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August 6, 2006
Trois Coleurs: Rouge
The third, and perhaps the best of the trio, Rouge is the story of doubles and a kind of romance. The story really gets underway when our heroine accidentally runs into a dog. She picks up the dog and takes it to her owner who turns out not to care much. It is the relationship with the owner that causes things to get interesting.
The owner is an ex-judge. He spends his time listening to the phone calls of others, spying on them. This judge is double in many particulars of his story by a young man who is taking his exam to become a judge.
It was in the course of this film that I realized that the enlightenment trinity Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité has actually, in the course of the three films been transmuted into the three theological virtues Faith, Hope, Love.
In Bleu, the young woman has lost everything that she lived for, she's lost all sense of self and all desire to continue an existence and yet cannot find itself in her to end her own life. So she decides to live a life without connections. It is her belief and her inner strength that brings her back to the real world, to an attempt at communion with humanity, to love and charity. In the Blanc, the man getting a divorce hangs on perpetually to the hope that his ex-wife really does love him. Time after time this hope is dashed, but ultimately it proves itself in unexpected ways. And finally, in the most compassionate of the three, the young heroine in Rouge brings life to an old man and to those around her through her simple compassion, love, and humanity. At the end of this film the three virtues are united and they stand alone in an odd juxtapositioning.
The three films are well worth seeing and they must be seen, for full impact together or at least in close proximity. I'm glad that I wasn't waiting a year between films when these came out because the freshness and the meaning would not have come through as clearly as it does watching them all within a week or so.
High recommended for ADULT audiences. Some of the finest film-making I've seen in a while.
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Isn't It Romantic?
Ron Hansen labeled this book An Entertainment perhaps an with an eye to sidestepping the criticism I am about to levy--the book is a wildly improbable blend of story-telling and musical comedy wrapped up into a highly entertaining, fluffy bon-bon of a read.
The difficulties the book presents are numerous, if one were to take the work seriously at all. The coincidences are too numerous to list. The prat-falls, gags, and jokes, are very evidently an hommage to Preston Sturges who is actually mentioned in the course of the book. That our French Heroine, who at times has difficulty understanding English, would know it well enough to sing Isn't It Romantic and that a Nebraska cowboy would do the same is, shall we say, odd?
But those are the kinds of things one says about a work meant to be taken seriously. Hansen disarms and forewarns us--so I retract my criticism of the other day. A person acquainted with his work coming to this novel might well be completely disoriented by the experience.
As a light romance and a smart comedy, the book works very well. Recommended for light entertainment and for Hansen completists.
Posted by Steven Riddle at 12:25 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Uzumaki
Variously translated Spiral or Vortex, Uzumaki is yet another one of those Japanese Horror films that is disturbing or odd and at some place inaccessible to western Audiences. It provides the same mysterious non-explanation of events that haunts films like Ringu and Gu-on and so the film comes off more as a nihilist dadaist exercise in film-making. Indeed, as I watched it, the Dadaist classic, Vormittagsspuk which I saw in a short film festival with Un Chien Andalou.
The film centers on the obsession of first one character and then many others with spirals and spiral patterns. The real infection in the film is this obsession which gradually turns people into giant snails and sends the smoke from their cremations into the atmosphere in anti-tornadoes.
I don't know what the point of this film was or what I was supposed to derive from it in terms of horror or even sense. However, that said, I did enjoy it on its own terms. There was a kind of surrealist/dada sensibility to it that permeated it in a far more profound way than anything since the 1930s. The events make no real sense, and yet they are compelling and interesting to watch and the film plays out to an inconclusive conclusion that is its beginning.
While not particularly frightening, it is eerie and unsettling, and perhaps on some level even thought-provoking.
Recommended for fans of Japanese Cinema, Horror Movie Completists, and Dadaist/Surrealists. Wouldn't recommend for anyone younger than teens.
For additional comments on films mentioned in this review:
and
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The Joy of the Transfiguration
and the horror of the disfigurement.
from Hiroshima Diary
Michihiko Hadhiya, M.D.[From the entry for August 6]
Clad in drawers and undershirt, I was sprawled on the living room floor exhausted because I had just spent a sleepless night on duty as an air warden in my hospital.
Suddenly, a strong flash of light startled me--and then another. So well does one recall little things that I remember vividly how a stone lantern in the garden became brilliantly lit and I debated whether this light was caused by a magnesium flare or sparks from a passing trolley.
Garden shadows disappeared. The view where a moment before all had been so bright and sunny was now dark and hazy. Through swirling dust I could barely discern a wooden column that had supported one corner of my house. It was leaning crazily and the roof sagged dangerously.
Moving instinctively, I tried to escape, but rubble and fallen timbers barred the way. By picking my way cautiously I managed to reach the roka and stepped down into my garden. A profound weakness overcame me, so I stopped to regain my strength. To my surprise I discovered that I was completely naked. How odd! Where were my drawers and undershirt?
What had happened?
All over the right side of my body I was cut and bleeding. A large splinter was protruding from a mangled wound in my thigh, and something warm trickled into my mouth. My cheek was torn, I discovered as I felt it gingerly, with the lower lip laid wide open. Embedded in my neck was a sizable fragment of glass which I matter-of-factly dislodged, and with the detachment of one stunned and shocked I studied it and my blood-stained hand.
Where was my wife?
A small memorial to a monumental folly that we still try to think of reasons and ways to justify. We had entered into the age of almost unimaginable cruelty at the beginning of the century, but this marked a new plateau, a plateau that has stayed with us from that day to our own. A plateau that it were better had it never been reached.
Posted by Steven Riddle at 8:39 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
Who Does the Father's Will?
Who better does the Father's will--the one who knows all manner of doctrine and all the subtlety thereof and who can explain it and argue its fine points with other and who completely assents to it, but lives a life in direct contradiction to every one of its tenets?
Or,
The person completely ignorant of doctrine, unable to discern or explain the divine hypostatic union, completely unaware of predestination and justification, unable to make an intelligible statement about doctrine, who yet lives it to the hilt--feeding the hungry and giving to the poor?
Too much knowledge stuffs the head and the ego--it fills us not with knowledge of the Divine, but with knowledge of our own self-importance. Knowledge stored in the head but never acted upon is less than useless. And action in complete ignorance of the whys and wherefores, the rules and the statutes governing it, that action which is within God's will is the action of love, the action of the saving Christ, shown in a way no words will every tell.
Posted by Steven Riddle at 8:52 PM | Comments (9) | TrackBack
Farewell to Theology
I tire of theologians who strain at a gnat and swallow a camel. Those who go on and on about how masturbation is a sin and anyone engaging in it is going to Hell, but then come up with terms to justify the slaughter of the innocents. Theology is supposed to be the divine science, but it is a deeply flawed human endeavor that more often than not seeks to justify the ways of humankind to God.
No more with "just wars" and debates about prudential judgments and subtleties about who can be killed under what circumstances. All justifications for continuing as we have always done, hard of heart and head. No more--I will have no more of it. Tiresome and puffed up like a blowfish and ultimately empty of anything not already revealed, but tricked out to look like a king's wardrobe--indeed, the very Emperor's New Clothes themselves.
Theology--the science of straining at a gnat to swallow a camel. If I thought that great love of God resulted from it, it would have some use. But what I find more often than not is greater love of self and greater love of knowledge. Those who pursue theology often do so as a means of fleeing God.
A pox on it all. Holy Mother church teaches and her word informs more often despite her theologians than because of them. The Church teaches through the Holy Spirit and through the inspired scripture, but when we start dragging in the inventions of the theologians--annulments and just war and original sin and limbo, one quickly loses one's way in the thicket. A fog of confusion, doubt, and questions that lead to no real end.
The more I read of them, the less I need to read of them and the weaker any faith I may have grows. My faith survives despite the theologian's best attempts to extinguish it entirely--to fill my head with the God who allows the slaughter of children and of innocents to further the goals of any particular regime.
Posted by Steven Riddle at 8:57 PM | TrackBack
The One Thing Necessary
delightfully exposed.
from The Saints' Guide to Happiness
Robert EllsbergWhat is the "one thing necessary"? Its form is different for each person, though its content is always the same. It is "to fulfill our own destiny according to God's will, to be what God wants us to be."
Tomorrow, if there's time, I'll copy out the passage about happiness itself.
Posted by Steven Riddle at 9:07 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 7, 2006
A Useful Definition of Happiness
from The Saints' Guide to Happiness
Robert EllsbergBut what if happiness is not subjective, a question of how we feel, or a matter of chance, something that simply happens? What if it is more like an objective condition, something analogous to bodily health? Aristotle took this view. The word he used for happiness, eudaimonia, is not a matter of feelings but a way of being, a certain fullness of life. Happiness, for Aristotle, has to do with living in accordance with the rational and moral order of the universe. It is more like the flourishing of a healthy plant than like Freud's pleasure principle. Because it is rooted in habits of the soul, it is the fruit of considerable striving. But for the same reason it is not subject to the vagaries of fortune.
The Greek-writing authors of the New Testament did not use Aristotle's word for happiness. The drew on another word, makarios, which refers to the happiness of the gods in Elysium. In the Gospel of Matthew this is the word that Jesus uses to introduce his Sermon on the Mount, "Happy are the poor in spirit. . . . Happy are the meek. . . . Happy are they who mourn. . . ." St. Jerome, who prepared the Latin translation in the fourth century, used beatus, a word the combines the connotations of being happy and blessed. Hence these verses are known as the Beatitudes. Forced to choose, most English translators have opted--probably wisely--for the more familiar "Blessed are. . . " The Beatitudes, after all, are not about "smiley faces" or feeling happy. They are not about feelings at all. They are about sharing in the life and spirit--the happiness--of God. In that spirit a disciple (like Jesus himself) could experience mourning, suffering, and loss while remaining "blessed"--happy, that is, in the most fundamental sense.
Happiness, as spoken of in the gospels and in the Bible is not of the moment. It isn't an instant of good feeling. Rather, happiness is the way of living as God would have us live. Outside of God everything is ephemeral, fleeting. Ecclesiastes would tell us that all is vanity, vanity. "If the Lord does not build a house, then in vain do the builders labor."
Happiness comes from what we do, not how we feel. That elation or good-feeling we sometimes experience is a pale shadow of true happiness that becomes apparent only in the light of eternity. Striving after anything else is in vain--only in obedience to His commandments and His word is happiness to be found.
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The Chair of Peter
I don't know what to make of this as I've never been there. But it sounds true enough
from The Devil's Advocate
Morris WestThe next step was the Chair of Peter; but this was a high leap, halfway out of the world and into a vestibule of divinity. The man who wore the Fisherman's ring and the triple tiara carried also the sins of the world like leaden cope on his shoulders. He stood on a windy pinnacle, alone with the spread carpet of the nations below him, and above the naked face of the Almighty. Only a fool would envy hm the power and the glory and the terror of such a principality.
I can't speak to the truth of it, but I certainly hope that it is with thoughts like these that any person approaches the Chair. I suppose it's a Catch 22--if you really want the position, you are undoubtedly not qualified for it.
Posted by Steven Riddle at 10:14 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
A Restatement
From an E-mail sent to a another member of St. Blogs--a restatement of some of the posts made earlier.
For me St. Thomas Aquinas, amongst others, is in a room marked "Staff Only." My problem is that I've been trying to barge in. I should just stay in the hall with the riff-raff.
Posted by Steven Riddle at 11:19 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Another Day to Remember
The sixth of August is bad enough, often forgotten are the horrors of the ninth of August with the near obliteration of the largest Christian community of Japan.
Such means are never just and never justified--no matter how one argues for the case for potentially shortening the war. And we must stop to consider why these weapons were deployed in Japan and not in Germany--one is led to suspect that it may have been that we didn't really regard the Japanese as fully human.
And are there people that we look upon that way today? Perhaps Arabs? Perhaps Muslims? If so, shame on us--it is time to learn that one cannot abstract a person. One cannot rely upon that abstraction to provide distance from the persons harmed. We owe it to ourselves to live the life of those mothers whose children have been taken from them, those husbands and wives who have lost their spouses. These are personal moments, personal tragedies, intimate and horrifying moments of human destruction and loss. Abstracting a person for a principle results in far too many such moments. The devil is in the details--the details of lives sundered and destroyed, that too often in our comfort we choose to ignore, or more culpably, we choose to explain away or try to justify.
Posted by Steven Riddle at 11:42 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
The Dignity of the Human Person
Why it even appears that some Jesuits remain Catholic:
Torture is an affront to the dignity of the individual. And belief in this dignity is supposed to be cherished by the same politicians who proclaim their support of the “culture of life,� especially during election years. But respect for life does not end at birth; it should continue unbroken from birth to natural death.
From, of all the odd places The Baptist Standard A Texas Baptist Newspaper.
This reference and the one below were courtesy of The Western Confucian--would that there were more such Western, Catholic, Confucians.
Later I just realized that what I wrote above could easily be misunderstood--I don't consider The Baptist Standard an "odd place" just an odd place for a Jesuit to show up.
Posted by Steven Riddle at 11:52 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
K'ung Fu-tzu
I know, it's the old Wade-Giles transliteration, the one that I'm comfortable with--but I'm just stealing a quotation from The Western Confucian anyway:
To put the world in order, we must first put the nation in order; to put the nation in order, we must put the family in order; to put the family in order, we must cultivate our personal life; and to cultivate our personal life, we must first set our hearts right.
We have much to learn from our brothers and sisters outside of the faith--and too often we forget it. Our lives are made immeasurably richer by the depth and the beauty of those, who not knowing Christ, nevertheless were granted to hear his voice:
"My sheep hear my voice and they know me."
Posted by Steven Riddle at 11:56 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
Oddest Food
Okay, I've freighted your mind with weighty issue enough today. So a poll, answer, if you please in the comments box:
(1) What is the oddest food you've ever deliberately eaten? (We're not counting swallowed flies or accientally ingested spiders here--this is food that you chose to eat.)
(2) What food do you really, really like to eat but many people around you find utterly revolting?
My answers:
(1)This is a tough one. On the plant side I've had stewed nettles, fiddleheads from maidenhair fern, and the cabbage palm "cabbage" and the stewed seeds of a local ground-cover cycad (I think--although it strikes me that they would be likely to be filled with taxine, so perhaps it was something else). On the animal side I've had fresh nautilus, Cassiopeia jellyfish (served as a sort of dried chip), scorpions, a bread made primarily from bees (and yes, surprising it was sweet), and most revolting of all holothurian. Google it and look for a picture. (In grad school we used to have "phylum feasts" to see how many phyla we could cover in one meal and throughout our career. My brave and intrepid little group managed a great many of the more common phyla--we balked at a few because of the rarity of the animals.
(2) Stewed okra, pickled okra, fresh okra, fried okra, gumdoed okra, fricasseed okra. People think of this as a southern thing, but I got into the habit from my Grandma who lived in South eastern Ohio at the time. She took me out to her garden and showed me one of the loveliest flowers I had ever seen and told me it was the flower of the okra plant. And later that season I got to eat my grandma's fresh cooked okra--yum!
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August 8, 2006
Ukiyo-e I
Ukiyo-e-Pictures of the floating world. Mundane life distilled from ordinary images of the day. Edo period. Beautiful in its sameness.
Ukiyo-e I
Blue shadows spil from the unseen new moon. The eaves etch navy ridges against the milk-lit stucco walls and the thick grass is no-color-at-all.
Three lights flashing, an airplane lumbers across the field of pinpoint white stars. The warmth of the summer night fills my lungs with each breath. If only I smoked or drank or took interest in women other than my wife I could be standing here in my boxers in my screened porch cradling a world weary scotch, or stirring my Sangria with a finger, or puffing away on my little black filterless Belgians, or lightly rolling my Ybor City mock Cuban between thumb and forefinger, or stroking the taut but silky smooth stomach and lower breasts of this week's love while waiting for my dog to do his business. But I'm not. I'm standing here thinking how wet this heat feels, and watching the plane vanish across the sky above the pink sodium lights of the neighborhood pool.
Posted by Steven Riddle at 8:03 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Ukiyo-e II-- Arriving
Understand that I don't claim that these little pieces begin to approach the beauty of the wood-block prints by masters such as Ando Hiroshige or Hokusai Katsushika or Utagawa Toyokuni II. But eventually, I would like to contribute some small part to the beauty of the world even in its ordinariness.
Ukiyo-e II--ArrivingSun-faded pink fabric walls catch the trickle of sunlight that passes mylar shade and mini-blind. Dusty rose makes so much more pleasant a cell compared to the gray walls of just a few years back.
The windows drip with the dew of too cold a building just emerging from Florida night, blurring the figures of the live oak, hedge, elephant-ear philodendron, and the gray strip of pavement that through the crawl of countless cars separates us from the dolphin-pools and tourists that throng in these summer months.
Mundane and ordinary, the world is nevertheless beautiful beyond my poor ability to express. But it will always remain out of my reach if I do not try.
Posted by Steven Riddle at 8:08 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 9, 2006
A Notice
In the near future there will be a day when this blog as well as others organized at this main address will be down as servers are changed. Then I'll be haunting all of YOUR blogs and making snarky comments rather than confining them to my own. Won't you be the lucky ones?
Posted by Steven Riddle at 9:01 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
Tonight's Agenda
Originally I had scheduled two short Polish films (the Decalogue II and III) and Franny and Alexander which is a three-hour long Swedish film. (Linda asked me if I would be speaking English by the time she got home.)
But I think I'll probably watch the two short Polish films and a surfing movie, perhaps Step into Liquid--it's been a while since I've seen it. And except for the surfers, the scenery is spectacular.
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Ukiyo-e III-Junk Mail
Ukiyo-e III--Junk Mail
Yellow and black, bright red, Sale! Sale! Sale! Letters fan out in stationery blue, clear plastic windows crinkling as the mail is sifted. Two tan envelops fall, the paper equivalent of a rock slide, as they tumble toward the black mouth of the abyss that yawns wide to receive all that falls, or is hurled into it.
A brick of a book of beads, bright beryl and malachite and hematite and onyx, rolled out against a calla-white cover. And here a craft catalogue, a litany of linen, threads and yarn.
The chunk, chunk, chunk of paper fall, the dark pull of the black.
Posted by Steven Riddle at 8:12 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
August 10, 2006
The Decalogue I-III
In 1987 Krzysztof Kieslowski did a series of ten films for Polish Television. We might refer to it as a mini-series; however, it differs in that while some characters show up in the films that feature others, there is no continuity of story and no strong connections between them. These are short stories, short films, to be viewed each as a separate piece. Kieslowski employed ten different cinematographers so that there would be a distinct visual style with each one.
So far I've seen the first third of these films and all I can say is that if television were like this even 10% of the time, it would be worth watching. They are superbly acted miniatures, each dealing with the dilemmas and problems that come from violating the commandments. Roger Ebert points out that there is little purpose in trying to determine which film is linked to which commandment, as many are linked to more than one, and some are obscure.
For example, in the first film, a young, brilliant professor and his son work together to devise a program that will calculate when ice will be thick enough to safely skate on a nearby lake. The results are disastrous. It appears that this might be "I am a jealous God , thou shalt have no other gods before me." But it's difficult to say. The second of the three is somewhat easier--"Thou shalt not commit adultery." But it presents us with a profound moral dilemma of the type "you will not do evil that good will result."
SPOILER ALERT
What follows has spoilers, although I'm uncertain that these films can be spoiled. A young woman consults her husband's doctor to find out if her husband is going to survive after an operation. She loves her husband but she had been seeing another man and is pregnant by him. If her husband will survive, she will abort the baby--her only chance of having a child because her husband is infertile. But if he will die anyway, she will carry the child to term. In the Poland of this time, there appeared to have been restrictions with regard to the term during which one might have an abortion and she is at the very limits of that term. Anyway, the problem is resolved because of a lie the doctor both manufactures and supports with false evidence and another doctor's opinion. The husband will survive after all and the end of the movie shows the husband thanking the doctor for the lie that will preserve the child he and his wife are to have.
Thus, this film deals not only with adultery, but also with false witness--a pair that seems to go together rather naturally. Believe it or not, even with this spoiler, there is tons of other stuff going on, both subtle and overt, that make this film worth watching over and over.
END SPOILER ALERT
The third of the three I've seen so far has been the weakest and least conclusive. It covers "Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor." It features a woman who at one time had an affair with a man and now, on Christmas Eve, seems to be seeking him again.
The films are instructive in another sense. We see in them the elite of Polish society--a musician in an orchestra, a Doctor, a Professor. We see also the conditions in which they live, which, while not absolutely squalid, are bleak. The hospital the husband is recovering in has a leak in the ceiling and down the walls and the paint is peeling off and flaking, the Doctor's offices are tiny uncomfortable cubicles. We have here a chronicle of just post-Soviet Poland and the bleak grayness to which communist policies reduced everything.
So far these films have the very highest recommendation. They are short, taut, brilliantly conceived. They are to cinema what Chekhov or deMaupassant were to literature--brilliant miniatures connected by theme and recurrent characters, but each an individual film.
As I view the remainder I'll keep you updated.
Tonight we'll do the Swedish Film, Fanny and Alexander, supposedly an autobiographical film by Ingmar Bergman. Also on the agenda are possibly a Thai film found at the local public library, a post-invasion/war Iraqi film Turtles Can Fly and François Truffaut's masterpiece Jules and Jim. I'm getting quite the film education this summer. It helps when there's ironing to do.
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Two Posts on the Plot--I
My first point about the plot uncovered in Great Britain to explode several airplanes at once should be noncontroversial. Praise God that it was discovered!
More than that, I am always astounded when we do discover these things. When you consider that they are the work of 25 or 30 people out of millions of possible "suspects," it seems nearly miraculous that we can avert any of the attacks. Unlike most of the nation, I was not disappointed in our security services with the 9/11 incident, rather, I figured it was only a matter of time before some key link was missed. In this case, let us hope that all of the key links have been found and all take caution from what was discovered today.
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The Plot II--Why I Am NOT a Theologian
Here's the problem.
If we take as a starting premise, a premise I accept and even embrace and to which I can propose no reasonable alternative, that one may not do evil that good may result, one might be forced to conclude that information derived from certain sources that help to define today's potential catastrophe should not have been obtained and should not be used.
Let's consider several examples:
(1) Information derived from listening in on conversations: So far as I can tell there is nothing MORALLY wrong with this, nor within the profession of spies ethically wrong with it. There may in some instances be problems with it legally, but legality and morality often don't coincide. So unless one can tell me otherwise, it would seem that information obtained this way is "clean."
(2) Information from a plant or a mole. This, it strikes me, is much more problematic. In order for a plant or mole to succeed he must mimic the surroundings. He must dissemble or lie in order to fit in. There may be things that the group does as a whole that are completely immoral that he must participate in in order to remain undercover. Information derived from dissembling (bearing false witness) would seem to be tainted under the "You must not do evil that good may result."
(3) Information obtained from a paid informant. Once again, we're at a place that I wonder about. If betrayal of one's friends and comrades is a sin (Dante certainly seems to think it is) then suborning such action is supporting such action and is, how is it phrased proximate material collusion? It would seem that information obtained by paying someone to rat out his friends is indeed "tainted."
All of that said, I don't know if any of it is true, and it is the reason that I've decided that I need to be just an interested spectator in the bloody arena of practical and applied theology. If I really stopped this long to analyze all of my actions of a day I would just have to admit complete paralysis and give up doing anything other than analyzing the potentials. Obviously theologians don't do this because they know of some "loophole" that gets them out of the eternally descending spiral (Uzumaki) of omphaloskepsis.
Oh, and before you start badgering me about saying that I think the actions and information acted on today were bad, please know that I don't. I just wanted to use this illustration to show how my brain gums up the works and why it is simply better for me to sit staring at Jesus than to try to figure out the mind of God on matters too lofty for me.
Posted by Steven Riddle at 7:36 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
August 11, 2006
Ukiyo-e VI--Metaphysical Conceit Break
Ukiyo-e VI--The God-Shaped Hole
I got back to filling the God-shaped hole today. I can't tell you what a nuisance it has been, what with people and things falling in all the time. Last week two vintage Ferraris, the week before my mother and my aunt. And the hole keeps growing.
When I first found it, a smoldering pit in the middle of my best field, I called the fire department and paid to have sea-water helicoptered in to fill it. Thought perhaps I could make a pond of it. But the water just kept on running and the hole got no fuller and no cooler.
So then I realized that I needed to line it. Started with quikcrete and figured I cover it with gunite smooth it out and line it with white Carrera marble, from that quarry that gave us David and Moses. It's a good thing I'm a man of means because six million cubic yards of quikcrete later and still no sign of an end.
If I couldn't fill it up, perhaps I could cover it over. That's what we're trying today. Three different ways. I figured I could span it with chicken wire and then plaster it over. When that's done, we'll drape it with crêpe de chîne and silk streamers--make it at kind of neo-Cristo pavilion type experience.
So we'll see. One way or the other, we'll find a way to fill it. With rocks and sand, with books and paper, with long dark alcoholic nights, with prada shoes and Givenchy and Chanel, with polo clubs and yachts, with coq au vin and curry poulet vindaloo with a Dom Perignon '65, with Picasso and Matisse and Gaugin and Brancusi. Cover it up, fill it in, one way or another we'll close that gap and I'll feel whole again, my perfect field restored.
Posted by Steven Riddle at 8:44 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Ukiyo-e IV and V
For those kind enough to ask, I present below a preliminary of Ukiyo-e IV--it may be finished, but I'm waiting for some sense of doneness--can't say it any better than that. V is too preliminary to Post. VII and VIII are underway with one mostly complete.
Hope that these really do work as the Japanese Prints were meant to do, even if they cannot compare in magnificence. Please consider it my way of remembrance, my memorial.
Ukiyo-e IV--Clouds
I
The eye of Horus, huge and blank and blue stares down at me from between two banks of cloud-blanched sky. The eye of the son of the sun reminds me just in time that providence rewards the
wise eye and I tap on my brakes to avoid the bumper of the car driving free-form in planck-space.Waiting now in the slow-crawl-stop of the turn lane. Trees, wires, telephone poles, ibis-necked street lamps transform the eye from merely blank to baleful or beautiful. I make my turn.
II
Have you ever stood connected to the sky watching the convecting clouds? The boundless yearning upward surge, the penetration of deepest blue by rising white. The cloud cap expands and then subsides, vanishing entirely into the growing bank.
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August 12, 2006
Kairo
Soon to be known, probably far less effectively, as Pulse in an American Remake.
The central concept--the Internet is populated by ghosts. That's it. They're there and they cause a lot of problems. No, more than that, they bring about an apocalypse that starts in Tokyo.
The film is quiet and horrifyingly effective with very little of the trick photography or the overt horrors of many lesser works. This film works because of its suggestion. It also works because it has more to say that most horror films. It asks questions about death and eternity that it doesn't dare answer or even really suggest answers to--but it asks them in a most disquieting way.
The imagery of the film is odd and suggestive. People disappear into shows of themselves left imprinted on the walls. Those in turn "pixelate" and vanish. But it is interesting that Kiyoshi Kurosawa has chosen this imagery for the disappearance of humankind, most particularly as it is the haunting imagery of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and of the Katsuo Oda short story "Human Ashes."
Be forewarned, the story never really goes much of anywhere--the film is almost entirely about atmosphere and about the loneliness of the human condition--both points conveyed superbly. And it does provide a few creepy moments and some surprising jolts.
Understated, elegant, and thoughtful--for those into the Asian Horror Movie field this is a superb entry. High Recommended for adults.
Posted by Steven Riddle at 4:29 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack