was any confusion, 88-year-old Ellen Burstyn is here to let us know she can still bring the thunder. Pieces Of A Woman is a mess, and her character is dubious, but she gets one powerhouse speech to shine and (somewhat) anchor the movie -- a declaration of strength, resilience, and survival. And she delivers a two-handed, rim-hanging, backboard-shattering jam. Oh, right, there's the woman who scored an Oscar, plus four other nominations, in a 9-year span in the 1970s. And who's been an Emmy fixture the past 15 years. And who has four more movies already in the works. Just another not-so-gentle reminder that she's one of the great actors of her generation. (Honorable Mentions go to The United States Vs. Billie Holiday's Da'Vine Joy Randolph, who continues her scene-stealing ways after Office Christmas Party and Dolemite Is My Name; and Dominique Fishback, whose performance adds emotional heft to Judas And The Black Messiah.)
BEST DIRECTOR:
SHOULD WIN: Chloé Zhao (Nomadland) WILL WIN: Chloé Zhao (Nomadland) GLORIOUSLY OMITTED: Ryan Murphy (The Prom) INGLORIOUSLY SNUBBED: Christopher Nolan (Tenet)
The second-most-certain thing this year is Chloé Zhao winning Best Director for Nomadland. She's dominated the narrative and the awards circuit this year; nobody else is close. In fact, she might win four Oscars, which would be a record for one person with a single film. (In 1954, Walt Disney was a quadruple winner for four different movies… but do short films really count?) Odds are that she'll win three, but if she wins Best Editing early in the night, the record will be hers. Historically joined at the hip, Best Director and Best Picture have surprisingly been split between different movies several times in recent years. The voters will align them this year, but I'm going to malign them. (Disalign? Unalign? Who am I kidding, I will malign them too.) As tepid as I am on Nomadland for Picture, Zhao is my Director choice. She is clearly a masterful artist and impressionistic storyteller. But more than that, she's able to conjure a mood and state of mind with her pseudo-documentary hybrid style. She gets us to feel what the character is feeling and put us right in the environment -- and makes it seem effortless. The film's long, languid takes allow us to breathe the air, drink in the scene, and live in the moment, unhurried. Zhao augments the nomadic quality of the film in every shot. But (oh, you knew there was a 'but'), on the down side, I also find the style to be a bit tedious and overdrawn at times. Because of my lack of investment, the film often struggles to keep my attention, or more accurately, my curiosity. And despite the film being touted as a tale of community and interconnectedness, it mostly suggests to me (via the main character) feelings of pain, loneliness, coldness, and sadness. But ultimately, I think those things speak more to the story than the directing. This will doubtless be a crowning a achievement for Zhao, but I'm more excited to see what the future will bring, and what she can do for a story that I'm invested in.
I was really close to picking Lee Isaac Chung for my Should Win, for his rich, captivating film, Minari. (Really close. You, the fortunate, insulated reader, will never truly know how much I agonize over this. Some suffer for art, I suffer for unsolicited criticism.) Honestly, I was tempted to give Chung a clean sweep of Picture, Director, and Screenplay; but instead I've opted to spread them around (I can play Academy politics all by myself). So many of the qualities of Zhao's film are present in Chung's film as well; his toolbox is just as full and varied. His quiet, atmospheric shots are unburdened by haste yet always nudging the story ahead. Chung draws us in, as another member of the Yi family, our hopes rising and falling with each challenge and trifle (and sexed chick) they face. There's a real confidence in his style; he knows how to best engage the audience for the specific journey. For me though, what I appreciate most is the warmth of his filmmaking; while the story has tribulations, the film itself is compassionate, never harsh or aggressive. That stands in stark contrast to Nomadland; the palette is one of the main things that sets them apart. Chung also scored points by showcasing the best accessory on the virtual Golden Globes telecast: a ridiculously adorable child. (Was that his own kid, or a rental? Only his publicist knows for sure.) Careful, I might accidentally talk myself into flipping my pick to Chung.
This was supposed to be his year. Goddammit, this was supposed to be his year! That was the sentiment from cinephiles all over the internet this year. Throw a rock in any direction and you'll hit a podcaster (and possibly me) ranting about how David Fincher was robbed in 2011 when he lost Best Director for The Social Network to Tom Hooper and The King's Speech. (Was the Academy justified? Since then, Fincher landed a third Oscar nomination, fourth Golden Globe nomination, and two Emmy wins; Hooper directed Cats.) In early winter, the pieces seemed to be lining up for a Fincher victory with Mank: a big, mainstream, Hollywood-y underdog story; an ode to the most revered film of all time, Citizen Kane; a scenery-chewing performance from beloved thesp Gary Oldman; a film that was more accessible (read: less weird and violent) than most of his other fare; and a passion project that he had been developing for decades, written by his late father. The only question was not whether the film could win all the Oscars, but whether it could cure pediatric cancer or pilot a rocket to Jupiter. But that was 2020… and we all know how that year went. Maybe it's the fatigue caused by the prolonged award campaign season, maybe it's the lack of theaters that would have showcased his visual marvel, or maybe it's the fact that the film didn't quiiiiiiite live up to the hype, but one thing is clear: Fincher is out of the race. I'll say what a lot of the other film snobs won't: This is probably not the film we want Fincher to win for anyway. We want him to win for something sharper, weirder, more incisive, and more upsetting; in short, something more Fincher-ish. Mank is fantastic, to be sure; and in (mostly) pulling it off, Fincher demonstrates his mastery of historical and contemporary cinema. But the hiccups are puzzling. The film is structured like Citizen Kane itself, which makes it at times equally difficult to engage in; but while Kane's flashbacks feel natural, a handful of Mank's feel shoehorned. The dialogue is in the style -- but not the pace -- of hard-boiled 1940s films, which alone is a recipe for difficult viewing; further peppering every retort with unnatural irony makes for wit but not necessarily comprehension. The Kane-esque echo effect doesn't help; neither do subtitles. (I tried.) While it turns out that it's not supposed to be his Oscar year after all, I commend Fincher on an effort like this -- the singular vision, the vigor, the risk -- even when I don't necessarily love the movie or connect with it. We need his art, we need his beautiful mess. (But next time maybe throw in a grisly murder, perverted romance, or crippling heartbreak… and acquire a charming child for the awards telecast.)
Emerald Fennell impressively scored a nomination for her first feature film, Promising Young Woman, an inventive genre-mashup of a Rape Revenge movie -- a new spin on a 1970s grindhouse staple. Like a lot of people, I don't quite know what to make of the movie (I don't think I've ever actually seen a Rape Revenge movie… though I've seen plenty of Dognapping Revenge movies). It's a film that could go badly a thousand different ways, but Fennell makes choices that keep it fresh and thoroughly watchable. The primary word that comes to mind is 'subversive'. From the candy coloring to the pop music to the meet-cute to the campy suspense, she toys with convention at every turn (in some cases more effectively than others). Even the support casting -- the kooky, on-the-nose (or 180-flipped) cameos spice up the movie, but also tend to undermine it and give it a B-movie vibe. (Do we really need Jennifer Coolidge and Max Greenfield doing what they do best, but not as well as they usually do it? Probably not. Do they make me chuckle? Yes.) The result is an oddly entertaining movie on a subject that is anything but. The patina of playfulness is helpful; if it was an avalanche of distressing, horrifying scenes, it could be a tortuous watch. All in all, it might be the most enjoyable Rape Revenge movie you'll ever see.
Perhaps the biggest surprise nominee in any category is Thomas Vinterberg, for the Danish film Another Round. (The lion's share of the Oscar buzz had been for star Mads Mikkelsen; the film is also up for Best International film.) This movie is in the grand tradition of celebrating alcohol because excessive drinking is awesome. And the Academy has recognized Vinterberg because he has so astutely captured how booze is a tasty balm for every wound -- an ancient and failsafe key to enlightenment and inner peace. Wait, what's that? I'm sorry… I'm being told that this movie is actually a cautionary tale. Hmmm. I guess I should have watched it sober. In light of that, I suppose the film is an interesting examination of middle-aged ennui and the tendency to overlook that which is right in front of you. (Anyone that has gotten this far in the article knows exactly what ennui is, and should have overlooked what was right in front of them.) It's also an unintentionally apt allegory for pandemic life: When it started, we began drinking a bit at home, enjoying Zoom happy hours, and generally having a good time; pretty soon we were day-drinking out of sheer boredom, trying to teach our home-schooled kids long division while buzzed, and it got very sad and depressing; now we're all pretty much ready to jump off the pier. In general, I like the film (though I prefer my mid-life drinking crises more in the mold of Old School), but the story and arc are fairly telegraphed. You mean their problems can't be fixed by increased alcohol consumption? The more you drink, the harder it is to control? Drinking at work as a teacher around minors might go awry? Instead of booze, have they tried rest, exercise, healthy eating, or appreciating the good things in their lives? (Who I am kidding, those are a waste of time.) Ultimately, there are several directors I would have chosen over Vinterberg (Christopher Nolan for Tenet, George C. Wolfe for Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, and Florian Zeller for The Father come to mind), but it's interesting to see the continuing trend of nominating non-American filmmakers in this category, as the Directors' branch of the Academy becomes increasingly international.
I want to talk about the ending of Another Round for a moment. If you didn't see the movie (and I'm betting you didn't), just skip this paragraph. Most of the reviews I've read online interpret the ending as a hopeful, happy one. I think that's crazy. The ending is a Trojan horse. It looks joyful, but just underneath lies tragedy: The trio resume drinking after they've seemingly hit rock bottom and lost their best friend to booze; they believe they're in control and having a good time when really they're spiraling into chaos; they think they've found a balance, when they're actually sliding endlessly further into alcoholism. They don't realize that they cannot enjoy life sober. I think one of the reasons why I like the movie so much is that it masks that ending as a "happy" one, much the way a drinker would see it when they don't realize there's a problem. The ending is denial. A lot of people have seen the final scene as uplifting and life-affirming (even Vinterberg seems to say this in interviews, which is puzzling), that the friends have come to terms with their drinking, and have found a way to drink in moderation and still invigorate their lives and celebrate the small things. I don't understand that take at all. I would buy it if they had found a way to celebrate life while sober. Instead, I think it's the surest sign that they are destroying their lives, because they don't even realize it's happening. It's the 'darkest timeline'. They ask themselves the wrong question, "What would Tommy do?", instead of "What would Tommy want us to do?", and we know exactly what Tommy would do because we see him drink himself to death. Martin has gotten a reconciliatory text from his wife, but just as he's about to go to her, he instead joins the party, quickly gets plastered, and literally goes off the deep end. What's truly heartbreaking is seeing that they've (gleefully and unknowingly) perpetuated the cycle, having encouraged the next generation to drink in order to cope and be "awakened to life". I think there are hints in the final song lyrics ("What a Life") and the movie's poster (the image of Mikkelsen recklessly chugging champagne in a blurry stupor is from the final scene). To me, the seemingly exuberant ending is a fallacy… and utterly tragic.
In a surprise move that everyone saw coming, I'm naming Christopher Nolan as my Snubbed choice, for his twisty, backwards-y spectacle, Tenet. Did I understand the movie? Of course. Oh, you didn't? Dummy.
BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY:
SHOULD WIN: Derek Cianfrance, Abraham Marder, Darius Marder (Sound Of Metal) WILL WIN: Emerald Fennell (Promising Young Woman) GLORIOUSLY OMITTED: Aaron Abrams, Brendan Gall (The Lovebirds) INGLORIOUSLY SNUBBED: Sam Levinson (Malcolm And Marie)
Did his name have to be Ryan? No, that wasn't my biggest takeaway from the script for Emerald Fennell's Promising Young Woman. But it was a big one. As Carey Mulligan's chances fade a bit, Screenplay is the movie's strongest chance to strike gold, making a strong run in the precursory awards. The ending of the film has been pretty divisive, but I like that it's completely unexpected. Maybe it's contrived, but it's what makes the movie memorable for me, and separates it from other revenge thrillers. Or maybe it's inevitable, given the themes of the movie and the character pursuing her mission past the point of no return. Either way, did his name have to be Ryan? Unless Fennell's role (she's an actress, too) as Camilla Parker Bowles on The Crown accidentally embroils her in recent royal family controversies, she should be collecting this award on Oscar night.
Most of the praise for Sound Of Metal has been specifically for its sound design. But it starts with the script (written by director Darius Marder, along with Derek Cianfrance and Abraham Marder), which is the blueprint for the sound and experience of the movie. And it's my pick (by a hair) for best screenplay of the year. It has -- hey, whaddya know! -- an actual narrative, with a main character who has an objective and opposition. It's always impressive to me when a story has very little I can directly relate to, but it still manages to resonate, and strikes a tone that feels real. I also appreciate the skill in the writing -- it's minimalistic, yet thorough in the ways that matter. The film doesn't explain a lot or give us much exposition -- it doesn't lean on voice-over, window characters, or monologues. It's quiet. Which may seem obvious considering it's about a man losing his hearing, but even the man himself and the real world he lives in have a muted vibe (despite his mind being anything but calm). The film has also been lauded for its authentic portrayal of deaf people… but not for its authentic portrayal of audiologists. (I mean, how bad is Ruben's audiologist consultation, that he is in no way prepared for how things would sound after getting cochlear implants? I get more information from my dentist when getting a cavity filled.) Also: What does metal sound like? I still don't know.
Aaron Sorkin would seem like the obvious pick here, for The Trial Of The Chicago 7. It's the kind of sonorous, social-consciousness word-porn we've come to love and expect from him. But he's already got an Oscar (though most people assume he has three), and the fight-the-system theme isn't exactly unique to his script this year. Not surprisingly, the movie feels like a mash-up of The West Wing and A Few Good Men, complete with humorous exchanges of smug cleverness, heart-warming declarations of overly-simplified principle, and his own trademark Sorkin-esque version of facts. Sure, the story of the Chicago 7 is intriguing, but would I rather watch a movie about a Chicago 7-Eleven? It's tempting…
I've previously talked about the reasons I appreciated Minari so much (written by director Lee Isaac Chung). A lot of the sweetness of the film is present in the screenplay. He cleverly tells much of the story through the eyes of a 7-year-old boy, so it's told less fact-by-fact, and more through the filter of a child's memory. (Chung based the screenplay somewhat on his own experiences growing up.) Charming as it is, I can't help but view it through the filter of a parent's anxiety: 1) Is moving across the country to live in a small town where you don't know anyone, living in a trailer, and starting a farm with zero experience the best way to solve marital problems? 2) One of the main promotional photos for the movie is a of the little boy holding a stick. Am I crazy, or is that the same stick that the father was going to use to beat the boy when he disobeyed? Did the marketing person keep their job after that? 3) The friend's deadbeat dad leaves the kids alone overnight, presumably out carousing and drinking, then shows up at breakfast hammered, saying, "Tell your mom I was here all night." How many times can you get away with that? 4) When the boy cuts his foot, is it bad that I did not think of the wound or his safety, but about the blood getting on the carpet? 5) Why aren't these kids in school??
Perhaps the script (and movie) with the biggest head of steam coming into awards night is Judas And The Black Messiah, a late entry that has been picking up acolytes left and right. The film has been lauded for its approach to the story of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton -- by telling it as a gritty, 70s-style, cat-and-mouse thriller, from the perspective of the FBI informant sent to help stop him. Director Shaka King (who wrote the script with Will Berson, based on ideas from the Lucas Brothers) has said that structure, instead of a more traditional biopic style, helped get it made by a studio. Despite the inevitability of the ending, the dramatic conflict and ferocity of the performances make for a satisfyingly tense ride.
This is going to come back to bite me, but my snubbed pick is Malcolm And Marie (or, as it should have been called, Things You Shouldn't Say To Your Girlfriend At 2 AM When You're Drunk And She's In A Bad Mood). It's like a really long Bad Idea Jeans commercial. Now, I'm not necessarily recommending this movie. You should know that most critics and regular people hate it. It's two hours of a couple arguing. It's a rough ride. It's indulgent, overwrought, and well, chock-full of mental and emotional abuse. But (stay with me here), if you can get past all that, those elements have a purpose, and there is a point to the film. I think the key is that it's not intended to be literal. It's allegorical for how we talk to ourselves -- the internal conflict we have, when we wrestle with ideas that are hard to reconcile. It's also lyrical; there's an elegance in how the characters spew eloquent vitriol at each other and rhapsodize (okay, rant) about some opinions that seem dead-on and others that seem wildly inaccurate. In some ways, the words seem like the most important thing; but in other ways, I think the movie could work as a silent film. (Either way, it's inventive: It was the first major film to shoot completely during the pandemic, so it takes place in a single home, with 2 actors, in more-or-less real time.) Writer/director Sam Levinson poses interesting questions about storytelling and authorship: Sure, write what you know; but also, and maybe more interestingly, try to write (and learn) about what you don't know. (Case in point: I don’t really have any experience or expertise about the Oscars, yet here I am.) Levinson has gotten a lot of criticism for what appears to be his point of view. I think that's fair, but I also disagree. I believe it's a bit of a misdirection. I think he believes in both sides of the argument; he's been the irrational, emotional one, and the cool, calculating one. The characters are halves to a whole. There's also the frustration with how the couple end up. The film is ambiguous, but audiences seem to think they stay together. I think the girlfriend actually decides before the movie starts that she's leaving him, and this is their breakup. That's why she lets him say all the horrible things he does, because she knows he has to get it out -- it affirms what she already knows, and reinforces her decision. Did I sell you on the movie yet? No? Well, how about this: It's the best autobiographical movie that Burton and Taylor never made.
As an honorable mention, it would have been a nice story had Mank been nominated here, as it was written by David Fincher's father, Jack Fincher, over two decades ago. The elder Fincher was a life-long newspaper man, who had an affinity for 1930s/1940s cinema, a strong knowledge of Herman Mankiewicz, and a fascination with a famously-dissenting Pauline Kael article that disparaged Orson Welles's contributions to the Citizen Kane screenplay. David Fincher had hoped to get his passion project off the ground in the 90s, but hasn't been able to until now. A nomination would have been a touching tribute to his father, who died in 2003. (Another interesting connection: John Mankiewicz, Herman Mankiewicz's grandson, was an executive producer on David Fincher's House Of Cards.) Despite my frustrations with the overall movie, the script is slick, and analyzes some intriguing inside-the-snowglobe aspects of Citizen Kane. It's a crackling, showy piece that jauntily goes out of its way to flaunt its writerliness. (For you keen-eyed writers out there, you'll notice I just made up the word 'writerliness'.) It doesn’t necessarily require you to believe that Citizen Kane is the greatest film ever made, but a healthy sense of awe doesn’t hurt. (It also helps to have a working knowledge of the film's lore, pre-WWII Hollywood, and 1930s -- or some would say, 2020s -- California politics.) The script simultaneously adores and gives a middle finger to Hollywood. Isn’t that what art is supposed to do? (That's not a rhetorical question. I'm actually asking if art is supposed to do that. Because I don't know.)
I've picked The Lovebirds as my Gloriously Omitted choice, not because it's a bad movie, but because it's a missed opportunity. It should have been amazing. The premise, the trailer, the choice of leads, and the chemistry are all fantastic, and set lofty expectations. But the movie itself is just… underwhelming. Maybe hopes were too high, but it's not as clever, tight, or funny as I wanted it to be. The problem isn't the actors -- Issa Rae truly holds the screen, and Kumail Nanjiani is naturally funny (though his character doesn't stray far from previous ones). I think it's the script (from Aaron Abrams and Brendan Gall), which feels rushed and half-baked, like a collection of sketch ideas. It's as if the screenplay left chunks blank, with a note saying, "The actors will figure out something funny on set." For these actors, I'd rather see a taut thriller story, and let them imbue it with humor and humanity. Or better yet, let Rae and Nanjiani write it themselves next time.
BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY:
SHOULD WIN: Christopher Hampton, Florian Zeller (The Father) WILL WIN: Chloé Zhao (Nomadland) GLORIOUSLY OMITTED: Jane Goldman, Joe Shrapnel, Anna Waterhouse (Rebecca) INGLORIOUSLY SNUBBED: Ruben Santiago-Hudson (Ma Rainey's Black Bottom)
Adapted Screenplay is going to get swept up in the Nomadland tidal wave on Oscar night, but to me it's probably the film's weakest element. I've talked about my lack of connection to the story. I understand the opinion that it's resonant, but is it revelatory? I can certainly see how it would strike a stronger chord during the pandemic, when we are all isolated; it makes the main character's loneliness feel more real. We've all been living in Nomadland, and whether it's David Strathairn shattering our favorite plates, or our kids shattering our iPad, we're just about at wit's end. But Chloé Zhao's script also plays up the theme of community and interconnectedness, and I didn't really feel that. The main character seems to be closing herself off from connection (though the ending suggests a change that we never actually get to see). A red flag is a movie description that says, "It asks more questions than it answers." Ugh, that's tough. For me, narrative is king. I understand that the movie is literally about a drifter with no plan, and the structure of the film is supposed to make you feel unmoored, but a little plot direction would be nice. Then there's the emotional climax, when Bob the Nomad Guru comes to the rescue to explain the whole theme. He tells Frances McDormand (but really, us) that he gets through grief by helping other people: "For a long time, every day was, How can I be alive on this earth when he’s not? And I didn’t have an answer. But I realized I could honor him by serving people. It gives me a reason to go through the day. Some days that's all I've got." Hmmm, where I have I seen that exact sentiment expressed before? Oh yeah, an award-winning short film called Through The Trees. (Available now, for free on YouTube.)
Dementia Mystery Thriller… is that a movie genre? Well, it might be, after success of The Father (written by Christopher Hampton and Florian Zeller, adapted from Zeller's Tony-winning play). "Exciting" is hardly the word I would use to describe the horrible crumbling of the mind that is dementia, but in this movie, it weirdly fits. The film has a way of presenting the disorder in a unique manner, that goes a long way in conveying the helplessness and frustration of the victim. With copycat movies inevitable, I can almost see Christopher Nolan's version now: Demento, where a mumbling Tom Hardy (unrecognizable under heavy old-man makeup) kills his caregiver twice because he can't remember if he already killed her… or her identical twin. The big twist comes when he discovers whether he killed them in the past, or in the future, or if he's remembering the memory of someone else who killed them. The scenes of the movie play in a different random order every time, and the only score is the constant deafening sound of the old man's heartbeat. Marion Cotillard plays the twins -- apparently the only females in the universe -- using whatever accent she feels like, because she has limited, unrealistic dialogue, and has no compelling story or agency, or any useful traits for an actress whatsoever. Hardy's son may or may not be a British crime lord or an undercover MI6 agent, played by Michael Caine (digitally de-aged to look the age that Hardy actually is). An emaciated Christian Bale, who manages to lose 3 inches of height for the role, makes a cameo as Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Revolutionary practical effects include a life-size recreation of Westminster Abbey inside a zero-gravity chamber, for one massively-complicated but forgettable 5-second shot. It will only cost $723 million, and will go straight to HBO Max. I will name it the best film of 2022.
I may be picking The Father, but I'm rooting for The White Tiger, written and directed by Ramin Bahrani. Set in India in the recent past, it's a striking, chilling tale of what men may be willing to do (or forced to do) to escape poverty. Bahrani constructs a fiery examination of themes that never get old: power vs. agency, freedom vs. choice, complicity vs. culpability. His script uses a lot of devices that shouldn't work: excessive, expository voice-over; explicitly-stated metaphors; speaking directly to the audience; and on-the-nose correlations to current times. But the story and acting are strong enough to make these feel integral. Given the themes and foreign setting, it has the misfortune (or great fortune) of being an easy comparison to Parasite, last year's Oscar grand prize winner. But I find The White Tiger far more accessible and scrutable than Parasite (maybe partly due to the devices I mentioned). A win here would be a welcome surprise. By the way, Bahrani's first Oscar nomination is an interesting footnote to Hollywood lore: In the 2014 Roger Ebert documentary Life Itself, we learn that Ebert was given a legendary token by Laura Dern -- a puzzle that had been passed on from several film icons, with the understanding that each would pass it on to someone truly deserving. Dern had gotten it from revered acting teacher Lee Strasberg, and it originated when Alfred Hitchcock gave it to Marilyn Monroe years before. And now Ebert was giving it to Bahrani. 60 years of movie history, from Hitchcock to Bahrani, and into the future. (Good thing it's not at my house, we would have lost several pieces by now.)
Four of the most famous and popular men in the country walk into a bar… so shouldn't the patrons be freaking out more? One Night In Miami plays out a very intriguing hypothetical scenario: When Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, Jim Brown, and Sam Cooke all met one night in 1964, what did they talk about? The compelling script (by Kemp Powers, based on his own play) and naturalistic direction (by Regina King) make for a highly enjoyable think-piece and character study. It's a daunting task, to say the least: Not only are they representing extremely visible and important figures, but two of the actors (Kingsley Ben-Adir as Malcolm X, Eli Goree as Ali) are reprising roles already played by Oscar-nominated performers (Denzel Washington, Will Smith) who may be more famous than the actual figures themselves. I guess my hang-up (besides the horrendous Johnny Carson impersonation) is, what are the stakes? Historically, we know the stakes for these four people, in the larger context of their lives and the civil rights movement. But in the film itself, in that single night, for these specific characterizations, what are the stakes? What are they each looking for that evening? I think the movie doesn't fully address this, structurally. Ultimately, due to their fame, we know where the characters' lives go from here -- how it "ends". While that makes it interesting culturally, it feels like it puts a ceiling on the movie in a way, like it's holding something back. With these outsized characters, plot-wise, I wanted a little bit more.
Released in October with almost no warning, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm either single-handedly swung the presidential election, or had no absolutely no impact whatsoever, depending on who you ask. It's a rare feat for an original movie and its sequel to both score Oscar nominations for screenplay; I can't think of another time it's ever happened for a comedy. The fact that it's even under consideration -- given its improvisational nature and whopping nine (nine!) screenwriters (I'm not going to name them all, I'm trying to keep this article brief) -- is fairly astonishing. Even more baffling still, it's been placed in the Adapted category instead of Original. (Pesky Academy rules: Any sequel is automatically defined as an adaptation of the original.) The movie itself is unfortunately a shell of the unrelentingly funny original (Sacha Baron Cohen looks more like a middle-aged man doing a mediocre Borat impression at this point). When the big night arrives, the film will either single-handedly swing the Oscar vote, or have absolutely no impact whatsoever, depending on who you ask.
One of the biggest surprises on nomination day was the exclusion of Ma Rainey's Black Bottom from Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay, assumed to be a lock in both categories. It was even thought to contend with Nomadland in this category (it would have gotten my vote, had they asked me). I think it was diminished by the perception of being a fairly straight recreation of August Wilson's play, which is a shame. The film version (written by Ruben Santiago-Hudson) makes wonderful use of the physical space, the confinement, the claustrophobia. And I'd say the movie feels more like an album than a play -- a collection of "songs" (monologues, exchanges, and actual songs), each with its own rhythm, beat, lyrics, and theme, but coming together as a cohesive piece. The composition is effective; it draws you in the way the best albums do, and challenges your brain to think one thing while your heart feels something else. (My only complaint is that I wanted more of Viola Davis and Chadwick Boseman together! Their personalities are electric, and their personas overtake the room. Their conflict is brief (it mostly flows over to conflicts with other characters), and I really wanted to see them alone, head-to-head and unbridled. I realize their distance is purposeful, and important thematically, but damn, it could have been a showdown for the ages. Just another reason to wonder… What might have been?)
The remake of Rebecca was written by a few people, including Joe Shrapnel, whose name may have been a bad harbinger for what was to become of this script. Keep it simple: Please leave Hitchcock alone.
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dearorpheus · 5 years ago
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hello, hello. i'm fascinated by horror but can never watch as much as i want bc of fear! this is so silly, but how do you watch so much horror? do you stifle fear, face it, or let yourself feel it thru & thru?
hello, lovely! this isn’t silly at all! it’s v relevant, of course. 
i definitely, definitely don’t stifle it. i’ve always accommodated fear. for me, it’s one of those essential feelings that i chase after. fear cracks open the shell; it props open the door, lets in the draught, the night air. i enjoy the sensation and have come to crave the involuntary shiver that follows when i allow myself to overstep the confines of normalcy and enter into the horrific, the tenebrous, the other. similarly, and, like tragedy, horror—that fear—acts as a vehicle for knowing myself; as anne carson said, “you sacrifice [the actors] to action. and this sacrifice is a mode of deepest intimacy of you with your own life.” these characters, our proxies, explore our innermost perversities, our most obscure and isolating thoughts. horror, to me, has always been a revelation. 
that said! i grew up with a somewhat superstitious mother, and with many stories about the occult, so you would be correct in supposing that paranormal horror can sometimes trigger a less savoury experience of fear for me—restless nights, paranoia. in this, i think i relate to your situation. i am slowly working through it, confronting it, but not with the mind of “besting”/“overcoming” the fear, or working myself into a position where i might swallow it without issue—it seems a shame to me to take a strong, pure, genuine emotion like that and muzzle it. if life, at its baseline, is like the furred, numb spot on your tongue after you’ve burnt it on too-hot tea, the potency of that emotion is a long-awaited burst of flavour; a stab at monotony, at sterilised, generic, formulaic cinema. this has… maybe digressed into a polemic. but what i’m saying is i revel in being scared! our fairy tales, our oral traditions, spooky stories around a campfire—there’s a thrill, there’s flushed skin—we have always gravitated towards it. 
if you experience a debilitating amount of fear when watching horror movies, i would recommend starting with a weaker distillation—perhaps some classics? the creature from the black lagoon (1954), frankenstein (1931), night of the living dead (1968), psycho (1960). or any older films in the genre, really: i recently watched the pit and the pendulum (1961) and the company of wolves (1984) and thought them quite tame!you could try some films that aren’t horror at all but are still “scary”. i’m thinking of films like lost highway (1997) and mulholland drive (2001), or the pale man scene from pan’s labyrinth (2006).or perhaps some less-scary but still contemporary “horror” films? crimson peak (2015), only lovers left alive (2013), let the right one in (2008), mandy (2018), the neon demon (2016). i think most of 80s horror is too dated to be truly fear-inducing now. the scene in nightmare on elm street (1984) where they (for the most part) introduce freddy made me laugh so much when i first saw it bc he has extend-o arms and he runs after his victim like a drunk uncle chasing after his niece at a family barbecue. 
that said, i still hesitate with recommendations bc i recognise that everybody’s fear thresholds differ radically. it also bears mentioning that the more you watch, the higher your tolerance will become. stalwart horror fans “have a hard time finding a really nerve-rattling movie” bc experience tends to be the enemy of true terror.i didn’t find it (2018) scary in the slightest but i know it would terrify my sister. texas chainsaw massacre (1974), scream (1996), get out (2017), us (2019), raw (2016), the vvitch (2015), alien (1979), hush (2016), jennifer’s body (2009), a girl walks home alone at night (2014), jurassic park (1993), jaws (1975), you’re next (2011)—I wouldn’t say any of those are “scary” per-say; perhaps at turns disturbing or gory, but not scary. but halloween (1978) definitely unnerved me, and i’ve spoken to people who think it’s the least scary of the 70s/80s horrors. it follows (2014), annihilation (2018), apostle (2018), under the skin (2013), hereditary (2018), the autopsy of jane doe (2016)… those are some films off the top of my head that have freaked me out in a way. 
most of all, give it a go if it intrigues you. try and enjoy the feeling of being truly scared in a completely safe environment—there aren’t many other ways to access that. if that won’t do, there’s a youtube channel called dead meat that does “kill counts” of films—the host, james, runs through the entire film, tallying the numbers. that’s a way for you to consume some of the more mainstream horror without the mounting tension. james’ girlfriend, chelsea, orchestrates the channel’s podcast, which i adore. 
i’m v excited by the prospect of you being fascinated by horror though… i really hope it all works out for you, however that may manifest
post note—here are some links orbiting the subject bc i love throwing resources around:“horror is not defined by what scares you”, angelica jade bastiénhow to make an effective horror moviemy childlike wonder every time guillermo del toro discusses the subject (x, x, x)
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Snippets on Theological Issues Pt. 1
Inspired by the Zondervan Counterpoints Series
Miraculous Gifts
I’m a continuationist, though I only particularly expect to see gifts when the church/individual needs to be doing something radical. The performance of gifts in churches in “holding patterns” is not expected by me. (And to be fair, sometimes churches in a given society need to be in holding patterns, not every church is the church in Corinth).    Church Growth
Generally not a fan. The Social Sciences are generally based on a non-Christian ideology and cannot be adapted by the Church without substantially subverting her message. (Aspects of the social sciences are cool and good, but the underlying presupposition is based upon assuming that the fallen world is the way the world actually is in an ontological sense; this is okay for handling pragmatic or day-to-day matters, but will result in the subversion of the church’s ability to genuinely condemn the world).  On the other hand, churches often use “tradition” as an excuse to not actually answer the questions that people are raising today. This is bad and a violation of the great commissions.  (Loudly answering the wrong questions is about as useless as softly answering (perhaps incorrectly) the right questions).  Apologetics
I think apologetics is useful when it focuses on diffusing particular arguments against Christian Faith, I don’t really think it is useful beyond that.  More particularly, I don’t think evidentialism works as a general model (because evidence is always in relation to given tradition of inquiry, there is no “neutral” evidence), and I don’t think presuppositionalism works either (because while God is in fact necessary for truth, in our intellects he is not, because our intellects cannot comprehend God and thus cannot rely upon him as a fundamental postulate in the way that the presuppositionalists would require; God stands at the end of the process of reasoning, wherein we recognize that the core ideas which we have been using all along only find their true meaning and source in him; but this is the opposite of presuppositional theory). The Reformed Epistemology position is probably the one that I’m closest too; but I don’t think foundationalism in the sense in which they work is terribly useful; our core concepts are inherited from the traditions in which we work, and while we have freedom to improvise within those traditions, we aren’t reliant upon some kind of foundational intuition in the way that the (limited) amount of reformed epistemology I’ve read implies.  (Instead, the sense in which we have a general revelation of God is due to things inherent to anything which could be called a language and linguistically structured desire/sense of self/being-in-the-world; these things guide us towards “general revelation”, not some mysterious intuition. (Though, I entirely confess perhaps that’s what the Reformed Epistemology school has been driving at, in which case I’m quite close to them; and I have enormous respect for them regardless).  Inerrancy
I accept that everything in the Bible is true in some sense, and is binding upon my thought and intellect. I cannot discard any part of the Bible as merely a product of its times, instead I must accept (and to a limit extent, join with) the long effort of my fellow Christians to understand the Bible as the Truth about the Word of God. 
At the level of the text: I accept that the final revisions of the tradition were divinely inspired, and that what they say is normative for Christian faith and practice. While it is not accurate to say God “said” every part of the Bible, he certainly has endorsed every part and said a great deal of it (most of the Prophetic books, most of the Pentateuch etc.) Basically some parts God said, other parts he edited, other parts he published (if we are using the modern publishing process as an analogy).  However, I also believe that what God is saying through the text usually is far more than what the original author was saying, and that there can be substantial tension with what the original author would have understood the text to mean. (But I think that about all texts; the original author and even the original community of interpretation do not necessarily exhaust or finally determine the meaning of a text; though their opinions are quite significant as they are the most fluent speakers of the idiom of a text [under normal circumstances]). However, God still chose this text as God’s text (in way not dissimilar to how he chose this people as God’s people) and therefore one must accept it as chosen by God and not something that can be ignored. So, while there can be tension between God’s intent and the author’s intent, there are limits to the sense in which there can be irreconcilable contradiction between the two.  Law and Gospel
The Law is a form of Gospel, the Gospel is a form of Law. The differences between them are based upon the ontological differences inaugurated by Christ’s Life/Death/Resurrection, and the resulting epistemological differences. 
(The Law kills only because the Law faces sin qua unredeemable and has to fight against it as an enemy; a contradiction only overcome by Christ who in being God could make those naturally enemies friends and children once more. But this is an ontological change, not merely an ethical or “conceptual” one).  The differences between the ethical norms of “the Law” and the ethical norms of “the Gospel” are grounded in this ontological difference. (And thus, some precepts of the Old Testament do not apply to Christians, or at least are not necessary for Gentile Christians). 
I also accept that the Church has the power to generate law, albeit the law that the Church generates is contingent and prudential, not necessarily true in all cases. (as all laws are)
The Law of the Church, to be legitimate, must also be grounded in the revelation of Christ and the new order of being he inaugurated. 
Sanctification
I have a sufficiently sacramental theory of redemption that most of the sanctification debates don’t really interest me.  I don’t really believe in a second work of the Holy Spirit (Other than, maybe Confirmation), I do believe that in every individual case of sin mature Christians can resist; but factually speaking due to corruptions of will or intellect patterns of sin tend to persist throughout the Christian life. (But I also believe in purgatory, so... I think everyone does get sanctified before heaven). 
Christian Spirituality
I don’t really understand what this means, but insofar as I do understand... I think each major doctrinal loci properly speaking is a source of deep existential satisfaction, along with the scriptures and the Church (understood to encompass both the living and the dead).  Both excessive individualism and excessive communalism will result in a failure to continue to seek God through Christ Jesus as the Center though, as all of these things only have coherence in that (and through our baptism).  Divine Providence
God’s causal activity is not in competition with creatures, and is ontologically an entirely different sort of thing. (So God “divinely” causing things never precludes a creature “creaturely” causing them). (See Tanner and Aquinas) [God of course can use divine causation to, in one way or another, cause things in a creaturely sense, such events are what we usually call miracles. But this is not God’s typical mode of causal relation to things].  Thus while God causes everything that occurs, that tells us very little about how God governs the world.  Otherwise I broadly accept a Molinist view: God chooses this world among other worlds he could have chosen to create. Since creating a world is, for God, a non-temporal event, he knows all that will happen in this world, but the things that happen are co-determined by the internal logic of this world (and indeed, God could not have created *this* world without creating *this* world with *this* internal logic). 
Eternal Security
I don’t really believe in this, other than in the sense that God’s creation of the world includes the creation of all who will be saved. However, individual persons accept and reject God’s grace, and thereby accept or reject salvation that is available to them; and their position can change over time.
The Problem of Canaan
The major problems in this text are resolved by recognizing that the reformulation in “genocidal” or “holy war” language is a polemical response to Assyrian theories of religious war, and is meant to indicate that God fights powerfully for his people as well.  The earlier layer of stories which the later author is adapting include elements which make it reasonably obvious imo (Such as Rahab, Gibeon, etc). that the actual conquest was not genocidal [and indeed, historically speaking probably resulted in the assimilation of many rural Canaanites as new tribes of Israel]. There is still some tensions (after all, God definitely endorses a war of conquest even if it was not historically genocidal, and is reformulated in more absolute terms later, and is apparently consenting to being used in what is functionally state propaganda.) But I do think that this is inherent to choosing to become a God to a particular people who exist in a particular place and time.  
(So I guess my view is a mixture of: the events didn’t happen in this way, and the primary point is not ‘God wants you to kill Canaanites” but rather “God has destroyed powerful enemies utterly in the past, much like these empires claim they can do; he can give us triumph over Assyria”. And then of course there are the spiritual and Christological readings which add even more depth.) 
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marginalgloss · 6 years ago
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stunned by coffee
Authentocrats: Culture, Politics and the New Seriousness is a new book by Joe Kennedy. It begins with recalling an incident from a few years ago, when Owen Smith, who was then regarded as a potential leader of the Labour party, made a bizarre comment about how 'frothy coffee' (cappuccino) was new to him in a small cafe in Wales. The author takes apart this remark with the grace of a surgeon. He explains how that area, like many others in the UK, had been shaped over generations by waves of Italian immigration, and that Smith’s remark was shaped out of ignorance with the intent of appealing to a vague notion of working class authenticity. For a certain kind of person this can be reduced to an exclamation over what Smith called 'posh biscuits and a little cup':
'He was not some member of the metropolitan elite, he was saying, unlike Corbyn: no, he was a real prole, stunned by coffee, dumbfounded by little biscuits. And yet anyone, by spending about twenty-five seconds on the internet, can tell that Smith is by background part of a liberal middle class, endowed with substantial cultural capital, and by profession — namely as a one-time PR consultant for a huge, European-based pharmaceuticals company — precisely the kind of person who could instantly pick a cappuccino out of a lineup of seven hundred ways of serving coffee.'
Smith is perhaps one of the softer targets of the book – the 'frothy coffee' remark was considered risible from the moment it was uttered – but this incident works well as one of the most absurd examples of a trend that's evident in the behaviour of almost every significant political and media figure in Britain. I was only surprised that the book doesn't spend much time on Nigel Farage, but perhaps he would require a volume all to himself. On the whole it's highly perspicacious, funny and true. It feels like a very modern blend of polemic, critical theory and memoir; a bit more rigorous than the average online opinion-haver, while revelling in a certain aggro vibe that leaves it lurking several steps away from academia.
Aside from the directly political angle, the book also goes off on several long digressions into the nature of authenticity in popular culture. The author allows himself a very long leash in these chapters, which range far and wide through literature, film and TV. Some of the examples seem more relevant than others; certainly I couldn't summarise now what point was trying to emerge about Peter Jackson and the Lord of the Rings movies. But I enjoyed the passages on Henry Green, who is still one of our most interesting and neglected post-war novelists. And there's some very good stuff here about the nineties in Britain, our long hangover from lad culture, and the uneasy relationship between Millennials and Gen Xers.
The thing about engaging so thoroughly with the question of authenticity in politics and culture is that it becomes difficult for the book to extricate itself from it. At times the theory here seems to be urging the reader to turn away from arguments about 'the kind of people' they see before them towards a kind of broad class-based solidarity, based on the idea that we all have more in common than what separates us. But at the same time, it can't quite set aside the language of 'reactionary traditionalism' that it spends so long lamenting elsewhere. Meaning still pivots on assumptions about things that belong and things that don't.
I like, for example, that the author lampoons the fact that 'the Times and the Telegraph both employ several writers whose job seems to involve little but acting as if the greatest social ills facing the UK in 2017 are the popularity of the avocado, the rise of craft beer and the ubiquity of beards.' This is true. It is a stupid tendency. We know this. But immediately after these lines, a whole crowd of other assumptions pile in:
'Such writers have an implied audience of comfortably-off professional people — generally men, given the masculinist tone of this writing — in their forties and early fifties who know, or think they know, what a “hipster” looks like and where they can be found. Indeed, the reason they are aware regarding the whereabouts of the people they believe are hipsters is that, frequently enough, they’re collecting rent from them.'
As drive-by humour, this kind of works. It's a passage which creates a whole little society of its own, in just two sentences. But we're supposed to take it more seriously than that. The problem is that it's rejected the character-based assumptions of the avocado/craft beer/beard-complainers, and replaced them with a set of its own. Not long after this, the author recounts a story from a friend who complains that their landlord turns up to carry out house inspections 'on a fucking Vespa'. By now we're a long way from frothy coffees, but the implication is surely that they didn't really belong on that scooter.
Another example. At one point the Labour MP Jess Phillips is cited as an example of someone who brandishes their working class credentials as part of their public persona; gleefully the author comes in with the left-field rejoinder that 'Phillips talks incessantly about her West Midlands upbringing whilst typically failing to note that it was entirely middle-class'. It may be true that her accent and her demeanour feed into our ideas about what a 'real' politician looks like, but to scrutinise her origins in this way is just playing the authentocrats at their own game. This kind of assessment requires the kind of snap-judgement of authenticity that the book spends so long bemoaning.
The book expends a great deal of energy in undermining the media-led construct of a homogenous majority of working class people whose 'legitimate concerns' include our nuclear deterrent, immigration, benefit fraud, etc. This is right, I think, and on that front the book is a strong and focussed corrective to that idea. But at the same time, there is a certain amount of eye-rolling at the idea that anyone could believe earnestly in these things. It's difficult to explain what I mean by this without falling into the same old trap: that to pretend to cater to 'legitimate concerns' is to manifest a secret contempt for the working class. To be clear, I've nothing at stake: I don't have to cater to anyone. I have no interest in listening to points of view I find immoral, and in most cases I'd much prefer if politicians were more open and principled about their disagreements.
The problem is that this book has nothing to say to anyone who might earnestly believe in some of the things it holds at arm's length. Should it? I don't know. Whether or not that's a problem for the reader probably depends on what they are expecting. There's not much in the way of solutions here. It takes a certain amount for granted from its audience: that the idea of a nuclear deterrent is oxymoronic; that immigration has brought vast benefits to this country, many of which are incalculable; that a Corbyn-led Labour party would in general be a highly progressive force for good in the world. And yes, these are all positions that I agree with – I'm not the one who needs convincing here. But Authentocrats left me with no idea of how one might go about talking to anyone who thinks differently.
At one point there's an anecdote about encountering a flyer in a pub, printed with some cringeworthy pro-English doggerel. The author has a bit of fun with the poet’s complaint that nobody teaches Shakespeare or Wilde or Shaw anymore. But then the flyer slips away, useful only as a prop for a wider point about the vacuous nature of English patriotism. Nationalism holds no appeal for me; maybe such things are mostly deserving of contempt. But given that these feelings have thrived on (real or imagined) intellectual contempt for so long, I can't help but wonder what would happen if we tried something else.
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restekova · 7 years ago
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my short story recommendations masterlist (with links to read!!)
last updated 4/26/18
@farmerbf @yugiohlesbian @mariannevibritannia @11thprince & everyone who said they’d be interested & everyone looking for something to read—
hello, my name is Amelia Kester and this is a list of some of my very very favorite short stories. the title of each one links to wherever you can read it online legally for free! because so many short stories are available to read online legally for free, through the digital archives of the magazines they were published in, the personal website of the author, or so on, i decided to theme this recommendation post to only include such accessible stories, so that even if you’re flat broke or just don’t regularly have money to spend on books, you can still read some great literature! also, the stories are largely contemporary. with the exception of the borges stories which i included because i just had to, almost all all of these written from at least 1990 onward, many published just last year or the year before, because i wanted to introduce contemporary stories rather than just old classics that everyone in a mainstream audience already knows about. 
this list is a very personal list and is limited to stories that are personal favorites of mine, and especially ones that i consider to have personally influenced my writing or the way i see the world a lot. so it’s a very personal list of recs, as in, these are just my favorites. but i believe most of these are pretty damn good stories overall no matter what, so if you’re looking for something to read and see something interesting, give it a shot!
i included trigger warnings to the best of my ability. also, it’s really hard to write summaries of these stories and do them justice, so in place of a traditional summary of each one, i just copy an excerpt from the first few sentences of each story to serve as a summary. if one makes you want to keep reading, click on it!
Victory Lap (George Saunders) personal rating: ★★★★★ (this may be my single favorite short story of all time) tw: attempted kidnapping, attempted rape
Say the staircase was marble. Say she descended and all heads turned. Where was {special one}? Approaching now, bowing slightly, he exclaimed, How can so much grace be contained in one small package? Oops. Had he said small package? And just stood there? Broad princelike face totally bland of expression? Poor thing! Sorry, no way, down he went, he was definitely not {special one}.
Tenth of December (George Saunders) personal rating: ★★★★★ tw: cancer, attempted suicide
Today’s assignation: walk to pond, ascertain beaver dam. Likely he would be detained. By that species that lived amongst the old rock wall. They were small but, upon emerging, assumed certain proportions. And gave chase. This was just their methodology. His aplomb threw them loops. He knew that. And revelled it. He would turn, level the pellet gun, intone: Are you aware of the usage of this human implement?
Blam!
70 SENTENCES THAT DUOLINGO.COM BELIEVES I WILL NEED TO KNOW IN SPANISH (Caitlin Horrocks) personal rating: ★★★★★
I am going to tell you everything: I have a house in every country. I have a dog in each one of my houses. The houses do not have roofs. What are they, exactly? 
Hog For Sorrow (Leopoldine Core) personal rating: ★★★★★ tw: sex work, prostitution
Lucy and Kit sat waiting side by side on a black leather couch, before a long glass window that looked out over Tribeca, the winter sun in their laps. Kit stole sideward glances at Lucy, who hummed, twisting her hair around her fingers in a compulsive fashion. Her hair was long and lionlike with a slight wave to it, gold with yellowy shades around her face. Kit couldn’t look at her for very long. She cringed and recoiled, as if faced with a bright light. Lucy was too radiant.
Caiman (Bret Antony Johnston) personal rating: ★★★★★
Your mother wouldn’t let me bring the ice chest into the house, so I left it in the garage. Earlier, I’d knifed four holes into the styrofoam lid. One of them looked like half a star, which I remember liking. This was years ago, a windswept Sunday. This was Texas.
Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot (Robert Olen Butler) personal rating: ★★★★
I never can quite say as much as I know. I look at other parrots and I wonder if it's the same for them, if somebody is trapped in each of them paying some kind of price for living their life in a certain way. For instance, "Hello," I say, and I'm sitting on a perch in a pet store in Houston and what I'm really thinking is Holy shit. It's you. And what's happened is I'm looking at my wife. 
Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (Jorge Luis Borges) perosnal rating: ★★★★
I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia. The mirror troubled the depths of a corridor in a country house on Gaona Street in Ramos Mejia; the encyclopedia is fallaciously called The Anglo-American Cyclopaedia (New York, 1917) and is a literal but delinquent reprint of the Encyclopedia Britannica of 1902. The event took place some five years ago. Bioy Casares had had dinner with me that evening and we became lengthily engaged in a vast polemic concerning the composition of a novel in the first person, whose narrator would omit or disfigure the facts and indulge in various contradictions which would permit a few readers - very few readers - to perceive an atrocious or banal reality. 
Funes the Memorious (Jorge Luis Borges) personal rating: ★★★★★ (this story literally changed the way i think about the world, particularly the fallibility of memory, and helped me when i was really struggling)
I remember him (I scarcely have the right to use this ghostly verb; only one man on earth deserved the right, and he is dead), I remember him with a dark passionflower in his hand, looking at it as no one has ever looked at such a flower, though they might look from the twilight of day until the twilight of night, for a whole life long. 
Brokeback Mountain (Annie Proulx) personal rating: ★★★★★
They were raised on small, poor ranches in opposite corners of the state, Jack Twist in Lightning Flat, up on the Montana border, Ennis del Mar from around Sage, near the Utah line, both high-school drop-out country boys with no prospects, brought up to hard work and privation, both rough-mannered, rough-spoken, inured to the stoic life. Ennis, reared by his older brother and sister after their parents drove off the only curve on Dead Horse Road, leaving them twenty-four dollars in cash and a two-mortgage ranch, applied at age fourteen for a hardship license that let him make the hour-long trip from the ranch to the high school. 
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ckret2 · 7 years ago
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Here’s my @secretsolenoid​ gift for Kiwii! The prompt was “[IDW] Megastar: dancing”! (You also made a reference in your wishlist to drawing and i spent all december like “o shit are you hoping for fanart” i hope you’re okay with fanfic i am sorry im but a humble ficwriter.)
Also posted on AO3 here.
About 3k words of Starscream talking Megatron into learning to dance as Iacon burns.
“Lead Me”
For the first time since Optimus took control of the Autobots, the Decepticons held part of Iacon.
Just a small corner of it, west of the Septentrio Expressway, not quite reaching all the way north to the warehouse district—far from where Metroplex had squatted down over the Citadel. But it was several square miles—most of which they’d already gleefully bombed to rubble the day before, and tonight were very personally finishing the job of flattening—and it included a massive convention hall with underground hotel facilities that had been once used by the Senate and those few elites who had been rich enough to move in the senators’ circle.
Now, the hotel facilities were Decepticon bunkers—even with six to the average room, it was far more luxurious than anything they'd had in Kaon—and the convention center on top was filled with weapons and makeshift medical facilities. Most of which were currently empty, except for a couple of stragglers getting outfitted with weapons; everyone else was in the streets, slaughtering the cowardly neutrals who had failed to evacuate the blocks that the Decepticons now controlled—making an example of those who didn't either bow down to the Decepticons or get out of their way.
Megatron had elected to spend this battle—if it could really be called that—back in their headquarters. This close to Metroplex, if he showed his face outside, it would invariably lure Optimus into battle, and he felt his troops deserved an opportunity to slaughter the civilians in peace without having to worry about Autobot retribution. Shockwave had stayed behind as well and was somewhere in the armories, no doubt scavenging parts from the choice weapons for some unsanctioned experiment. Soundwave was out with the troops, going street by street and building by building, telepathically scanning them one by one for survivors hiding in the dark, and sending his friends in to kill them.
Which left one question.
Where was Starscream?
Megatron hadn't seen or heard him anywhere in the convention center-turned-base of operations. His comm unit was off. A call to Thundercracker, out dropping bombs on tall buildings with Skywarp, confirmed that Starscream wasn't with them, although Megatron commanded Thundercracker to report if they found Starscream. Where was he? Starscream wasn't the type to vanish quietly into the shadows, especially when there was a victory to revel in—and if the victory was too boring for his tastes, he was eager to let Megatron know. So what in the world...?
He was trying to decide whether he should be irritated or start suspecting foul play when he got a comm from Skywarp. "Found him! Sir."
"He's with you?"
"No, sir!" Skywarp sounded far too chipper for Megatron to like where this was going. "He's back at the command center."
"Where?"
"In that big room, near the top, with the giant window wall."
Megatron had surveyed this building top to bottom, and there was only one room that met that description. "The ballroom?"
"Yep!" And Skywarp promptly hung up—Megatron would have Starscream chew him out for that later—before Megatron could ask what, exactly, Starscream was doing there.
One way to find out. He found the stairs and headed up.
Megatron found the entrance to the ballroom—entrances, really, an absurd bit of ostentation, three broad double doors right next to each other, each tall enough to accommodate a shuttle with a car standing on each shoulder—and pushed wide the door that Starscream, evidently, had left ajar. And stopped dead in the doorway. "What on Cybertron are you doing?"
Starscream stumbled, but didn't stop. "I suppose you talked to Skywarp?" Which didn't answer Megatron's question, but really, it didn't need answering; Megatron might not have been terribly acquainted with the high arts, but he knew dancing when he saw it. "He was waving at me from the window." Starscream gestured toward the massive floor-to-ceiling window that covered the long wall of the empty ballroom, from which in the day time there could have been an excellent view of the one-sided battle below—but in the dark, only the fires and occasional tiny flashes of lasers were clearly visible.
Starscream turned the gesture toward the window into a twirl as he glided across the floor. If he was at all self-conscious about having been caught dancing alone by Megatron—and Megatron had little doubt he must be—he was doing an excellent job of hiding it by carrying right on with what he'd been doing. That, Megatron thought, deserved a little admiration.
But only a little. "You're not going out to raze the city?"
"Is it an order?"
"No. But I thought you'd be able to appreciate the value of helping."
"Hah! We're bombing empty buildings and civilians." He twisted his wings as he spun, and Megatron could feel the breeze from the air they displaced. "They don't need my help."
"It's not about whether help is needed. There's no serious resistance out there, and that's precisely why we're fighting them—to give the troops a chance to celebrate, and to assert the superiority of the Decepticons. To show how easily their city crumbles and their people fall. We're dominating Iacon."
"Hmm." Starscream twirled across the floor, and in the split second that Megatron's gaze was captured by Starecream's arms and shoulders rather than his legs, he could have sworn Starscream was gliding, his motions were so effortlessly smooth. "You're not going to dominate anything until you take out Metroplex."
Starscream was, regrettably, right. Megatron looked past him and out the massive windows at Iacon. Even from here, even with the fires and intermittent explosions occasionally overtaking the dark, even with the reflection of the ballroom making it hard to see through the window—he could see the dull red light, the one atop Metroplex's tallest tower, flashing on and off like a single optic winking tauntingly at Megatron: here I am, here I still am.
They could crush all of Iacon to dust, but until they conquered the Autobots' stronghold, they'd dominated nothing.
"It's psychological warfare," Megatron said crankily. "To terrify and intimidate the opposition, and make them easier to crush. Not your area of speciality, I know."
Starscream snorted. "You're only terrifying neutrals, and they're already terrified. The Autobots aren't going to be impressed at seeing we can kill unarmed, defenseless civilians. If anything, they'll be inspired to revenge on the civilians' behalf."
Revenge they wouldn't be able to get, because they were too weak to do anything but hide behind Metroplex's walls, and the Decepticons had just seized control of the main route by which they were bringing in supplies; but Megatron couldn't make that point without first conceding that this wasn't about intimidating the opposition, and he wasn't ready to surrender that point yet.
He was still contemplating his next argument when Starscream continued: "Besides, if you're going for psychological warfare, a fighter jet dancing in a ballroom used by senators is far more terrifying than a pack of fighter jets dropping bombs."
Megatron could see what Starscream was getting at—oh, the existential horror that would inspire in Functionists—but he was going to make Starscream work for the point before he awarded it. "And how is that more terrifying?" Go on, Starscream, elucidate your argument. Megatron started a global resistance movement with a couple of essays; he grades hard.
Starscream arched back, lifting one leg into the air—could he lift it as high as his head? Primus below—and wrapped a hand under his knee to help keep it lifted. "Thrusters," he said, kicking his lower leg demonstratively. "I'm going to leave horrifying scrapes and exhaust stains all over their pretty marble floor."
"HAH!" Megatron hadn't expected that answer. He didn't mean to laugh. Starscream obviously knew that, if the smug smirk he favored Megatron with as he lowered his leg was anything to judge by. All right. Megatron conceded the argument to Starscream. He was more productively serving the Cause by dancing than he would be by bombing Iacon.
And not just by scratching the marble. A fighter jet dancing in a senators' ballroom was equivalent to flashing one's tail lights at the entire lineage of Primes and the Functionist Council all at once.
Megatron had often wondered: if he were to ever write another essay, what would it be about? It seemed unlikely that he would. Right now, he was far too busy waging war to focus his thoughts on writing—if there was one thing that could be said for mining, it was that it was mindless enough that he could turn his mental faculties to writing in his head as he worked. And ideally, once the war was over, there'd be nothing he lacked the power to fix through direct action and so he’d have no need to try to change it through polemics. But, if he did write again...
He had already decided that his next treatise would be on Starscream: a case study on the mistake of Functionism. Because of the shape of his wings, the density of his armor, and the power of his thrusters, he was relegated to the position of common soldier. The highest rank he could ever hope to achieve in life was cannon fodder for the Primal Vanguard. Anyone who ever met him could easily see what a waste to Cybertron it would be to force him to serve as a flying gun.
Within moments of meeting Starscream, even as he was still gushing enthusiasm at meeting his gladiatorial idol, Megatron could see how his entire personality sparkled with charisma. And it didn't take another half hour, as Starscream introduced himself to the growing Decepticon movement and struck up small conversations, for it to become obvious how intrinsically brilliant he was and what a keen observer he was of his surroundings. After making a single circuit of the Decepticon headquarters and returning to Megatron, the first thing he’d asked was "So where do you keep the big guy who splits into two vehicles locked up when he's not terrorizing gladiators?"—based on nothing but what he'd seen of Overlord in combat against Megatron, Starscream had concluded that he was 1) part of the Decepticons, even though he wasn't currently visible, and 2) too dangerous to be allowed out by himself. Astoundingly astute.
Starscream brought in recruits in droves—he knew just what to say to inspire devotion to the Decepticon Cause, when even Megatron's own words could not. He made himself welcome and indispensable everywhere, smiling and and simpering for the Senators until they let him into their confidences, smirking and swaggering for the laborers and gutter trash who needed to see someone from their end of the social ladder who could carry himself like a king. He had the benefit of no education but a fighter jet's standard boot camp training. And yet, he had the mind, the wit, the cunning, the acumen of any of the most highly-trained military minds he had been pitted against so far. He should have been—and Megatron would never use this as a compliment for anyone else—he should have been a politician.
He was cannon fodder. Had he been shipped out with the Primal Vanguard and died on an alien world, the Vanguard wouldn't have considered his body important enough to carry home.
Starscream alone was reason enough to justify this war.
If Megatron ever wrote that treatise—he didn't think it was necessary, now, but if he did—this would be how Megatron introduced it: with Starscream dancing, arms outstretched, wings upraised, legs gliding across the floor. Mechs with Starscream's frame—mechs with any warrior frame at all who hadn't been promoted to the position of global hero—were described as heavy, burly, graceless, thuggish, clomping. Starscream was twice as graceful as mechs with half his armor.
Starscream pirouetted on the tip of one foot, wobbled, stumbled to catch himself, and abruptly turned to face Megatron. "You know what would be even more horrifying than watching a fighter jet dance."
"What?"
"A miner."
"Absolutely not."
"Oh, come on." Starscream kicked the floor where he'd failed his pirouette; he'd left a nasty scratch in the marble. "Don't think you can top that?"
"I have no interest in trying," Megatron said stiffly. "Dancing is a waste of time. The idle pursuit of alt-mode exempt mechs who want to gloat about the leisure that being freed from a function affords them."
"All the more reason to do it! Since everyone should be alt-mode exempt, right?"
"Wrong. It's a hobby that's been claimed by mechs at the peak of a hierarchy that should never have existed. Imitating them would make it look like I'm aspiring to be like them. My goal is to tear them down, not to seat myself among them."
"Believe me, Megatron, there's no one left alive who would mistake you for an aspiring idle aesthete. I don't think your reputation would be irrevocably damaged if you whirled around the dance floor a couple of times." Starscream planted a hand on his hip and—his optics glittering in challenge—said, oh so very casually, "Anyway, the rest of High Command has been taught how to dance, who could hold it against you if you learned too?" A double insult: the suggestion (accurate) that Megatron not only chose not to dance but also didn't even know how; and the suggestion that, by not doing so, he lacked a skill that all of his commanders had. It was a low blow and an elitist accusation, and one that Megatron couldn't pay Starscream back for without making it look like he'd been insulted. And Starscream knew it, if his smirk was anything to go by.
Megatron would make him regret the jab later. For now, he could only challenge the validity of it. "You? Have been taught how to dance? I would think this,” he made a vague gesture that was supposed to be indicative of Starscream's graceful-but-unstructured glides across the floor, "this prancing wouldn’t be considered ballroom appropriate."
"Oh, of course not! That, I'm making up as I go. But I've been taught to dance properly." He snapped his heels together, raised his arms as if to support an invisible partner, and started dancing neatly, his steps forming smooth, uniform squares across the floor. "Taught by a superior who'd been to officer school—they learn in case they go to any Senate functions; anyone who moves in senators' circles is expected to know how. It might not be formal classroom training, but it's good enough that Zeta Prime never questioned my credentials as a delegate to the Senate." Starscream flashed a wink as he turned his invisible partner around a ninety-degree corner. Megatron scowled. The thought of Zeta with his filthy hands, gilded in fake armor, clutching at Starscream's waist...
"That hardly means the rest of High Command knows how."
"Shockwave was a senator. He knows, of course."
Wasn't that a wild mental image—Shockwave, dancing. "He would never."
"No, but he knows."
"Soundwave doesn't. His background is no higher than yours or mine." Megatron still didn't know Soundwave's exact origins—Megatron didn't even know Soundwave's full name—but Ravage had made passing comments to taking Soundwave in, which meant whatever his background, it had started lower than a cold constructed beastformer with no bipedal mode.
"Do you think Ratbat let his top agent get away with not learning how to dance? Even secret Senate messengers must represent their bosses well."
"At what? Black market business meetings?"
"Even black marketeers have balls."
Megatron laughed derisively.
"I'm serious! Ask Soundwave. Or Ratbat himself, if you want all the greasy details," Starscream said. "Should I go on? You wouldn't believe what Scorponok—"
"That's enough." Megatron had watched Scorponok cave Grimlock's face in, he didn't want to hear that he could dance too.
Starscream finally danced around to facing Megatron again, and favored him with a deceptively sweet little smile. "Well?"
"... All right." Starscream knew Megatron too well. Megatron couldn't abide the thought of being unable to do something his subordinates could. He walked onto the dance floor, head high and feet planted wide, as though proudly stepping into the gladiatorial ring. "Show me."
Starscream broke off his dance with his invisible partner, his little smile spreading into a wide grin. "Since this is your first lesson, and I'm going to be teaching you…” There was something subtly menacing behind his words as he said, "I will lead."
"For now," Megatron said, with what he thought was more indulgence than the look in Starscream's optics warranted. "Show me where to put my hands."
One hand in Starscream's hand, the other on his shoulder. Starscream's free hand settled on the corner under Megatron's arm, and Megatron immediately tensed, battle protocols quietly activating and rearranging his HUD, hyper-aware of the palm pressed to his side and the fingers against his back. And it occurred to him that, since he had left the mines, the only people who had touched his torso were either medics or enemies determined to kill him. The hand felt wrong. It felt dangerous.
Megatron's apprehension must have shown on his face—and an apprehensive-looking Megatron was a deadly-looking Megatron—because Starecream's smirk quickly shrank to nothing and he now looked rather like he was reconsidering this entire conversation. He could probably feel the heat of Megatron's cannon warm up next to his head. "... Sir?" He loosened his grip on Megatron's back.
Megatron tightened his grip on Starscream's shoulder, pulling him close enough that their chests nearly touched and the EM fields orbiting their sparks could brush against each other.
Perhaps Starscream had the body of a soldier, but he had the mind and spark of a politician—and a good politician, at that. If he ever decided he wanted to defeat Megatron, he wouldn't be doing it in single combat. Even a knife in the back mid-dance was too brazen an assault. Megatron had nothing to fear from the hand on his back.
It was the clever, smirking little mouth he had to watch out for. The mouth that turned day laborers into terrorist soldiers, that let cannon fodder walk confidently among senators, and that convinced miners to dance.
"You said you'll lead?" Megatron asked. "Then lead me."
Starscream's optics brightened. His grip tightened again. "As you command." He leaned forward, pressing his right knee into Megatron's left. "Everything I do, you do in reverse." Megatron stepped back with his left foot; Starscream's foot followed. "Just like that."
Megatron wasn't nearly as graceful as Starscream. But by the time the guns fell silent and the fires began to die down, Megatron had successfully learned how to dance from one side of the ballroom to the other.
He was far prouder of the ugly scuffs they left across the ballroom floor.
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salil23 · 7 years ago
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Book Commentary - ‘Why I am a Hindu’
Dear Mr. Tharoor,
I have been and continue to be, like many others in this country and abroad alike, a great admirer of your felicitous and eloquent oratory. Your elaborate and pedagogic elucidations regarding any topic you wish to offer your opinion upon vouchsafe for your clarity in thoughts and a convinced mind hard to sway. Such articulation of thoughts into words is an envious trait, indeed!
The reason I began writing this letter to you is because I was goaded into it by my father. I recently read your new book ‘Why I am a Hindu’ and shared my views on this book with him who also happens to be a devout Hindu just like your father. We discussed it at length and concluded that we took cognizance in most of the opinions you have chosen to offer in this book and at few points we disagreed. He then insisted me to share this commentary on the book with you and congratulate you for taking up this rather incendiary topic of ‘Religion’ and beautifully weaving it into a thought-provoking novel of about 300 pages.
Now, that the reason for writing this letter is established let me tell you few things about myself so that I don’t come out too alien to you. I’m a 22 year old boy from Mumbai. I completed my graduation in Engineering from Mumbai University last June. Thereafter, through campus placement I got into an MNC and I continue to work there as an associate software engineer. I’m a Brahmin, something I choose not to align/reckon my identity with but in this context I think it is essential to point that out. I come from a fairly religious family. The family goes on at least one pilgrimage on annual basis (It is never binding on me or anyone in the house to embark on one) and we have got a nice quaint marble alcove in the kitchen where idols of different gods nestle cheek-by-jowl. We aren’t atheists for sure and look up to some divine power not only for consolation in times of distress but also to express gratitude in times of happiness. My family is a vegetarian, a habit I chose not to solemnly abide by. I savor meat though it has never been cooked in our kitchen and given my mother’s dislike towards it, will never be in future too but my parents cut me some slack and allow me to have it on our lunch/dinner outings. Thus we are a well-educated, forgiving, broad-minded, religious quintessential Hindu family who takes pride in belonging to this religion and practice it on the lines which, to quote from your book, ‘Distances itself from dogma and holy writ, that is minimally prescriptive and yet offers an abundance of options, spiritual and philosophical texts and social and cultural practices to choose from.’
I always predetermine a book I want to read before buying it but ‘Why I am a Hindu’ was a fortunate accident. I tumbled upon this book inadvertently. Though I have seen numerous videos of your speeches and have religiously followed your twitter handle, this is the first book of yours that I have read out of the many you have written till date. Some acquaintance of mine casually mentioned this book to me while we were discussing and the title itself intrigued me and the next consequential thing that followed was me placing an order on Amazon. I was excited and skeptical at the same time before taking this up for reading. Excited because the title hinted at a bold monologue of a 21st century intellectual tearing apart the shackles of facetious dogmatic principles that eclipse the underlying transcendental wisdom this great Hindu faith has to offer and skeptical because what if this turns out to be another archetypal diatribe against the conservatives by a liberal.
To begin with the part one of the book, you have extensively dealt with the subtle nuances of this faith and have aptly substantiated your opinions with expansive case studies. It truly reinforced my belief in this faith and gripped my attention. For the next few pages it was difficult to put the book down. The citations from Vedas and Upanishads and not to forget the pertinent quotes from Swami Vivekananda gave the analysis a wholesome touch and a new sense of veneration for this tolerant and accepting faith arose in me. The amount of efforts you must have put in to gather and impeccably compile these observations is truly commendable. As a youth with limited experience and material aspirations, I could find solace in this philosophically spiritual writing and revelation which mystically, if pondered upon with the correct intent, offers to answer all the questions causing insecurities in our daily lives. The ‘Adwaita Vedanta’ philosophy, in particular, which sees the ‘Atman’ or the ‘Self’ in no difference to the ‘Brahman’ or ‘Cosmos’ is awe inspiring.
Being an apolitical person myself, I chose not to look at the second part of the book through the same glasses as you may have donned while writing it. Perhaps, owing not to the inexperience or limited exposure and knowledge in the socio-political sphere or conscious obliviousness towards political strides but the nonchalance towards the polemic references you intend to offer against a particular group and my impartiality towards any political party/ political ideology grants me the merit of putting forward blatantly my views as someone like me would perceive it. This part of the book, remarkably, came out to me as a harangue by an ardent party-man who is bound by a moral duty to reiterate his loyalty towards a particular party only by launching tirades against the rival party wherever possible. Your extensive citations definitely are laudable and definitely buttress the purpose of maligning the wrongs (tangible and intangible alike) but yet seemed to me as cherry-picked. The sardonic references do no good (This I speak only for a limited audience and hence should not be misconstrued as a generic response) to people like me who are least bothered about a particular party’s decision to impose a particular ideology/faith on a minority group of people or who are least affected by the blanket bans on consumption of certain food products probably because I belong to the majority and anyway I don’t consume the banned food product. Given your background, you too fall in the majority and are not directly affected by the bans per se but because you are a prominent figure in the socio-political province who owes an allegiance to particular political ideology, you are duty bound to criticize and raise questions. However, having said that it is also possible that you may counter this with saying you have just taken a humanitarian stand which is quite logical and sane and want to make  the ‘bhakts’  realize the repercussions of their ‘draconian’ initiatives. But to me this construes as a destructive criticism which will further elicit hatred and will lead to prolong inconsequential argument with trite remarks and futile debates. Asking questions and raising concerns are the intrinsic characteristics of democracy but I think providing solutions and acknowledging achievements are imperative to sustain one.
In the third part of the book you wonderfully espoused what a 21st century religion should be like and how a religion without fundamentals stands a chance to outweigh any other contender in the race. Another and probably the most important and central takeaway from this book for me was how revival of Indian Nationalism instead of Hindu Nationalism is the only way forward that will lead us, as you aptly concluded, from ignorance to truth, from darkness to light and from death to immortality.
To conclude, I would say the book is a delectable journey through the realms of philosophical insights thoroughly substantiated with pragmatic case studies backed by sanctified spiritual prudence juxtaposed to glimpses of parochial and prosaic remarks but eventually imparting conventional wisdom in the most contemporary form. I hope you take this commentary in good spirit as was my intent and forgive me for my apparent bold statements at certain places. I am a common middle class boy who wished to convey his views on the book as objectively as possible. I hope I have done my job to the best of my abilities and wish to hear back from you soon.
Yours truly,
Salil V. Shahane
11/03/2018, Mumbai.
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ratherhavetheblues · 5 years ago
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CLAIRE DENIS’ ‘BEAU TRAVAIL’ “This is the rhythm of my life…”
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© 2019 by James Clark
     We live at a time when athletic prowess abounds. Remarkable physical health races all about us, to our amazement. Such a state of affairs has been remarkably investigated by filmmaker, Claire Denis, in her film, Beau Travail[Good Work; Nice Going] (1999).
Here, however, we find neither specimens of professional athletes, nor amateur devotees of the limber and the inexhaustible. Instead, we find—in the very small-market presence of Djibouti, once known as French Somali land, during the decade (the 90’s) when tempers were unsporting—a unit of the French Foreign Legion busting their butts in training for quelling hostilities. Whereas the contemporary athletes and devotees, mentioned above, stood a chance to live, at some level, that topspin of frisson at the heart of human swiftness, the folks we get to know here seem frozen in such an interminable training routine which they present as nearly cloistral agents of squelching mundane squabbling, heavily, thereby, invested in a form of pedantry. They go so far as to, once in a while, a sort of th’i chi slow dance, fighting strategy with hands converging in the style of prayer to a fussy (pedantic) divinity. Way too much brain, and not nearly enough bravery.
How does athleticism—acrobatics—sour like that? Look no farther than Ingmar Bergman’s, Fanny and Alexander (1982), the compass, as it happens, of Denis’ odd war story which does so much more than enforce the status quo, while, paradoxically being (as with, Fanny and Alexander) a revelation of massive devotion to crushing, not merely the Horn of Africa, but everything in sight that might have real depth, which is to say, a purchase upon “the big world.”
Just as the Bergman film has its fanatical, murderous bishop, along with one, Gustav, a wealthy polemicist for the sake of “the little world,” there is in our film today a medley touching upon both wings of the distemper, namely, fanatical, murderous Sergeant Galoup, the sheep-dog of the soldiers’ sheep being tasked to put everything right, and the polemical agency of the French Foreign Legion itself, ensuring that the hegemony of “the little world” will always be the winner, regardless of the conflict and regardless of derring-do. Therefore, these paragons of action do not introduce themselves going flat-out, but rather, fluttering in the midst of young Arabic women at a dark and intermittently light-flooding dance club. The women clearly take pleasure in their audacity about abrogating their family mores of modesty. The troopers establish a contrasting propriety, allowing themselves to maintain a hushed decorum, neither joyous nor morose. The participants are mainly shown in extreme close-up of their faces, or parts of faces, looming in and out in the darkness punctuated by lightning flashes in the generally slow swirl. Their signature of the moment, initiated by one of the self-impressed natives, is blowing a kiss on the ridge of the up-beats. Especially getting into that grove is a young acolyte about to be central to our study of what more there is to be said than what Bergman said, in Fanny and Alexander, about a nearly bloodless massacre.
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Introducing Sergeant Galoup as a malignant fanatic, however, on the order of Bishop Vergerus, does not quite reach the sensibility at the core of this masterful film. (Nor, in fact, does that idea fully cover Vergerus.) In addition to Denis’ own motives bearing fruit, there will be our protagonist peppered by other Bergman films during this trek, for the sake of bringing to bear considerations which transcend that supernal prototype’s significant measure of fatalism in face of a planetary outrage, far more formidable than simple natives getting restless. There is, about Bergman’s incisiveness, a sheen and eloquence being secret and exulting in face of a perceived hopelessness. Denis’ more muscular touch upon war—her taking seriously that world religion, world humanitarianism (part and parcel of the former force) and world science, being rotting from within, triumphs notwithstanding—has discovered a critical mass of skepticism (however confused). The villainous fanatic, Galoup, therefore, whose story we hear, functions—as with “the little world” breaking hearts in Fanny and Alexander—as a disclosure of vectors possibly leading to a “truth” (a problematic key word, in the aforementioned film), requiring courage and wit to find ways to counter mob coercion.
The prelude, to that line dance by the rebel-women and the tamed soldiers, installs another instance of the series of Denis’ thematically radioactive, naive tableaus, in this case, “heroic” troopers on a ridge (reminding us of silhouettes stemming from the Dance of Death, in The Seventh Seal [1957]) beneath a scarlet sky. And they, coming to life, sort of, piously, operatically, melodramatically, stupidly, pule “Under the burning, African sun, a mighty phalanx hoisted up our banners! Cochin-China, Madagascar… Its motto, ‘Honor and Valor,’ makes for brave soldiers. Its flag, that of France, is a sign of glory!’” With subsequent aspects better held back than adding to confusion here, the second step of that prayer proceeds with a male chorus remarkably both old and obsolete, and yet uncanny, accompanied by long, black shadows (cast by humbugs) on the sandy terrain. Panning from there, the song without words accompanies flecks of light playing upon the sea near the military post. (Here the aural does some harm to the visual.) There is, after that, the imagery of an ink-well based pen, recording a saga of the “burning African sun” which elicits even more volume from a remembered chorus. On a balcony in Marseilles (following quick cuts showing our protagonist and the puff kiss night owl), Galoup tells us, “I have time to kill now… I screwed up from a certain point of view… Angels of attack…My story is simple. That of a man who left France too long… a soldier who left the army as a sergeant. Galoup… that’s me. Unfit for life. Unfit for civil life.”
Though the parallel of the bishop and the sergeant is far from close, we should pause here to secure the concomitants which Denis finds to be compelling. First and foremost is their grim delight in belonging to a venerable and powerful institution, confirming some kind of sagacity in having enlisted into an outlook being “absolute truth” in a punishing jurisdiction. The best, it seems which life affords. Moreover, both of them find nothing amiss about borrowing the fundamental findings of others—many of those others having been terrorized by bloodthirsty and cowardly idiots—and never attempting to measure alone what their specific sensibility has in store. So convinced that a very large sample of the world cannot be in error about the limits of couth, their (desperately manufactured) zeal could be such that murdering an infidel would  seem perfectly valid. Vergerus barely avoids murdering Alexander and would have killed Isak, if not for his sister’s being marginally balanced. That brings us to “a man who left France [and its treasures of audacity and creative beauty] too long,” and would have killed “the young acolyte,” Sentain, an infidel, or a witch (in the sergeant’s eyes)—like the witch in The Seventh Seal—without a mock-Spielberg rescue by a herd of camel-powered nomads. (You’ll recall the smell of Spielberg in Isak’s nonsensical rescue mission, in Fanny and Alexander.) Galoup, in fact, assuming he has killed his enemy, and becoming driven out of his dream job. The run-up to his wild revenge is the stuff Denis relishes. “We all have a trashcan deep within. That’s my theory.” Some of us, anyway, have “deep within,” something else, which is the gist of this brave and brilliant film.
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Whereas Bergman stages wonders of dramatic literature, our helms-woman here trusts a somewhat different register of emotion, if not alone, then nearly alone. The outcome is double trouble; but the uncanny rush opens tinctures of grand fascination. (As if the Djibouti domain were not bemusing enough [its wasteland being corded by the bishop’s lunar, coal-dust, ascetic interiors], we have Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down [2001], an adjacent smashup, to add to a dead-end, a frenzy of athleticism; not entirely in vain.) The moment of Sentain’s arrival at the vigorous spa—shown quite a while after he blew those kisses—affords a study of Galoup’s disastrous migration from melodrama to improve. “I noticed one of those who stuck out. He was thin. Distant. He had no reason to be with us in the Legion. That’s what I thought… I felt something vague and menacing take hold of me. Gilles Sentain was his name. The name he gave to the Legion.” (Our protagonist’s finding a new wrinkle to his piety, shows him needing more firepower. Compare that to Vergerus’ being confronted by an overtly insulting Alexander, who goes so far as to spreading the lie that he was informed, by the ghost of the bishop’s first wife, that the holy man had locked up the wife and two daughters, which resulted in their death in trying to leap to freedom from a high window.) Here we cut back to the recent civilian in Marseilles pruning a plane tree in his yard. He reflects, “Maybe freedom begins with remorse… I heard that somewhere… [That both freedom and remorse occur to him place the largely disappointing warrior into a region of notability. Vergerus’ facile bromides concerning unholy error fail to be more than ceremonial.] My muscles are rusty, eaten away by acid.” Cut to a training program whereby the non-rusty recruits negotiate under a field of low-lying ropes. One of them crawls under the obstacles with remarkable panache, a veritable crocodile. Does he feel elated in his fluidity? No kudos from the taskmaster who seems in some kind of need  of a heaven due to his lacking any joy on Earth. Here, too, the “mighty phalanx” chant returns (angelic choristers trumping earthy moves), along with the Sergeant’s glaring at the supposed rebel in the form of Sentain. “What counts above all,” he advises us, “is discipline in the Legion. Loving one’s superior, obeying him. That’s the essence of our tradition.” (This in voice-over, while the “tradition” hurls itself over harsh procedures, to mixed outcomes.) Onwards, then, to a structure of cement forms with no content. The overseer leads the lads in some maneuvers straight out of Hollywood—“I heard [and saw] that somewhere”—but only Galoup’s actions show any commitment. His construct invasion, electric in its stealth and alacrity, seems to derive from a sense of enemy committing slovenly, and therefore, terrorist, deeds. (The youngsters, perhaps worn out by the Olympian demands a short while before, go along, of course, but the difference is palpable in this filmic passage where everything comes down to a “foreignness” of the palpable. The cool, semi-automatic weaponry—“a sign of glory” beyond the French tricolor—becomes both operative and inoperative.) The camera draws back to reveal bemused native women taking in the show, and showing how unstable a phenomenon glory can be.
So characteristic, and both thrilling and amusing, then, the camera finds a repair man in the wilderness at the top of a high ladder, attending to electrical needs. Smarts, and perhaps more. And perhaps less, as the scene changes to the warriors ironing their shirts. The instance of pedantry being at the heart ofWild Strawberries, and rebranded as “the little world,” in, Fanny and Alexander. (For the sake of somewhat bolstering Galoup’s long-shot endeavor here, we should note that the little world of Bergman’s nightmare has been reconsidered by filmmaker, Leos Carax, in his film, Holy Motors [2012]. Not only that, however, but the protagonist there is played by none-other than Denis Lavant, who portrays Galoup and his better moments. Carax’s format comes to us as the domain of an ancestor haunting the precinct of a theater, the range of which includes Lavant’s actions in the name of “Mr. Oscar,” a banker, instead of the artistic director of a concern to touch “the big world.” However, it is Oscar’s moonlighting which rattles off a spate of dramatics which intriguingly involves sensual initiatives somewhat closing the door on our helms-woman’s much earlier concentration upon undemonstrative resilience. Oscar’s unfortunate final word concerning his surreal reality is, “For the beauty of the gesture.”) In the midst of such divided initiatives, we should recognize as another beacon, to accompany the lineman and his ladder, a wrecked tank on the base. In Bergman’s film, The Silence [1961], an impressionable young boy watches from his train a series of flatcars sending tanks, like the one in the desert, to the front. He, and the adults with him, are at a loss to comprehend the language of their situation. Could Galoup, packing all those negatives, bring this matter to light in order to distinguish our guide’s own hard-won fluency. On the heels of this instance of murderous wobble, the power of cheapness and the power of care stage a little dance. The town near the base has a market where women of the hinterland sell their vividly colored rugs. As if a curtain of a stage emerges and opens within the noisy transactions, one of the craftswomen enters a doorway framed by posters of two popular products: Coke and Sprite. The grotty and the pristine. Or: out of overreaching, and balancing. Couched in this challenge, the concerns of advantage take over. “13 stripes, it’s a tradition [of the weaving in view]… Prices went up during the celebration…”/ “I made mine myself.” [the prospective client disappoints]/ Quick, “Oh!”
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Also aware of the commerce is Galoup, more involved in tradition than money. His thoughts have taken on a more urgent coloration in the face of his pedantry aiming for the good old days. His reverie centers upon his superior officer, the Commandant. “Bruno Forestier… I feel so alone when I think of my superior. [This reflection occurs while our protagonist hangs up his socks on a clothesline, pointedly different from the electrical wiring not long ago.] I respect him… My Commandant…[Here we see a photo of the great man when a young soldier] … after the Algerian War… [Now he’s on camera as a flabby, slightly suspicious, sedentary blob] He never confided in me. He said he was a man without ideals, a soldier without ambition. [One with a protracted commitment to the little world.]  I adored him without knowing why. He said he was the perfect Legionnaire and didn’t give a damn…” [Here we can’t help hearing influential and significant and superficial Gustav, in Fanny and Alexander. Body language letting the good times roll and being a charming rogue. Where, however, did anal Galoup win his undying respect? We’ll have to wait until the very end of our story to understand such a mystery.] After this credo, he fishes into a drawer and brings to life a bracelet with the word, “Bruno,” on it. This profile of the piece of work in the far boonies concludes with the Sergeant’s voice-over indicating the woman who supplies the drugs to the chief who can’t do without staying pretty-much brain-dead. “Ali brought him his qat. Night after night, Forestier chewed on it, alone.” (Here we could imagine Helena, the cynical matriarch of the family on that hot seat for fucking around with littleness, in, Fanny and Alexander. Her domain is chock-a-block with plants and she always has a strong drink close by. She’s beloved by many; but she’s appallingly overrated. One of the many juggernauts goring those who take life seriously in loving its perilous beauties. Does Galoup (an athlete of impressive strength and equilibrium in leading those drills) constitute both willing victim and willing perpetrator? “I never touched those leaves. I liked to stay on edge…”
I hope, by now, you’ll be on to this film as a war with oneself, and only in a minor way a story of a war in Africa in the 1990’s. Before we accompany any more close encounters of Galoup’s tribulation, why don’t we specifically appreciate the wit of Claire Denis’ visual and aural panache, as so richly accompanying this odd and powerfully lucid endeavor? As Galoup succumbs to his catalyst (in Sentain), there occurs a spate of troopers, including himself, wearing pill-box semi-top-hat head gear. There we recall, in the Bergman film, The Seventh Seal, the knight, named Block, on a mad, uncontrollable mission to live forever, the resort to farce. The little world, making, unfortunately, the world go round. Something else, way off in the  mix, is the operatic infusion here. Composer, Benjamin Britten’s, Billy Budd, chronicles a ship’s officer and psychopath intent on murdering a young man having attended to an impressive level of disinterestedness. But the lack of disinterestedness in the howling of its melodrama, and the posing of its dance in the training, spells something off the rails, which turns the troopers in their exertions to be stuffed-shirts, notwithstanding their being bare from the waist up. Thereby, much has been made of the film as involving a high-water level of queer observances. And thereby Denis, with much more than Britten on her mind—Bergman, for instance—takes a little shot at another essentially closed menace. (It is, I am convinced, when Time Magazine feels obliged to anoint a video game wiz as one of the most notable people on earth, to become a tad less obscure than our honey of a woman giant.) Playing with the Coke/ Sprite doorway, the film, with the “little world” coagulating by the minute, we find a doorway named, “Bar  des Alps.” Galoup ventures up and, in a short while, comes back down. Gustov, in our twinned movie, bringing off a “quickie” with his wife on Christmas Eve, after having spent a long time with Maj, a servant of the house. Ever the naïf, the Sergeant declares, “There was something so strange that night, a sort of harbinger of things to come, of the circumstances that sent me far from the Red Sea and Djibouti.”
The cynical drug addict (sort-of) running the show comes to us as Galoup’s war-footing begins to reach a state of affairs where he’ll have lots of time to reflect on his truly urgent malaise. Bruno, in a taxi at night, chats up the driver, “My bastards are good company. They are my family…” The cabbie chips in with, “You are a father looking out for his sons…”/ “Could be,” the self-indulgent one agrees. Then the driver—giving us a moment of Jim Jarmusch’s Night on Earth (1991), with its bad news for bright motion—tries for cogency by way of the leaden axiom, “If it weren’t for fornication and blood, we wouldn’t be here.” They pass Galoup walking toward the club. They also share the road with many of those pill-boxes, performing a series of lifting a warrior, as if in some kind of triumph-to-come, a state-of-affairs jumping to the sense of heroism (sort of). Next morning, they’re busy with producing the sharpest’s of ironing jobs, perhaps vaguely attentive to a kinetic payoff. Cut, then, to an antithesis of training on high wires—that  measure of acrobatics always breathing down their neck, even when totally ignoring it; and being the bane of technology. Here the heavy and graceful lifting of synthesis fails to come about. A group of women hanging up their laundry underlines a “little world” digging in for the duration. Bruno, onscreen, and on some other planet, remarks, “We’re taught elegance, in and under our uniforms… Perfect creases are part of this elegance…. Here I am, Commandant. Like a watch dog… looking after our flock…” (Pause a moment to the mix of sensibility behind this madness.) Bruno, perhaps intuiting that Sentain has more range  and poise than the others, asks him why he became a Legionnaire. The youngster (when asked, telling him he’s 22) refers to a homeland—Russia—not being functional. “No money. No work. I fought for Russia. But it’s impossible to fight just for an ideal. An ideal that always changes.” Now, not surprisingly, the supposed leader, asks, “What ideal?” We knew he’d say something to that effect. But how about Sentain and his canvass of “ideals” to join? He remarks about a need to find a means of survival (a “little world”) and somehow cohering with an elusive vision to share with many others. As such, the young notable may not be the dangerous, resonant wunderkind the officers imagine him to be. He has helped along another recruit to learn a smattering of French. But how conversant is he with the thorny matter of “ideals,” which, when coming in the form of a plurality, tends to be a pain in the ass. (In the same stream, we have a program of knife-ready, underwater warfare, continuous with the sharks being on the move.)
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We’ll cover the Sergeant’s sharp pathology rather quickly, because the Spielberg aspects (as in, Fanny and Alexander) are not what we need to tarry with. Where we’ve reached in this military narrative is a little romantic sidebar of Galoup’s acquiring at a bazaar a bottle of perfume and bringing it to a local woman as she sleeps. (Even Gary Cooper had his camp follower; and the contrast is there to enjoy.) The Sergeant’s stroking her hair constitutes going AWOL. But seriously AWOL takes far more guts than our dopey playboy could ever muster. (Or, maybe not?) Borrowing a bit of Bergman’s dramatic soliloquy, Denis shows the bishop-like sanitation maniac about to defend his god. “Sentain seduced everyone. People were drawn to his charm. [This while he puts the finishing touches—involving pink-red tablecloths—for a birthday party for one of the “elegant” soldiers.] Deep down, I felt a sort of rancor, a rage brimming. I was jealous…” With shock-effect change of pace (though put in place so tenuously as to cut Spielberg exotica), there is a pink-red bloody sea during a helicopter accident by another Legion unit, with one death, multiple injuries and Sentain overcoming an otherwise second death. During the party, Bruno had been morose and sneering; but he does manage to hand over a medal to the elegant hero. Our far from pleased protagonist tells himself, and us, “That day, something overpowering took hold of my heart. I thought about the end. The end of me… The end of Forestier.” Soon after the medal ceremony, Galoup has a tantrum in his quarters. Continuous with that storm, we have a menacing sergeant circling a medalist looking for a lift by a bona fide “ideal,” perhaps disinterested, but more likely pedantic. Then was the time to watch Bruno and the Sergeant playing a game of chess, and reprising, for the alert that is pedantry, The Seventh Seal, and its blockhead. Galoup can’t avoid telling his thrilling adversary in chess, “He [Sentain] has something up his sleeve. Don’t say I didn’t warn you…” Bruno trots out the lazy litany, “Careful what you’re saying. Backstabbing isn’t in the Legion’s honor code.” Here a cut back to Marseilles has the court-martialed soldier of fortune hearing, in his favorite bar “You’re a rock of the nation. You are the epidemy of the Legion…” Another cut back to the exile, being at his home, has a version of Gustov’s (in Fanny and Alexander) too-little-too-late opening to something big, rather than the beloved little. “I’m sorry I was that man, that narrow-minded Legionnaire.” The unit has decamped to be closer to the “unrest.” It’s Ramadan, and Sentain is on all-night duty with a Muslim recruit who slips out to get some prayer-time. Galoup pounces on this, sentencing the pious runaway to dig by shovel a deep hole in the impacted wasteland where his hands bleed profusely. Sentain’s sentence, for countenancing the abandonment, is a truck ride to the heart of the deadly Danakil Desert, from which he could return, if he were a comic book hero. The hated one comes to a salt flat and a salt lake. Salt all over his face, he lies on the burning sand. He’s rescued by a herd of camel, owned by a singing group as they happily overcome the elements. Before the matinee hero returns (he had told the Sergeant, “See you soon, sir”), to searching for those ideals, Bruno, formulaically, has the officer, who dangerously found fault with low-key, Millennial action (along with his hunger for crude power), sent on his way. “Good riddance,” he pedantically tells Galoup.
But, on the day before he gets his one-way ticket to Marseilles, there is a recovery—not muted but not very pointed either (like the recovery of Emilie [in Fanny and Alexander], screwing up badly and now [after the disaster of religion] giving a shot to art in the form of taking over her first husband’s theatre company.) The figure of the rather dopey matriarch, Helena, always in range of a glass comes into the sightlines of dopey Bruno and his qat. Galoup commences with a display of pedantry in making his bed as fussily—and also impressively—as the greens at the Master’s Golf Tournament. And, then, he’s off to a club where his theme is, “This is the Rhythm of my Life,” running on the same track of Emilie’s first show, Strindberg’s, “A Dream Play,” saying, “Everything is possible and probable. Time and space do not exist [not the way they’ve been cemented by tradition]. On a flimsy framework of reality the imagination spins, weaving new patterns…” Spins, weaving new patterns are his swan song. Or are they? The soundtrack is by “Cascada” and the cascading by Galoup is far from shabby. (The cheap and hostile assault on the band’s video version is as egregiously stupid as the ways of Louis’ neighbor, in Denis’ The Intruder.) But it’s only a baby step, and time is running out. At least for him. The three volcanos in the nearby ocean at the second venue try to speak to the dialectic as a lifetime lover. “Like sentinels,” someone suggests. Standing there won’t help. Keeping watch might.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grGiq0yTaj4
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lionwall08-blog · 6 years ago
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Low-Carb Diets Shorten Lifespan: Ketogenic Fans Should Celebrate (Or: Where Has Kiefer Been?)
I
magine the horror of waking from years in a coma to find the world embroiled in the same war, each side racking up casualties with neither side admitting it. That’s what the last couple of years have felt like for me. With the recent passing of Charles Poliquin, a friend and respected colleague (even though we disagreed about a lot, we were always respectful to each other’s ideas when we talked) I decided it was time to come back to the fray. Of course, the timing couldn’t be more critical…
Eating a low-carb diet shortens your lifespan. (It’s on the BBC’s website, so it must be true.)
Some already rejoice and revel in these findings: their careers spent telling people to eat less fat are safe, their academic positions secured, their textbooks will enter another printing cycle and the vast panoply of pharmaceuticals will continue to flow. Of course, there’s also the ability to say, “I told you so.”
For others, however, this could be a death knell, bringing their nascent careers as diet gurus, internet celebrities and snake oil peddlers to a screeching halt.
Me: I completely agree with the results of the paper, plain and simple; I even expected it (but I thoroughly suggest you read on).
Many preaching the low-carb sermon tend to crouch into the familiar last-stand posture—ticks digging in for a few more drops of blood—when papers like this appear. They’re quick to attack, picking it apart piece by piece, layer by layer, attempting to demonstrate the flaw in the statistics, in the logic, in the procedures, in the data or find any blemish to tarnish the credibility of the results.
And don’t worry, they won’t fail to remind us ad nauseam that correlations do not show causation (which, incidentally, is the most accurate criticism one can heave at these types of reports, but the implication of causation originates more from the poor quality of journalism and less from the researchers).
What ideologies are in peril, you may ask: Paleo, low- and no-sugar hypotheses, some variants of intermittent fasting and anyone dogmatic about the insulin hypothesis. All these philosophies can allow dietary carbohydrates into the range that the study found correlated with shorter lifespan. The results cast quite a blight on the insulin hypothesis which relies on the argument that insulin is the root of all evil, and as such, the total amount of carbs in the diet must correlate to lifespan and health. Those on the fundamentalist side of the insulin hypothesis—like Dr. Jason Fung—should take a moment to reassess their philosophy. My guess is they won’t.
My attitude about the whole thing might seem cavalier, and rebel-rousing polemics (I’m trying to be nice and not say ‘idiots’) might say I’m claiming that my own diets don’t work anymore. Neither is true.
Statistical observational data analyses (SODAs) like these embolden me because they strengthen my new model of human health, disease and performance. Don’t worry: Carb Nite® and Carb Backloading™ still form the cornerstone of my work, but I synthesized them into a single consistent theory that points to CNS and CBL as ideal diets (on a spectrum of “ideal” depending on your lifestyle and an “ideal” that I can now clearly define). My latest work also gives me the ability to predict and explain nearly every SODA …even the ones that seem to contradict CNS and CBL. Once I release the book, anyone can look at a new diet fad, like Paleo or vegan, and know what the short term benefits might be and also the long term consequences…like dying early.
Why isn’t everyone else excited?
Ketogenic proponents, despite their angst, should be ecstatic. This particular SODA shows that taking carbohydrates down to 40% still isn’t healthy. The diet needs to contain less than 40% (at least) and ketogenic diets require somewhere in the range of 0 to 6% of calories from usable carbohydrates (remember, every carbohydrate except fiber is a usable carbohydrate). The SODA also showed correlations between shorter lifespan and very high carbohydrate intake. Again, more support.
For me, I’ve come to the conclusion that all data needs to be explained. Enough SODAs reveal this negative correlation between health and low-carb diets (defined as a diet with 40% of calories from carbohydrates) that we should view the result as fact. If carbohydrates comprise around 40% your diet, then your health is at risk. At the very least, we have an upper bound on the level of carbohydrates that one should allow in their diet. This level (40%) can be shown to be too high, but this particular SODA doesn’t say anything useful about the matter—good or bad.
From the perspective of a ketogenic diet, this SODA is a boon. It says nothing negative about ketogenic diets and adds support (incidentally, I am still not an advocate of ketogenic diets). So why is my inbox flooded with emails from my Low-Carb Research Google Group trashing this particular SODA, a call to demolish it and its authors?
I alluded to the answer above with my choice of words. Nearly every one of my contemporaries (particularly those with a public platform) base their dietary views on a philosophy, an ideology or a fairy tale. Although they take their story as fact, it is not; it’s a story and one that’s best suited for study in a field known as Narrative Research instead of molecular biology, cellular dynamics, endocrinology, biothermodynamics or chronobiology. Terms like “evolutionary (ancestral)” and even “evidence based” hide a soft underbelly of assumptions which no one can justify within any framework resembling science. Their only defense is to attack. Why worry about the deplorable shape of your own house when you can be busy burning down everyone else’s?
This problem worries me on a fundamental level. Without a serious attempt to create a verifiable framework underlying the workings of the human body, society will proceed as it has, getting sicker, requiring more pharmaceuticals, costing more in healthcare and leaving people tired, sick and bereft of joy. I’ve talked with thousands of people from across the world and most of them admit to giving up. They’re paralyzed by confusion. There’s also no shortage of complaint about all their hard-earned income being wasted on seaweed extract, kale smoothies and crystalline vaginal eggs.
So for those of you who want to know why I disappeared, the reason is simple: I have been doing the work you paid me to do. I wanted to continue the serious work that would lead EVERYONE to success, no matter how they defined it: fat loss, athletic performance, health, enhanced cognition, getting off medications or just feeling well enough to chase after their children on the weekends.
And to understand any of it, you have to understand all of it. That understanding requires a lifetime of dedication and an insane amount of experience. You can’t get a Ph.D. based on lab work exploring mitochondrial function and suddenly decide to give performance advice to elite level athletes (that would be stupid). But by the same token, you can’t fully understand the implications of mitochondrial function if you don’t know how the body of an elite level athlete works.
I set out to incorporate the entire landscape of human performance and disease into a single theoretical and verifiable model. It was no small task. But respect for my audience and my own sense of integrity forced me to attempt nothing less (also: impossible problems are the only ones worth solving).
When I read my first journal article 28 years ago (yes, I’ve been doing this for that long), I was clueless about the path I started on, but here I am. I have all of you to thank for it. I won’t disappoint.
I think it’s time for us all to be able to wake from this nightmarish war of words and competing fairy tales to a world where the word “health” is no longer a mask on the face of ignorance, ego and an accelerating march toward disease. I hope you’ll join me on this journey.
P.S. It’s good to be back.
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Source: https://body.io/low-carb-diets-shorten-lifespan-ketogenic-fans-should-celebrate-or-where-has-kiefer-been/
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caveartfair · 6 years ago
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Tracey Emin’s Unlikely Journey from Vulgar Upstart to Art World Establishment
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I Loved You More Than I Can Love, 2009. Tracey Emin Phillips
This week, the flagship outpost of London’s White Cube gallery opens Tracey Emin’s first show of new work in the U.K. capital since 2014. To describe this as a big deal would be an understatement: Along with David Hockney and Damien Hirst, Emin is indisputably one of Britain’s most famous artists, a YBA icon who—in her home country, at least—has well and truly become a household name, the picture of the artist-as-brand. Her work across various media is both deeply personal but instantly recognizable—yet despite its confessional nature, it has become a signifier for a certain kind of luxury consumerism. Her scrappy, Schiele-in-remedial-class drawings of nudes and the hot pink neons of handwritten phrases can be found everywhere from P. Diddy’s collection to the Eurostar terminal at Saint Pancras train station, her cursive as distinctive a calling card as the logo of a high-end fashion label.
As such, Emin’s celebrity could be considered something of an obstacle to assessing the art she makes. If you’re of the opinion that respectability is the kiss of death to artistic integrity, you may well find Emin’s work problematic: As a professor of drawing at London’s ultra-patrician Royal Academy and holder of some ludicrously quaint titles (in 2013, she was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire), it’s fair to say that Emin became respectable long ago. Indeed, possibly as a nod to her public endorsement of his right-wing Conservative party back in 2009, one of Emin’s neon works, blazing the blandly corporate phrase “More Passion,” took pride of place on the walls of 10 Downing Street during Prime Minister David Cameron’s ill-fated premiership. Nothing, and nobody, can get more Establishment than that.
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Tracey Emin. November 7, 2002 by Jason Schmidt, 2002. Tracey Emin Alternate Projects
And yet, for reasons I’ll come to, I will never begrudge Emin the gilded status she occupies in British public life—because, frankly, she deserves it. Twenty years ago, long before she was elevated to the higher echelons of society, Emin was a pariah in the national consciousness. In 1999, she was nominated for the Turner Prize, Britain’s most prestigious art award. Though the financial stakes may be relatively low—£25,000 goes to the eventual winner, £5,000 apiece to the other three shortlisted artists—it is a major event, with the awards ceremony broadcast live on a primetime slot on evening TV. To put it simply, it is the only moment of the calendar year when the wider British public pays any attention to new art—and pay attention they did. Emin’s contributions to the Turner Prize exhibition that year sparked a media furore that enshrined her as the bad girl of British art and made her the target of furious bile.
To be sure, any of the exhibits of Emin’s show-within-a-show would have guaranteed a degree of controversy. There was a punkish tapestry incorporating a crude Union Jack, and some less-than-respectable phrases in appliqué: “They were the ugly cunts”; “No fucking way no”; and, perhaps most memorably, “Pissing pure cider until it rains.” In a small room separated from the main exhibition space, you could watch a truly harrowing film in which she recounted a teenage abortion. More troubling still was her 1995 Super 8 movie Why I Never Became a Dancer,in the course of which her deadpan voiceover relates her sexual history in detail, considered shocking at that time. (“It was something you could just do, and it was for free,” she says at one point.) She goes on to reminisce about entering a dance competition at the age of 15, and when she took to the stage, she was greeted with chants of “Slag! Slag! Slag!” from men in the audience.
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In Your Good Sea, 2015. Tracey Emin Carolina Nitsch Contemporary Art
But the main exhibition, the one for which Emin was nominated, proved truly inflammatory. As you entered the gallery, you were immediately greeted by the sight of a bed, the sort of thing you might see in an IKEA showroom. Look closer, though: The cover is unmade, strewn with cigarette ash and traces of indiscriminate bodily fluids; empty packs of cigarettes spill out over the crud-strewn blue carpet next to it, while bottles of spirits and mixers stand upright by its foot, arranged surprisingly neatly given the circumstances; on the floor, there’s a pair of beaten-up novelty slippers, which, in happier times, might have been described as “cute.” Also scattered about is the black-and-gold cardboard support for a pack of Duracell batteries; a wind-up dog, of the sort you might buy in a dollar store; and, most sensational of all, a pair of underwear stained with menstrual blood.
Britain has always had a love-hate relationship with modern art—witness the outrage that greeted the Tate Gallery’s acquisition of Carl Andre’s Equivalent VIII (1966) in the 1970s—but nothing has sparked polemic quite like Emin’s Turner Prize show and its centerpiece, My Bed (1999). It inspired endless (and largely negative) column inches, hours of TV reports, countless “my three-year-old could do that”–type observations, and some bizarre responses from the public. A pair of Chinese performance artists were removed by security guards after jumping on the bed, while one woman in Wales was so outraged that she drove the 200 miles to London specifically to clean up the mess around it. Emin “will never get a boyfriend unless she tidies herself up,” as she told the BBC. Art critics were as harsh as anyone. In the Daily Telegraph, Richard Dorment compared Emin’s work to “unprocessed sewage”; TheGuardian’s Adrian Searle, normally an open-minded writer, described it as “tortured nonsense.”
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Red, White and Fucking Blue, 2002. Tracey Emin Phillips
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I know, I know, I know, 2002. Tracey Emin Phillips
This reaction, I think, largely stemmed from Emin’s frankness about sex—not a subject the British have ever been comfortable discussing—and her personality. As some saw it, a woman artist was not supposed to be a loud, outspoken, and unashamedly working-class troublemaker oblivious to the concept of oversharing; less still, as Emin described herself in the video Tracey the Slut (also on show at the Turner exhibition), “an alcoholic, neurotic, psychotic, self-obsessed whinger.” Yet she transcended this barrage of coded misogyny to become one of Britain’s most successful artists, in the process bulldozing accepted notions of what, or—more to the point—who could be taken seriously in a high-cultural context.
From an entirely personal point of view, the 1999 Turner Prize show was a revelation. At age 10, I visited during the school holidays, and what I saw there had an extraordinary effect. I remember very little about the other nominees (12 Years a Slave director and future Oscar winner Steve McQueen, twin conceptual artists Jane and Louise Wilson, and the kinetic sculptor Steven Pippin) other than the fact that McQueen’s Buster Keaton–referencing film bored me half to death. But Emin’s section of the exhibition remains startlingly fresh in my mind.
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Faithful to My Dreams, 2012. Tracey Emin Alpha 137 Gallery
At that age, I had only the vaguest understanding of adult life, and sex remained an abstract notion, gleaned almost entirely from the bratty, pornographic lexicon of Blink-182 and American Pie. Emin’s work changed all that. In My Bed, I saw a visceral articulation of what I later learned was known as “depression,” a picture of total emotional paralysis as immediate as any in modern art. But the films were what really worked on me. Suddenly, sex seemed much more than a gross-out joke, something that could leave suppurating open wounds on the psyche: after all, Emin had only been a few years older than my 10-year-old self when she had her first abortion. Nobody I knew, and no film, song, or book, had ever alerted me to the existence of the subjects Emin discussed in her work, and the genius of it was that she narrated it all in visuals and language that even the most incurious of pre-teens could understand.
Most shocking of all, however, was the corresponding feeling that I had lost my innocence. Sitting through the hour-long video reel in the show, I suddenly became aware that I was intruding on something so deeply personal that I shouldn’t be watching. Not that I would have known it as such then, but for weeks after visiting, I was wracked with the weird guilt of the voyeur, and a sense that I had crossed a set of tracks into sordid and unmistakably grown-up territory. We all have warped memories of childhood, but I will never forget the horrible realization that from this point on, there was no going back. It was not the most intelligent art exhibition I’ve seen, let alone the best, yet nothing has ever had such a pronounced, disquieting impact on me. Though it features a return to video work, I doubt her new show at White Cube will leave a comparable impression. But regardless of what she produces, however safe or self-parodic her works become, I could never bring myself to get bored of Tracey Emin.
from Artsy News
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biofunmy · 5 years ago
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Hans Haacke, Firebrand, Gets His First U.S. Survey in 33 Years
Anyone who knows much about the defiantly political art of Hans Haacke, filling the New Museum in New York later this month, is bound to feel anxious before meeting the famous firebrand. But when Mr. Haacke showed up for an interview at his dealer’s gallery in Manhattan, what was shocking was his quietude: In sensible sandals, roomy jeans and a staid plaid shirt, the 83-year-old New Yorker answered questions with an amiable, unflappable calm.
Asked about what seems to have been almost an embargo against him among American curators, despite his huge reputation in Europe, he replied, “before they make a move — one that is not quite the norm — they need to consider (and I don’t blame them for that) whether this is good for their personal career.”
Queried on the power of museum donors, a group he has unflinchingly confronted in his art, he replied merely that he “suspects” — and in person, Mr. Haacke never does more than “suspect”— that the power of art to affect viewers’ thinking leaves museum benefactors with “an interest in what is being shown there, and what is not going to be shown there.” And the art some donors would prefer not to see exhibited includes Mr. Haacke’s own.
“He’s just a really nice guy,” said Andrea Fraser, a peer of Mr. Haacke’s known for equally hard-nosed work. “I’ve never seen him be aggressive” — at least not in the flesh, she clarified, acknowledging the aggression in his art.
In 1971, when Mr. Haacke was about to be honored with a survey at the Guggenheim Museum, the show was canceled. Once the director learned that the art on view would include research into questionable real estate dealings, he said there was no way his museum would display such “muckraking.” He fired the survey’s curator, too. Mr. Haacke’s conceptual artwork, “Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971,” made up of photographs, charts and financial histories of buildings on the Lower East Side and Harlem, remains one of his best-known pieces.
“To introduce something that deals with the social and political world that we live in — that was alien,” Mr. Haacke recalled, expressing something like understanding for the predicament he’d created for the Guggenheim. “Maybe I was naïve,” he added, “but I did not expect that this would cause problems.”
Mr. Haacke admits that the furor around the cancellation helped establish him as an art-world force, but in a rare moment of personal revelation, he also mentioned what it cost him: “It was not easy. We had a two-year-old child. I had an adjunct position at Cooper Union. I could not sell my stuff — it was hard.”
It looks like American museums have never quite forgiven Mr. Haacke for his early transgressions. It has been 33 years since his last U.S. survey — and that was also at the New Museum, when it was a much more modest place than today. But Mr. Haacke doesn’t blame curators for not risking art from a wild-card. “Who knows what I’ll do?” he asked, allowing himself a sly smile.
“More than risk, we felt it was important to do this show,” said Massimiliano Gioni, co-curator of the New Museum retrospective, who hopes the survey will establish Mr. Haacke as “the artist who has opened the doors to a world outside,” making art for much more than art’s sake. Gary Carrion-Murayari, the show’s other curator, said that when they first offered it to Mr. Haacke, “it was the most surprised and happy we’ve ever seen an artist be.”
A centerpiece of the retrospective will be the work that lost Mr. Haacke his Guggenheim solo. Mr. Gioni reads the 300 documents in it as a kind of detective story, with Mr. Haacke as a gumshoe “going out into the city and revealing forces that are hidden.” It went on to teach several generations of artists that pure information could count as art. Also, that the most pointed social critique had as much claim on museum space as any pretty object. The barbed work that’s so common today descends from Mr. Haacke’s.
Mr. Gioni said that it was one of Mr. Haacke’s most polemical assaults on the establishment that first set the New Museum on the road to his survey. In 2015, the artist’s “Gift Horse,” a huge bronze skeleton of a thoroughbred, began its 18-month stay on a long-empty plinth in London’s Trafalgar Square. The square’s three other plinths bear classic monuments to a king and two generals, making Mr. Haacke’s riderless, fleshless mount a counterweight to such celebrations of Great Men. One of the horse’s front legs came wrapped in an LED display that carried the latest U.K. stock-market report. When “Gift Horse” goes up at the New Museum, the numbers will come from Wall Street.
The New Museum will be hosting still more Haackian critique in a recent piece called “We (All) Are the People,” enlarged and tweaked for the retrospective. The words of its title will parade across banners on the museum’s entrance wall in the languages of recently arrived New Yorkers from such places as Latin America, Vietnam and Haiti, a nation Mr. Haacke feels has been singled out for opprobrium by the president.
But the imperturbable Mr. Haacke is reluctant to attack collectors’ preference for the attractive and uncontroversial over tough work like his. “They have to consider, ” he said, “when they have friends in — coming for dinner and cocktails and so forth — that unless they are of their particular political clan, they don’t want to get into a big argument.” Speaking with Mr. Haacke, it can sometimes feel as though his art has absorbed all his ire, leaving the man himself free to adopt a more distanced, impartial view.
“There was a kind of clinical accountability to his way of talking about art,” remembered James Leary, thinking back on the classes he took with Mr. Haacke in 2002, at the very end of his 35-year career at Cooper Union college in New York. Mr. Leary and another student of Mr. Haacke’s named Seth Cameron went on to help found an influential collective called The Bruce High Quality Foundation, which, with Mr. Haacke as father figure, has addressed art-world hypocrisy. Mr. Cameron remembered being especially impressed by his teacher’s determination to keep the spotlight on his art, to the point of refusing to ever have his face appear in print (not even for this article). The pair remember being surprised to find Mr. Haacke’s politics mostly absent from his actual talk and teaching.
“I feel uncomfortable to be seen running around with a clenched fist,” Mr. Haacke explained.
At the New Museum, not every piece will be overtly political. One floor will be devoted to 1960s works that explore physical and natural systems and human impacts on them — easy-to-like works that, among Mr. Haacke’s fans, are the equivalent of the early, “funny” films of Woody Allen. A 1966 piece lets us watch a rod of ice grow and shrink depending on the humidity released into the gallery by visitors. In 1972, when a German sewage plant and factory were pouring effluent into a river, Mr. Haacke set up pumps and filters to clean a tiny sample of its water. Mr. Gioni pointed out that today, as we confront systemic threats to our planet, such early pieces seem prescient.
Mr. Haacke first revealed a commitment to exploring social systems in a talk he gave in the 1968, as he found himself reeling from the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. Faced with that, he said, artists could only realize “how unsuited their endeavors are for making society more humane.” And ever since, he’s taken society on.
Mr. Haacke’s political awareness has deep roots. He was born in Cologne in 1936, to a father who lost his job for refusing to join the Nazi party He spent his childhood amid the terrors of World War II. For art school, he took care to choose one of the few West German institutions that still held to the Bauhaus ideals that left artists “very much involved in the society in which they worked,” as he put it. The school was in Kassel, a bomb-flattened town by the East German border. In 1961, Mr. Haacke came to the U.S. on a Fulbright fellowship and settled in New York four years later.
SINCE THE CANCELED Guggenheim survey, Mr. Haacke’s gimlet eye has often strayed from the ills outside museums to the politics inside them. “Whether artists like it or not, artworks are always ideological tokens, even if they don’t serve identifiable clients by name,” Mr. Haacke once said.
A 1975 piece in the New Museum exhibition quotes David Rockefeller, a longtime trustee of the Museum of Modern Art, on how a company’s involvement in culture can deliver “extensive publicity and advertising, a brighter public reputation, and an improved corporate image.”
A 1985 work looks at the relationship between sales of fuel to apartheid forces by Mobil oil and the company’s support for African art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; it couples a statement from Mobil defending those sales with a pitch from the museum on how sponsorship can provide “a creative and cost effective answer to a specific marketing objective.” Such works made Mr. Haacke the godfather of the art movement now called Institutional Critique.
“He’s been a major influence on me, and an inspiration,” said Ms. Fraser, chair of the art department at University of California, Los Angeles, and the most eloquent of institutional critics.
This summer at the Whitney Museum of American Art, it was hard not to feel echoes of Mr. Haacke when artists protested a board member’s ties to a company that produces tear gas.
But his own work is still and always art, not activism. “Of course, I don’t believe that artists really wield any significant power,” he once said. “At best, one can focus attention.”
That brings Mr. Haacke close to many great artists in the Western tradition. The medieval painter Ambrogio Lorenzetti “focused attention” on the evils of bad government; Caravaggio showed us cardsharps and torturers; Goya made heart-rending prints of the evils of war — and none of them ever thought that such ills would end once they’d revealed them.
It’s hard not to notice that nothing in Mr. Haacke’s show probes the New Museum itself, despite its history of anti-union measures, a board drawn from members of the 1 percent and a coming expansion that may demand appeasing donors.
Mr. Haacke admitted that his fires may have cooled. “I’m too old by now — I’m 83,” he said, adding, “What I read every day is very upsetting, but I don’t have that much energy anymore.”
But he also hinted (that sly smile again) that the checklist to a Haacke exhibition is never final. So do confirm the show’s detail before heading out to Mr. Haacke’s latest retrospective. It’s never too late for a cancellation.
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nofomoartworld · 8 years ago
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Hyperallergic: The Trials of a Hot-Pink Sunbather
Ohad Meromi, “Sunbather” (2016), cast bronze, industrial paint; commissioned by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs’ Percent for Art program, the Department of Transportation, and the New York City Economic Development Corporation (courtesy the artist, photo by Kristof Wickman)
After inching through the public art gamut for nearly three years, undergoing numerous trials by committee and verbal hazing by dissident locals, last fall Ohad Meromi finally unveiled his public sculpture “Sunbather” (2016) to the world.
This ambiguous sunbathing humanoid is endowed with neither gender nor age. Its dimensions approximate the chassis of a Fresh Direct delivery truck. It’s made of about 400 pounds of bronze. It looks like something a pre-schooler might construct out of hot-pink pipe cleaners, magnified a millionfold.
The work has not been installed in a contemplative, tranquil nook like so many pieces in the nearby, walled-in sculpture garden of the Noguchi Museum, which has managed to remain invisible for decades now. Nor, does it occupy a weathered pier just past Socrates Sculpture Park, heroically turning to rust like one of the gargantuan Mark DiSuvero abstractions there. . “Sunbather” is not so sublime. It has been plopped down in the middle of Jackson Avenue in a rapidly gentrifying part of Long Island City, Queens, between four lanes of traffic (not including turning lanes). At rush hour, it seems to revel in a cloud of Volkswagen fumes, as irreverent as someone still smoking Marlboro Reds.
The sculpture was commissioned by New York’s Department of Cultural Affairs through its Percent for Art Program, which has been one of the most prominent public art organizations in New York City. Since 1982, the program has pursued its mission to allocate one percent of the yearly budget of city-funded construction projects to the realization of large-scale public artworks. With this one percent, a few artful human beings are brought to the table with many an artless human being to take part in the urbanism conversation.
But the artless — the developers focused on the bottom line rather than the top of the line — have also benefited from this one percent, receiving a boost by the big-hearted Dostoyevskian idiots of the world who transform uninspiring city plots into destinations for investment.
As Meromi’s “Sunbather” does its thing in the middle of Jackson Avenue, it also broadcasts the message, “Long Island City has arrived!” — which is code for: the idiots (the artists) have thrown in the towel and vacated; the industrial property is now ripe for the bidding war.
Ohad Meromi, “Sunbather” (2016), cast bronze, industrial paint; commissioned by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs’ Percent for Art program, the Department of Transportation, and the New York City Economic Development Corporation (courtesy the artist, photo by Kristof Wickman)
Contemplating a work of art in this extraordinarily unsexy part of Queens, as opposed to, say, the ritzy Seagrams Plaza in midtown Manhattan, reminds me that the “everyman” does still exist. “Sunbather” is not there as eye-candy for the out-to-lunch investment banker or the pack of Swiss tourists caught in all-day gridlock between MoMA, the Whitney, and the New Museum. It is there for the un-arty, un-culturally-sophisticated working-class resident, 9-to-5 laborer, and just plain old commuter, who populates our city’s outer boroughs and its 24-hour circulatory system.
This perspective on the city reminds me of Hokusai’s “Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji” from the 1830’s, the famed woodblock series celebrating quotidian life. In one of the most famous views, we witness the exact moment a gust of wind blows a stack of paper out of a person’s hand. One forgets about the stoic mountain looming far from the action. In other images, the mountain’s tip just barely peeks over the horizon line, as if to say: whoever you are, however far way from the mountain you are in this sprawling landscape, you are still part of the picture. Mount Fuji is just as centralizing as the tallest steeple in any hilltop town, or the highest skyscraper in any financial center. The toothpick of Freedom Tower (whatever its called), asserting its authority all the way out to Coney Island, is our Mount Fuji.
“Sunbather” seems to indulge this premise. Like Hokusai’s prints, Meromi’s sculpture bathes us in life on the outskirts. But however it may undermine the ivory tower of the art cabal, it also, paradoxically, fulfills the dream of another variety of plutocratic mindset. Here, I refer to the multitude of real-estate agents who have achieved an expertise at exploiting artists in order to transform the perception of such peripheries as far more central, and thus far more expensive, than they were before the installment of the artwork.
* * *
Art’s beauty (or repulsion) lies, as they say, in the eye of the beholder, and Meromi’s “Sunbather” is no exception. Its lumpy, anatomically incorrect distribution of body mass is not exactly walking off with the best-on-the-beach trophy. Yet, it’s hard to say precisely which of its displeasing aspects has rubbed so many people the wrong way.
When the work was announced back in 2014, the artist and the Department of Cultural Affairs were slowly backed into a corner by local residents who objected to being left out of the machinations of exactly how $515,000 taxpayer dollars were poised to leave them with a man-who-fell-to-earth. The locals demanded inclusion on the vetting process, and as a result the commentary floodgates sprang open.
In the meantime, Meromi’s work had already been selected by a panel of arts professionals and representatives from the Council Member’s Office and Community Board. It was somewhat late in the game (March 2015) for the sculpture (and its creator) to face the nearly 300 local residents who gathered for a town hall meeting at MoMA PS1 to air their grievances.
The first question from the locals was certainly legitimate: who is this artist the cat dragged in? Meromi, now in his mid-40s, is an Israeli born resident of Brooklyn who has taught at Columbia University and Bard — is a seasoned pro on the international art circuit, having exhibited his work all over the place, and emphatically not the pre-schooler dabbling in pipe cleaners that he may appear at first to be.
But his work, perhaps unintentionally, turns out to be a button pusher. And the pushback it has already received is a healthy sign. One would hope that the outer-borough everyman and -woman would get in on the action, given that it’s the context of their neighborhood that supplies the work with its leverage.
Ohad Meromi, “Sunbather” (2016), cast bronze, industrial paint; commissioned by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs’ Percent for Art program, the Department of Transportation, and the New York City Economic Development Corporation (courtesy the artist, photo by Kristof Wickman)
But leveraging anything in this city is no easy trick, and just because something occupies a public place doesn’t make it visible. If anything, there is a level of reverse psychology to the art of sticking out. Even the people most obviously in need attention, consideration, and help — the broken-down woman with her overstuffed garbage bags in the middle of the subway car, or the man at the intersection with two stumps for legs and a cardboard sign asking for change — tend to blend in as if camouflaged by the city itself.
Or is Meromi’s sculpture less about the ignorable victim and more about a kind of subliminal aberration? That is to say, a magical, almost divine presence? Consider the Babushka Lady — the nickname given to the unknown woman caught in the Zapruder film of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy — so called from the headscarf she was wearing as she stood in the middle of the grassy knoll, which is similar to those worn by elderly Russian women (babushka literally means “grandmother”). Is she the smoking gun? Ask Oliver Stone.
In its long life as a permanent fixture on Jackson Avenue, Meromi’s “Sunbather” will go through phases of being seen and unseen. It may stick out lie a sore thumb for one generation, and then wear a cloak of invisibility for the next. It will pulsate over time. People will stop seeing it one day and then wake up the next and say: What is that thing, and who made it?
Despite its current conspicuity, the “Sunbather” is quite conventional and conforming. What, after all, could be more traditional than a reclining nude? Every sculpture park and college green in the Western world displays at least one ambiguously reclining form by the likes of Henry Moore or Anthony Caro. Meromi’s sculpture is perfectly in sync with the subject matter of modernity, as well as a nod to so much art history that it’s hard to know where to begin. (The Parthenon’s river gods? Cezanne’s bathers?)
Ironically, I would think that virtually anything other than a reclining pink figure would have been even more controversial. Imagine if Meromi’s sunbather had been a 20-foot-tall standing naked woman with the body type of an R. Crumb model. Or a man flat on his back? And what about the color? If you look at the classic Crayola crayon set, you will find that we still live in a world where the brown crayon is labeled “brown” and the peach crayon is labeled “flesh.”
Meromi has sculpted perhaps the only politically correct human figure that can be made in the sexually and racially-charged climate we are living in. His pink androgyne seems bred for balance in the current topsy-turvy limbo of race and gender polemics.
The work, which is as anatomically out-of-whack as any bather Cezanne ever painted, is not even the point. Given its title, “Sunbather,” Meromi’s imaginary form — displaced from Cezanne’s pastoral arcadian world of Aix-en-Provence — is more evocative of a person who has survived the radiation storm of a Bikini Island A-bomb test than someone out to catch a few rays in the South of France.
While the comments Meromi has received may at first seem shallow, they are in fact quite thought-provoking. Some outspoken critics plainly call it “bad.” Others have labeled it an “ugly piece of poop” and a body sculpted with “used bubble gum.” One art lover wrote: “This looks like you dug up Gumby’s grandmother and threw it on the median.” Gumby’s babushka? That is like totally Grandma-phobic!
Ohad Meromi, preparatory sketch for Sunbather (2014) (courtesy the artist)
At a recent public discussion at The Sculpture Center, Meromi himself used the word “ugly” at least three times to describe his own piece. Clearly he was getting in on the fun of trashing his art, while cleverly deploying his skill at the art of self-deprecation.
This is of course not the first time that a reclining pink nude shocked the public. Consider Manet’s “Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe” (“The Luncheon on the Grass,” 1862/3), as bold and scandalous today as it ever was. Manet’s infamous naked lady sits between two rude dandies who haven’t even bothered to remove their hats. A scantly clad second woman off in the distance is said to be douching in the river, if you can believe that.
Some of the quotes I found from the time that Manet painted his masterpiece are not unlike the current discourse around Meromi’s “Sunbather.” A critic once wrote of the “Luncheon”: “Some seek ideal beauty, Manet seeks ideal ugliness.”
Or consider the other French Realist of painterly shock and awe, Gustave Courbet. Courbet wrote the book on making art to piss off the peanut gallery, or whatever jury happened to be out there. In an 1850 letter to a friend, he wrote: “I will be so outrageous that I’ll give everyone the power to tell me the cruelest truths.” And in reference to the critical reception of his “La Femme au perroquet” (“Woman with a Parrot,” 1866) he once wrote: “I told you a long time ago that I would find a way to give them a fist right in the face. That bunch of scoundrels, they caught it.”
The post The Trials of a Hot-Pink Sunbather appeared first on Hyperallergic.
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free-mormons-blog · 8 years ago
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Archaeology and Our Religion -- Old Testament and Related Studies -- HUGH NIBLEY 1986
Archaeology and Our Religion
Nothing illustrates better than archaeology the inadequacy of human knowledge at any given time. It is not that archaeology is less reliable than other disciplines, but simply that its unreliability is more demonstrable. Meteorology (to show what we mean) is quite as “scientific” as geology and far more so than archaeology—it actually makes more use of scientific instruments, computers, and higher mathematics than those disciplines need to. Yet we laugh at the weatherman every other day; we are not overawed by his impressive paraphernalia, because we can check up on him any time we feel like it: he makes his learned pronouncements—and then it rains or it doesn’t rain. If we could check up on the geologist or archaeologist as easily when he tells us with perfect confidence what has happened and what will happen in the remotest ages, what would the result be? Actually, in the one field in which the wisdom of geology can be controlled, the finding of oil, it is calculated that the experts are proven right only about 10 percent of the time.1 Now if a man is wrong 90 percent of the time when he is glorying in the complete mastery of his specialty, how far should we trust the same man when he takes to pontificating on the mysteries? No scientific conclusion is to be trusted without testing—to the extent to which exact sciences are exact they are also experimental sciences; it is in the laboratory that the oracle must be consulted. But the archaeologist is denied access to the oracle. For him there is no neat and definitive demonstration; he is doomed to plod along, everlastingly protesting and fumbling, through a laborious, often rancorous running debate that never ends.
To make a significant discovery in physics or mathematics or philology, one must first know a good deal about the subject; but the greatest archaeological discoveries of recent years were made by ignorant peasants and illiterate shepherd boys. From that it follows, as the handbooks on archaeology never tire of pointing out, that the proper business of the archaeologist is not so much the finding of stuff as being able to recognize what one has found. Yet even there the specialist enjoys no monopoly. Dr. Joseph Saad, who directed the excavations at Khirbet Qumran, tells of many instances in which the local Arabs were able to explain findings that completely baffled the experts from the West, to the rage and chagrin of the latter. Hence Sir Mortimer Wheeler warns the archaeologist: “Do not ignore the opinion of the uninstructed. ‘Everyone knows as much as the savant. . . .’ Emerson said so and he was right.”2
With everybody getting into the act, it is not surprising that the history of archaeology is largely the story of bitter jealousies and frightful feuds. Archaeology mercilessly accentuates certain qualities characteristic of all research but often glosses over the exact sciences. The elements of uncertainty, surprise, and disappointment, and the pervasive role of speculation and imagination, with all the unconscious conditioning and prejudice that implies, are not merely regrettable defects in archaeology—they are the very stuff of which the picturesque discipline is composed. “What in fact is Archaeology?” asks Sir Mortimer, and answers, “I do not myself really know. . . . I do not even know whether Archaeology is to be described as an art or a science.” Even on the purely technical side, he points out, “There is no right way of digging, but there are many wrong ways.”3
Duel in the Dark
The idea of archaeology as the key to a man’s origin and destiny was introduced as a weapon of anti-clerical polemic in the revolutionary movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Reimar’s “hate-filled pamphlet” on history and the New Testament launched the “scientific” attack on the Bible,4 and when Boucher de Perthes, a child of the French Revolution, found stone “hand-axes” among the flints of Abbeville he published them in five stately volumes entitled, with pontifical finality, “On the Creation.”5 These objects, whose use and origin are still disputed, were to be nothing less than the key to the creation. Such fantastic leaps of the mind reveal the fierce determination of the first modern archaeologists to “get something” on the Bible. It was inevitable that biblical archaeology should become little more than “an offshoot of Darwinism.”6 The great Lamarck, before he even came up with his explanation of the creation, was animated “by a severe . . . philosophical hostility, amounting to hatred, for the tradition of the Deluge and the Biblical creation story, indeed for everything which recalled the Christian theory of nature.”7 And Darwin writes of himself in his twenties: “I had gradually come, by this time, to see that the Old Testament from its manifestly false history of the world and from its attributing to God the feelings of a revengeful tyrant, was no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindoos [sic], or the beliefs of any barbarian. . . . By further reflecting . . . that the more we know of the fixed laws of nature the more incredible do miracles become—that the men at that time were ignorant and credulous to a degree almost incomprehensible to us. . . . This disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but was at last complete. The rate was so slow that I felt no distress, and have never since doubted for a single second that my conclusion was correct.”8
This is a very revealing statement, a rich compound of cliches, a testament of Victorian smugness: “manifestly false . . . revengeful tyrant . . . any barbarian . . . fixed laws of nature . . . never doubted for a single second.” Those are the words of a man who knows all the answers and is proud rather than ashamed of his unflinching loyalty to his adolescent prejudices. Just how much would a young English theology student in the 1820s know about the real history of the world, books of the Hindus, or “the beliefs of any barbarian”? Next to nothing, is putting it mildly, but it was enough to put the stamp of “complete disbelief” on Darwin’s thinking forever after. Students commonly assume that it was the gradual amassing of evidence that in time constrained such men to part company with the Bible. Exactly the opposite is the case: long before they had the evidence, they brought to their researches such an unshakable determination to discredit the book of Genesis that the discovery of the evidence was a foregone conclusion. It was Darwin’s bosom friend and spokesman who blurted out the real issue with characteristic bluntness: “Darwin himself avoided attacking the Bible, but for Huxley, his doughty champion against all comers,” writes J. C. Greene, “the battle against the doctrine of inspiration, whether plenary or otherwise, was the crucial engagement in the fight for evolution and for freedom of scientific enquiry.”9 The battle was against revelation, and evolution was the weapon forged for the conflict. We must not be misled by that inevitable tag about “freedom of scientific enquiry.” When a Tennessee high-school teacher was fired for teaching evolution in 1925, the whole civilized world was shocked and revolted at such barbaric restriction on freedom of thought; yet at the same time there was not an important college or even high school in the country that would hire a man who dared to preach against evolution. Freedom of thought indeed.
The great debate between “science” and “religion” has been a duel in the dark. How do things stand between the picture that “archaeology” gives us of the past and the picture that the scriptures give us? Take the biblical image first: the best efforts of the best artists back through the years to represent a clear picture of things described in the Bible look to us simply comical. Even the conscientious Flemish artists, using the best Oriental knowledge of their time, paint Solomon or Holofernes as boozy Landgraves at a fancy dress ball, while the masters of the Italian Renaissance show their prophets and apostles affecting the prescribed dress and stock gestures of traveling Sophists of the antique world. We are no better today, with our handsome “Bible Lands” books, based on diligent research, showing Jesus or Elijah in the garb of modern Bedouins or Ramallah peasants moving through the eroded terrain of modern Palestine or discoursing beneath arches and gates of Norman and Turkish design. The moral of this is that no matter where we get our information, our picture of the Bible is bound to be out of focus, for it will always be based on inadequate data, and it will always be of our own construction. And at no time did the Christian world have a more distorted picture of the Bible than in the nineteenth century. To the Victorians, creaking with culture and refinement, it was easy and pleasant to assign all other creatures their proper place and station in the world—for that is what evolution does. Their outspoken objection to Mormonism was that it was utterly barbaric, an intolerable affront to an enlightened and scientific age. Huxley declared with true scientific humility that the difference between a cultivated man of his own day and a native of the forest was as great as that between the native and a blade of grass. What possible understanding could these people have of the real Bible world? Taken at face value the Bible was a disgustingly primitive piece of goods—”poor stuff,” John Stuart Mill pronounced it; the work of people “ignorant and credulous to a degree almost incomprehensible to us,” as Darwin said, for this, of course, was the Bible that Darwin rejected: in it he was attacking an image that was the product of his own culture and nothing else.
The Mind’s Eye
Archaeology today “in our universities and schools,” according to Wheeler, “forms innocuous pools of somewhat colorless knowledge—mostly a refined Darwinism—in which our kindergartens are encouraged to paddle.”10 Again, everybody gets into the act. My own children, long before they could read, write, or count, could tell you exactly how things were upon the earth millions and millions of years ago. But did the little scholars really know? “What is our knowledge of the past and how do we obtain it?” asks the eminent archaeologist Stuart Piggott, and answers: “The past no longer exists for us, even the past of yesterday. . . . This means that we can never have direct knowledge of the past. We have only information or evidence from which we can construct a picture.”11 The fossil or potsherd or photograph that I hold in my hand may be called a fact—it is direct evidence, an immediate experience; but my interpretation of it is not a fact, it is entirely a picture of my own construction. I cannot experience ten thousand or forty million years—I can only imagine, and the fact that my picture is based on facts does not make it a fact, even when I think the evidence is so clear and unequivocal as to allow no other interpretation. Archaeology brings home this lesson every day, as Sir Flinders Petrie pointed out, for in no other field does interpretation count for so much.12 “The excavator,” writes Sir Leonard Woolley, “is constantly subject to impressions too subjective and too intangible to be communicated, and out of these, by no exact logical process, there arise theories which he can state, can perhaps support, but cannot prove. . . . They have their value as summing up experiences which no student of his objects and notes can ever share.”13 Yet what makes scientific knowledge scientific is that it can be shared. “There are fires,” writes a leading student of American archaeology, “which man may, or may not, have lit—animals he may, or may not, have killed—and crudely flaked stone objects, which those most qualified to judge think he did not make. By weight of numbers these finds have been built into an impression of probability, but the idol has feet of clay.”14 This is the normal state of things when we are dealing with the past: “If one certainty does emerge from this accumulation of uncertainties,” writes an eminent geologist, “it is the deep impression of the vastness of geologic time.”15 An “accumulation of uncertainties” leaves the student (“by weight of numbers”) with an “impression” which he thereupon labels a “certainty.”
Yet with examples gross as earth to exhort him, the archaeologist is constantly slipping into the normal occupational hazard of letting the theory rather than the facts call the tune. For years archaeologists always assumed that pieces could be chipped from the surface of stones merely by exposure to the burning sun—they never bothered to put their theory to the test, though no one ever was present when the sun did its chipping.16 From Breasted’s Ancient Times, millions of high-school students have learned how primitive man woke one morning in his camp in the Sinai Peninsula to find that bright copper beads had issued from the greenish rocks with which he banked his fire that night. It was not until 1939 that a scientist at Cambridge actually went to the trouble to see if copper could be smelted from an open fire, and discovered that it was absolutely impossible. 17 Nobody had bothered to check up on these simple things—like the Aristotelians who opposed the experimenting of Galileo, the men of science felt no need to question the obvious. If man had been on the earth for, say, 100,000 years, scattered everywhere in tiny groups subsisting on a near-animal level, could we possibly find the cultural and linguistic patterns we do in the world today? After fifty thousand years of local isolation, is it conceivable that languages at opposite ends of the earth should be recognizably related? Only in our day are such elementary questions beginning to be asked—often with surprising and disturbing results. But however vast the accumulation of facts may become, our picture of the past and the future will always be, not partly but wholly, the child of our own trained and conditioned imaginations. “The world will always be different from any statement that science can give of it,” a philosopher of science writes, and he explains: “that is, we are looking for an opportunity to restate any statement which we can give of the world. . . . We are always restating our statement of the world.”18 Scholarship is also an age-old, open-ended discussion in which the important thing is not to be right at a given moment but to be able to enter seriously into the discussion. That I cannot do if I must depend on the opinion of others, standing helplessly by until someone else pronounces a verdict, and then cheering loudly to show that I too am a scholar.
Because interpretation plays an all-important role in it, archaeology has been carried on against a background of ceaseless and acrimonious controversy, with theory and authority usually leading fact around by the nose. If the great Sir Arthur Evans decided eighty years ago that the Minoans and Mycenaeans were not Greeks, then evidence discovered today must be discounted if it shows they were Greeks; if it was concluded long ago that the Jews did not write in Hebrew at the time of Christ, then Hebrew documents from that time if they are discovered today must be forgeries. “Does our time scale, then, partake of natural law?” a geologist wonders. “No. . . . I wonder how many of us realize that the time scale was frozen in essentially its present form by 1840 . . . ? The followers of the founding fathers went forth across the earth and in Procrustean fashion made it fit the sections they found even in places where the actual evidence literally proclaimed denial. So flexible and accommodating are the ‘facts’ of geology.”19 “Science,” said Whitehead, “is our modern-day dogmatism.” There is something cozy and old-fashioned, almost nostalgic, in the archaeology of forty years ago with its invincible meliorism and romantic faith in man’s slow, steady, inevitable onward and upward march. But archaeology is the science of surprises, and the most desperate efforts of accommodation have not been able to discredit the sensational changes of our day.
“One of the most exciting results of the radio-carbon dating,” writes Piggott, ” . . . has been to emphasize how rapidly and severely the environment was modified.”20Extreme and rapid changes of environment have long been anathema to science. “Darwin’s secret, learned from Lyell,”21 according to H. F. Osborn, was (in Lyell’s own words) that “all theories are rejecting that which involves the assumption of sudden and violent catastrophies.”22 In a world of nuclear explosions this seems downright funny, but it “was a perfect expression,” as Egon Friedell has written, “of the English temperament and comfortable middleclass view of the world that refused to believe in sudden and violent metamorphoses, world uprising, and world calamities.” 23 One of the most militant evolutionists of our day says that “it remains true, as every paleontologist knows, that most new species, genera, and families, and nearly all categories above the level of families, appear in the record suddenly, and are not led up to by known, gradual, completely continuous transitional sequences.”24 One wonders why if most species appear on the scene suddenly without millions of years of evolutionary preparation leading up to them, the human race cannot have done the same. “Because it didn’t,” we are told. For a hundred years, thousands of scientists have devoted their lives to proving that it didn’t; yet all they have to offer us as proof to date is a large and cluttered science fair of bizarre and competing models, interesting but mutually damaging.
The New Uniformity
Through the years the writer, who is no archaeologist, has had to keep pretty well abreast of the journals and consult occasionally with archaeologists in order to carry on his own varied projects. Anyone who has any contact at all with what is going on is aware that the significant trend since World War II has been the steady drawing together of far-flung peoples and cultures of antiquity into a single surprisingly close-knit fabric. Early in the present century an “Egyptologist” could make fun of the “amusing ignorance” of the Pearl of Great Price, in which “Chaldeans and Egyptians are hopelessly mixed together, although as dissimilar and remote in language, religion, and locality as are today’s American Indians and Chinese.”25 Today a ten-year-old would be reprimanded for such a statement, since now we know that Chaldeans and Egyptians were “hopelessly mixed together” from the very beginning of history. Even as late as the 1930s so eminent a scholar as T. E. Peet had to exercise extreme caution—suggesting that there might be any resemblance between the literatures of Babylonia, Palestine, Egypt, and Greece.26 Today we know better, as every month establishes more widely and more firmly the common ties that knit all the civilizations of the ancient world together.
A hundred years ago, investigators of prehistory already sensed “the essential unity of the earlier Stone Age cultures throughout the Old World.” From the very beginning of the race “at a given period in the Pleistocene,” writes Piggott, “one can take, almost without selection, tools from South India, Africa and South England which show identical techniques of manufacture and form. . . . What happened at one end of the area seems to be happening more or less simultaneously at the other.”27 I have never seen any attempt to account for this astounding worldwide coordination in the industries of primitive beings who supposedly could communicate to their nearest neighbors only by squeals and grunts. In the mid-nineteenth century the folklorists were beginning to notice that the same myths and legends turned up everywhere in the Old and New Worlds, and philologists were discovering the same thing about languages; today Hockett and Asher are bemused by the “striking lack of diversity in certain features of language” and make the astounding announcement that “phonological systems [of all the languages of the world] show much less variety than could easily be invented by any linguist working with pencil and paper.”28 The same authorities note that “man shows an amazingly small amount of racial diversity,” and pardonably wonder “why human racial diversity is so slight, and . . . why the languages and cultures of all communities, no matter how diverse, are elaborations of a single inherited ‘common denominator.'” 29 With a million years of savagery and hostility, ignorance, isolation, and bestial suspicion to keep them divided, it seems that men should have had plenty of time to develop a vast number of separate “denominators” of language, legend, race, and culture. But that is not the picture we get at all.30
In religion it is the same. It was not until 1930 that a group of researchers at Cambridge cautiously presented evidence for the prevalence through the ancient world of a single pattern of kingship, an elaborate religious-economic-political structure that could not possibly have been invented independently in many places. We do not find, as we have every right to expect, an infinite variety of exotic religious rites and concepts; instead we find a single overall pattern, but one so peculiar and elaborate that it cannot have been the spontaneous production of primitive minds operating in isolation from each other.31
When history begins, “let us say c. 5000 B.C.,” to follow J. Mellaart, “we find throughout the greater part of the Near East . . . villages, market towns . . . and castles of local rulers” widely in touch with each other as “goods and raw materials were traded over great distances.”32 It is essentially the same picture we find right down to the present; and we find it everywhere—if we go to distant China “the life of the Shang [the oldest known] population can have differed little in essentials from that of the populous citystates of the Bronze Age Mesopotamia,”33 or from that of the peasants of the Danube or of “the earliest English farming culture.”34 This is what has come out since World War II. Before that, archaeology had made us progressively aware of the oneness of our world with successive discoveries of Amarna, Ugarit, Boghazkeui, Nuzi, and so on, each one tying all the great Near Eastern civilizations closer and closer together while revealing the heretofore unsuspected presence of great nations and empires as active and intimate participants in a single drama. And the Bible is right in the center of it: the patriarchs who had been reduced to solar myths by the higher critics suddenly turned out to be flesh-and-blood people; odd words, concepts and expressions, and institutions of the Bible started turning up in records of great antiquity; the Hittites, believed to be a myth by Bible scholars until 1926, suddenly emerged as one of the greatest civilizations the world has ever seen. Since then a dozen almost equally great empires have been discovered, and the preliminary studies of each of them have shown in every case that they had more or less intimate ties with the great Classical and Middle Eastern civilizations.35 The picture of ancient civilization as a whole has become steadily broader and at the same time more uniform, so that the growing impression is one of monotony bordering on drabness. Seton Lloyd is depressed by “the drab impersonality of the ‘archaeological ages.'”36 Archaeology gives us, as M. P. Nilsson puts it, “a picture-book without a text”;37 or, in the words of Sir Mortimer, “the archaeologist may find the tub but altogether miss Diogenes.”38 The eager visitor to a hundred recent diggings is fated to discover that people once lived in stone or brick or wooden houses, cooked their food (for they ate food) in pots of clay or metal over fires, hunted, farmed, fished, had children, died, and were buried. Wherever we go, it is just more of the same—all of which we could have assumed in the first place. The romance of archaeology has always resided not in the known but in the unknown, and enough is known today to suggest the terrifying verdict that a great Cambridge scientist pronounced on the physical sciences a generation ago: “The end is in sight.”
And now we come to the crux of the matter. As the tub without Diogenes has nothing to do with philosophy, so archaeology without the prophets has nothing to do with religion. “You cannot,” says Piggott, “from archaeological evidence, inform yourself on man’s ideas, beliefs, fears or aspirations. You cannot understand what his works of art or craftsmanship signified to him.”39 The ancient patriarchs and prophets ate out of ordinary dishes, sat on ordinary chairs, wore ordinary clothes, spoke the vernacular, wrote on ordinary paper and skins, and were buried in ordinary graves. The illusion of the pilgrims to the holy land, Christian, Moslem and Jewish, that this is not so—that is, that contact with such objects by holy men rendered them holy—gave rise to Biblical archaeology at an early time. The Palestine pilgrims from Origen and Gregory to Robinson and Schaff had all been looking for extra-special things, for miraculous or at least wonderful objects. Men who viewed the idea of livingprophets as a base superstition turned to the dead stones of the “Holy Land” for heavenly consolation, and enlisted archaeology in the cause of faith.40 But though archaeology may conceivably confirm the existence of a prophet (though it has never yet done so), it can never prove or disprove the visions that make the prophet a significant figure. Former attempts to explain the scriptures in terms of nature-myths, animism, and psychology had nothing to do with reality.41 What can archaeology tell me about the council in heaven? Nothing, of course—that all happened in another world. The same holds for the creation, taking place as it did at a time and place and in a manner that we cannot even imagine. Then comes the garden of Eden—a paradise and another world beyond our ken. It is only when Adam and Eve enter this world that they come down to our level. Strangely enough, the biblical image is not that of our first parents entering a wonderful new world, but leaving such to find themselves in a decidedly dreary place of toil and tears. Before long the children of Adam are building cities and are completely launched on the familiar and drab routines of civilized living: “dreary” suggests old and tired, and there is nothing fresh or new about the Adamic Age.
On the archaeological side we have Jericho, by general consensus (as of the moment) the oldest city in the world. It emerges abruptly full-blown, with a sophisticated and stereotyped architecture that remains unchanged for twenty-one successive town-levels, and from the first it displays a way of life substantially the same as that carried on by the inhabitants of the nearby towns right down to the present day. This has come as a great surprise; it is not at all consistent with the official model of the onward and upward march of civilization that we all learned about at school. When the civilization of China was rediscovered by European missionaries in the seventeenth century, skeptics and atheists saw in it a crushing refutation of the Bible—here was a great civilization thousands of years older and far richer, wiser, and more splendid than anything Western man had imagined, thriving in complete unawareness of God’s plan of salvation. It was the discovery of such other worlds, such island universes, that was once the concern of archaeology, ever seeking the strange, the marvelous, and the exotic. But now archaeology has found too much; the worlds are there, but they are not isolated—not even China; they are all members of a single community, and by far the best handbook guide to the nature and identity of that community remains the Bible.
NOTES
* “Archaeology and Our Religion,” accompanied by two cover letters dated September 16, 1965, was originally intended to be included in the “I Believe” series in the Instructor.
1. Sloan, Raymond D., “The Future of the Exploration Geologist—Can He Meet the Challenge?” Geotimes 3, no. 1 (1958), p. 6. “Only one wildcat well in nine discovers oil or gas: only one in forty-four is profitable.” In spite of scientific methods, “the high risks . . . are unusual in the business world.” (Sloan, pp. 6, 7.)
2. Wheeler, Sir Robert Eric Mortimer, Archaeology from the Earth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), p. 50.
3. Wheeler, p. 2.
4. Jeremias, Joachim, “The Present Position in the Controversy Concerning the Problem of the Historical Jesus,” Expository Times 69 (1958): 333.
5. Rapport, Samuel, and Helen Wright, eds., Archaeology (New York: New York University Library of Science, 1963), pp. 18—20.
6. Gall, August Freiherrn von, Basileia tou Theou (Heidelberg: Winter, 1926), p. 12, discussing the Wellhausen school.
7. Gillespie, Charles Coulston, “Lamarck and Darwin in the History of Science,” American Scientist 46 (Dec. 1958): 397.
8. Darwin, Charles, Autobiography (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1959), describing the period between 1836 and 1839. Darwin was born in 1809.
9. Green, John C., “Darwin and Religion,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 103 (1959): 717.
10. Wheeler, p. 23.
11. Piggott, Stuart, ed., The Dawn of Civilization (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961), p. 11.
12. Petrie, William Matthew Flinders, Social Life in Ancient Egypt (1923), part 3, pp. 80, 81.
13. Woolley, Leonard, Digging Up the Past (New York: Crowell, 1954), p. 119.
14. Bushnell, G.H.S., “The Birth and Growth of New World Civilization,” in Piggott, p. 377.
15. Swinnerton, Henry Hurd, The Earth Beneath Us (Boston: Little-Brown, 1955), p. 15.
16. Morgan, Jacques Jean Marie de, La Prehistoire Orientale (Paris: Paul Geuthner, 1925), II, pp. 4ff., discusses this phenomenon, with pictures of “hatchet-shaped seile chipped by the heat of the sun.” (Fig. 2.)
17. Coghlan, H. H., “Some Experiments on the Origin of Early Copper,” Man 39 (1939): 106—8.
18. Mead, George H., Movements of Thought in the 19th Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1936), p. 508, discussing Bergson.
19. Spieker, Edmund M., “Mountain-Building Chronology and Nature of Geologic Time Scale,” Bulletin of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists 40 (August 1956): 1803; cf. Norman D. Newell, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 103 (1959): 265.
20. Piggott, p. 40.
21. Osborn, Henry Fairfield, The Origin and Evolution of Life (New York: Scribner’s, 1918), p. 24.
22. Lyell, Charles, Principles of Geology (New York: John Murray, 1872) 1:318.
23. Friedell, Egon, Kulturgeschichte Aegyptens und des alten Orients (München: C.H. Beck, 1953), p. 105.
24. Simpson, George Gaylord, The Major Features of Evolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1953), p. 360.
25. Peters, John, in Rev. Franklin S. Spalding, Joseph Smith as a Translator (Salt Lake City: Arrow Press, 1912), p. 28.
26. Peet, Thomas Eric, A Comparative Study of the Literatures of Egypt, Palestine and Mesopotamia (London: British Academy, 1931), pp. 52f., 96f., 127—29, 113—16.
27. Piggott, Stuart, Prehistoric India (London: Cassell, 1950), p. 26.
28. Hockett, Charles F., and Robert Ascher, “The Human Revolution,” American Scientist 52 (1964): 90.
29. Hockett, p. 90.
30. Hockett and Ascher insist not only that man had already achieved the essence of language and culture at least a million years ago (p. 89), but that “the crucial developments must have taken place once, and then spread” by that time, since “true diversity is found in more superficial aspects of language” but not in the fundamental aspect (p. 90). That is, all the languages of the world have retained recognizable ties to a parent language from which they separated over a million years ago! Since C. S. Coon puts the age of the human race at about 50,000 years, this is quite a thing.
31. Lord Raglan, The Origins of Religion (London: Watts and Co., 1949).
32. Mellaart, James, “The Beginning of Village and Urban Life,” in Piggott, Dawn of Civilization, p. 62.
33. Watson, William, in Piggott, p. 271.
34. Sieveking, Gale, “China: The Civilization of a Single People,” in Edward Bacon, Vanished Civilizations of the Ancient World (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963), this being the Windmill Hill site of 2750 B.C.
35. For a good survey, see Sieveking’s paper in the preceding footnote, which deals in major civilizations of which we have virtually no history but all of which are definitely tied to the great civilizations of antiquity.
36. Seton, Lloyd, “The Early Settlement of Anatolia,” in Piggott, p. 185.
37. Nilsson, Martin Persson, Minoan and Mycenaean Religion (Lund: C. W. K. Gleerup, 1950), p. 7.
38. Wheeler, p. 214.
39. Piggott, p. 15.
40. We have discussed this in the Jewish Quarterly Review 50 (1959): 99ff., 109ff.
41. Lord Raglan, p. 38.
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classicalexaminer · 8 years ago
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A Brief Note on Confessions
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Pictured: “The Conversion of St. Augustine” by Fra Angelico. 1430-1435.
Augustine was, by no means, an indoctrinated Roman Catholic nor a cradle to grave devotee to Christianity. Perhaps the most impressive aspect of his life derives from his unrelenting and introspective reflection on what, in his heart, he held to be true. His intellectual evolution, from a more than capable student with no religious or philosophical affiliation, to an impassioned adherent of Manichaeism, to a skeptical Neoplatonic admirer, to, finally, a converted Catholic and later bishop, demonstrates the informed seriousness with which he contemplated the Truth. Augustine was thirty-one years old when, in a Milanese garden, he heard a childlike voice telling him to “Pick up and read, pick up and read,” after which he picked up Paul’s Epistle to the Romans and read the first lines he saw: “Not in riots and drunken parties, not in eroticism and indecencies, not in strife and rivalry, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh in its lusts” (Romans 13:13-14). “I neither wished nor needed to read further,” Augustine writes, speaking of his conversion. “All the shadows of doubt were dispelled.” Indeed, it was the Word working through the sudden flash of an immediately transformative revelation that prompted Augustine to, at long last, embrace the Catholicism of his mother, Monica. However, this epiphany only came to the most prolific of the Church Fathers after he spent nearly a decade as a Hearer for the Manichaeans, years studying the Platonism of Plotinus, and listening to the intellectual sermons of Ambrose, bishop at Milan. “Late have I loved you,” Augustine writes to God. But “you touched me, and I am set on fire to attain the peace which is yours.” For the rest of his life, Augustine more than made up for his belatedness.
More than a detailed account of the saint’s life, the official positions he held, or the friends he made, Confessions is the story of Augustine’s ideas, beliefs, and philosophical and religious assertions. While Augustine still incorporates these other, more ordinary elements in antiquity’s most famous autobiography, they are secondary. Whereas Augustine may spend one paragraph explaining what or how he did something, he spends four or more paragraphs explaining why he did it, what the intellectual consequences were of such an action, and why he looks back on that time of his life with shame. This approach, while perhaps unusual to the modern reader, nevertheless affords us unrestricted access to Augustine’s brilliant mind and most intimate thoughts. With Confessions, Augustine tells all. He practically leaves no stone unturned with respect to his intellectual and spiritual odyssey, even if it means writing at considerable length about his adolescent sexual exploits and inability to walk away from life’s carnal pleasures. “I was an unhappy young man,” he says, “wretched at the beginning of my adolescence when I prayed you for chastity and said: ‘Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.’ I was afraid you might hear my prayer quickly, and that you might too rapidly heal me of the disease of lust which I preferred to satisfy rather than suppress.” The tone here reminds one of another passage from Paul’s Epistle to the Romans: “For we know that the law is spiritual; but I am of the flesh, sold into slavery under sin. I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate” (Romans 7:14-15). In fact, Augustine wrote an exegesis on Paul’s epistle only a few years before publishing Confessions. While his unique interpretation of this specific passage makes any comparison between Paul and himself impossible, one can still see clearly how similar these men were, flawed as all humans are and pointedly aware of their shortcomings. “The thoughts with which I meditated about you were like the efforts of those who would like to get up but are overcome by deep sleep and sink back again,” Augustine says of his reluctance to convert, referencing an unwillingness that we all have experienced at some point. “The law of sin is the violence of habit by which even the unwilling mind is dragged down and held.”
The autobiographical portion of Confessions occupies nine of its thirteen books. And it is these last four books—on memory, time and eternity, creation and the formation of matter, and the church as it is found in Genesis—in which Augustine demonstrates the real profundity of his thinking. Earlier in his autobiographical account, Augustine notes that he learned that Catholic theologians “understood the text concerning man being made by you in your image (Genesis 1:26) not to mean that they believed and thought you to be bounded by the form of a human body,” contrary to what Manichaean polemic against the Church asserted and with which he was intimately familiar. For Augustine, the notion that God is Being and human persons, insofar as we exist, reflect that Being, albeit in a corruptible form, came as a sort of shock. He quickly realized that orthodox Christians were not the unintellectual philistines he once condemned them as and discovered that he had “been barking for years not against the Catholic faith but against mental figments of physical images.” “What I ought to have verified by investigation,” he readily admits, “I had simply asserted as an accusation.” Thus, the last four books of Confessions consist of an extended exegetical analysis of the first verses of Genesis in an attempt to offer an appropriate allegorical interpretation of a text Augustine first thought quite foolish and amateurish. Following Ambrose, whom he heard figuratively interpret “many difficult passages in the Old Testament scriptures,” Augustine brilliantly finds the Trinity, human persons, and the Church apparent in the opening lines of Genesis. In doing so, he makes complex assertions about the physical and intelligible realms, the difficulty with dividing time into past, present, and future, and the immutable, transcendent nature of God, the supreme and eternal Good.
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Pictured: The earliest known portrait of Augustine. Late 6th cent. CE. Library at the Lateran Palace in Rome.
Augustine is prepared to answer those who contest his beautiful allegorical interpretation of the first verses of Genesis. While I simply cannot do justice to his detailed response here, I nevertheless maintain that his remarks on biblical hermeneutics—which, in their own right, together mark an important contribution to the field of literary theory—are some of the most sublime and stimulating in all of Confessions.
“What difficulty is it for me when these words can be interpreted in various ways, provided only that the interpretations are true? What difficulty is it for me, I say, if I understand the text in a way different than from someone else, who understands the scriptural author in another sense? . . . As long as each interpreter is endeavoring to find in the holy scriptures the meaning of the author who wrote it, what evil is it if an exegesis he gives is one shown to be true by you, light of all sincere souls, even if the author whom he is reading did not have that idea and, though he had grasped a truth, had not discerned that seen by the interpreter?”
Thus, Augustine allows for a multiplicity of interpretations, so long as they are true—and this is an important caveat—when it comes to biblical hermeneutics. For Augustine, while the debate over the truth of an interpretation is legitimate, a debate over whether an author meant this or that and that therefore this or that interpretation is the only true explanation of the text is not at all legitimate. “I see of course that all the propositions stated above can be true statements,” Augustine writes, referring to a number of interpretations of the first verses of Genesis he has just examined. “But which of them Moses had in mind in writing these words, I do not see so clearly.” Nevertheless, that which Moses did have in mind is still important. “I do not doubt that what he saw was true and that his articulation of it in words was appropriate,” Augustine concludes. One can only admire such a nuanced stance.
 Confessions marks Augustine as one of the most creative theologians and philosophers of Late Antiquity. Since its publication in the late fourth century, countless bishops, theologians, and even existentialist philosophers have drawn upon his autobiography for inspiration, instruction, and its bold ideas. As a student of Augustine, I can only give Confessions my highest praise. It may even prove to be life-changing.
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