Iran Watch

Over the past few days, a massive interest in Iran has been expressed through Twitter and the blogosphere by Western citizens, including myself. Maybe this sympathetic support is admirable but I find it grossly perverted. First, this interest betrays a surprise at the stirrings of “democracy” in Iran – something that is contrary to the conventional but false fantasy of Iran. Utterances like “we’re watching you” are made while what they in fact imply is “yes, we are watching you because you are acting like us. you’re acting in a way we approve of. you have our consent.” Another despairing undercurrent surrounding this solidarity is  the hagiographic elevation of Mousavi as Iran’s savior. As Zizek would have said “a revolution without a revolution.”

Travel

Amit Chaudhury:

… Indians, as they travel, migrate and resettle, have increasingly begun to deflect the problem – and the rewards – of encountering foreignness, and strangeness, and the notion of “India” has helped them in (has, in fact, been crucial to) this deflection. The so-called Indian diaspora ceased, really, to want either to integrate with, or radically revise, the landscape they moved to in the 1980s and 90s (usually, the United States, succeeding the earlier wave of immigration to Britain); instead, they wished to conform silently and, simultaneously, to continue as themselves. This has led to a unique combination of acceptance and denial.
…
In the Clinton era, and even more pronouncedly in the Bush era, the US came to be seen as a facilitator of India’s own teeming, importunate ambitions, for its true place in the world, and, therefore, as a familial figure, in keeping with the Indian middle class’s interpretation of family, as an institution that is primarily a guarantor of self-interest. When India looks at America, it sees a comforting or discomfiting (according to the phase of history it then inhabits) extension of its own welfare – much in the way that a child invents its mother.

Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi:

“Obviously we went to Russia for the very simple reason that in Russia it’s O.K. to be a loser and a failure. Everybody is. If you’re not a failure in Russia, you killed somebody, you’re driving around in a Mercedes, everyone knows how you got it. In this country, everybody is so desperate to not fall through the cracks, everyone’s so afraid of failing, of not getting ahead, of ending up living in a shitty place, of not making money. In the United States, especially in New York, if you are not doing well professionally, it’s this albatross you carry around everywhere. The first thing people ask you is, ‘What do you do? Where are you?’ Everybody in this town has a book deal. In Russia, nobody thinks about that shit! You get together, everybody gets shitfaced, and everyone assumes nobody has anything going on because who does? Nobody. ” Mr. Ames said that Russia freed their American souls. “Being a fuckup there is your right , every Russian is a total fuckup, and that’s even valued in that culture, it makes you human ,” he said.

Emerson:

The soul is no traveller; the wise man stays at home, and when his necessities, his duties, on any occasion call him from his house, or into foreign lands, he is at home still, and shall make men sensible by the expression of his countenance, that he goes the missionary of wisdom and virtue, and visits cities and men like a sovereign, and not like an interloper or a valet.

I have no churlish objection to the circumnavigation of the globe, for the purposes of art, of study, and benevolence, so that the man is first domesticated, or does not go abroad with the hope of finding somewhat greater than he knows. He who travels to be amused, or to get somewhat which he does not carry, travels away from himself, and grows old even in youth among old things. In Thebes, in Palmyra, his will and mind have become old and dilapidated as they. He carries ruins to ruins.

Jim Jarmusch:

Woman: Elvis Presley, the King.
Man: Carl Perkins was better.
W: Elvis.
M: Carl Perkins.
W: Elvis.
M: Carl Perkins.
W: Elvis.
M: Carl Perkins.
W: Elvis.

Pessoa:

Sometimes I think I’ll never leave the Rua dos Douradores. And having written this, it seems to me eternity.

Not pleasure, not glory, not power…Freedom, only freedom.

To go from the phantoms of faith to the ghosts of reason is merely to change cells. Art, if it frees us from the abstract idols of old, should also free us from magnanimous ideas and social concerns, which are likewise idols.

To find our personality by losing it – faith itself endorses this destiny.

[Book of Disquiet, Pg. 36-37]

In the City of Sylvia

What is so thrilling about this film is its audacious banishment of fatality. Every gesture is significant not  because of possible metaphorical implications; instead, the gestures themselves constitute the drama (Each time I watch the film, I expect the wind to blow differently.) Guerin’s film surpasses the ambition of every ensemble movie that tries to encapsulate the individual and collective experience of a group of characters. Besides, like Tarkovsky’s Stalker, this film is incredibly funny when it’s seen with good company. This is the most pleasurable cinematic experience I’ve had in a while.

Modern Art

A few months back I read Calvin Tomkins’s Lives of the Artists and Sarah Thornton’s Seven Days in the Art World. (I still haven’t read that book on the economics of contemporary art) Considering my taste in art can be described as baroque, or just absurd, I was surprised to find myself fascinated by artists like Phil Collins and Takashi Murakami. Overall, though, I think Duchamp still conquers the conscience of many contemporary artists.

While reading these books, I scribbled some notes one night about my own potential art projects. If you know a gallery owner desperate to show some great new artists or a contractor who can build the following pieces, let me know!

Notes (title followed by description):

• Tradition aka cliche – a shattered mirror [of course]
• Decalogue – series of 10 photos
• God is dead and so are you – monkey trained to give bananas to gallery visitors
• Art that looks like art – pictures of every other art piece in the show
• The triumph of justice and the end of politics – flashes across the screen after the beggar girl [I have no idea what I meant and what this means]
• Womb – a walk-in box with white walls with uneven plastering. In it, a desk and a lamp in a corner with some book.
• Critique aka Art -  visitors press either a green or a red button (to presumably indicate their preference). Unknown to them, however, is that the artist receives a mild electrical shock when either button is pressed. [Ja, I am quite proud of this]

 
I think these pieces are supposed to be part of a solo exhibition.

Also:

• Chimps trade meat for sex
• Joseph O’Neill’s review of Beckett’s letters starts out painfully awkward but ends magnificently.

Recent Reading

I’ve been diving in and out of books (I need to learn how to write plainly; no imagery) after 2666. Though I didn’t want to tackle another long book, I started reading both Steve Coll’s The Bin Ladens and Richard Brody’s Everything is Cinema.

Coll’s book is very compelling and some of the stuff sounds unreal – how Osama’s father died in a plane crash.

I am halfway through Brody’s biography of Godard and so far I find it a bit too reductionist. Brody insists on reading every film as a response to Godard’s relationship with women, especially Anna Karina. (I haven’t finished reading the book yet and am just now approaching the political period of Godard’s work) Yesterday, however, I came across Bill Krohn’s epic takedown of Brody’s book (via David Hudson). Very nice!

I am also re-reading Beckett’s Murphy, peeking at Borges’ non-fiction, staring at Vila-Matas’ Montano’s Malady, and falling asleep to Kindleberger’s A Financial History of Western Europe.

Also:

• Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s 10 principles
• Glenn Kenny talks about editing DFW
• These posts here and here remind me of DFW’s quote “let’s not sit around giving each other handjobs.” I think they’re supposed to be tongue-in-cheek?
• The Epicurean Dealmaker cracks me up

Rant

 

It’s been a pretty stressful week at work so instead of a methodological post, I would like to just ramble (this is going to be as exciting as free verse!):

• Much of the information I read is such boring tripe. Jeeez. To make things worse is the sense of smug politeness that pervades these blogs/websites. Erudition is nice and all but can’t we also be conscious of the pointlessness of it?
• I had a very good Sunday last weekend. I didn’t go online at all (I didn’t plan it; I find it silly anyways when people plan to sleep on a tree or quit internet for a day; it should just happen dude). Anyhow, I spent hours laying down, with a slight hangover, reading a few pages I’ve read before and just staring at the light coming in from the window. Yea, glorious.
• Is it only me or does anyone else think Susan Sontag wrote like an over-eager grad student? I re-read her foreword to Antonin Artaud’s works which did not go well. She was obviously smart and all but really, chillax.
• Ethics could use some puerile jokes: “I try to be nice but it’s just so hard”…”That’s what she said!” My virtue ethics class last year could have been so much more fun.
• My sentences are bulky. Each word I write prolongs the catastrophe.
• My itch has been scratched. I’m going to go hunt for coffee now.

Obscure Films

I’ve learnt a lot and nurtured my cinephilia over the years thanks to the blogosphere. The healthy online discussion that is the core of today’s delocalized cinephilia has led me to discover many contemporary filmmakers – Pedro Costa and Jia Zhang-Ke in particular - that I would have otherwise ignored. More valuable are the festival reports from Toronto and Cannes that still seem to be semi-mythical.

Anyhow, I feel there are still a great number of films that escape mention let alone a discussion. Thus, I plan to write about at least one obscure film – by directors whom I’ve never heard of – every week that might interest a few souls. Of course, there is still the question of how one can get a hold of these obscure films. The first film will be Walter Heynowski & Gerhard Scheumann’s The Laughing Man (1966).

I apologize for being abrupt – I’ve lost my sense of humor today.

While writing this post, I came across a review of 2666 in n+1: 

Where does one go from this point of excruciating contraction, after Borges had taken what may seem like one final way out? Bolaño’s response to the conundrum is inspired in its daring, its flirtation with a kind of supreme irrelevance: he writes, at enormous length, about minor writers who fail to produce anything at all, or at least anything of real significance. His collected works can be read as one great shambling hymn to the nobility of failure.

Also, this piece by Anthony Lane on Beckett’s letters:

The letters that stir me most are not those in which Beckett grapples with family tensions, or rues the indifference of publishers, but those which find him at recitals, in front of paintings, or drowned in a book. That is no mean affair; the only thing that separates the writer from ordinary folk—and, far from making him or her a better or wiser person, let alone a more amenable one, it can redouble the force of solitude, “one’s ultimate hard irreducible inorganic singleness”—is that the reading of a poem, or the pondering of a Crucifixion, becomes an event. Not a diversion, a flight, or a release from chores but an experience no less transformative than a day in bed with a lover—especially if, as in Beckett’s case, lovers were scarce.

Playing on the Pod

Edgar Varèse - Complete Works. What a revelation!

Boredom

I am stunned by the similarity of Joseph Brodsky’s commencement speech to that of DFW‘s. Both address the issue of dealing with boredom in adulthood. Though each of them (cranky phrase: rather use ‘they’ or ‘they each’? – I am teh suck) explores the problem differently, both insist that embracing boredom is essential. This nugget by Brodksy is priceless:

Boredom is your window on the properties of time that one tends to ignore to the likely peril of one’s mental equilibrium. It is your window on time’s infinity. Once this window opens, don’t try to shut it; on the contrary, throw it wide open. For boredom speaks the language of time, and it teaches you the most valuable lesson of your life: the lesson of your utter insignificance. It is valuable to you, as well as to those you are to rub shoulders with. “You are finite,” time tells you in the voice of boredom, “and whatever you do is, from my point of view, futile.” As music to your ears, this, of course, may not count; yet the sense of futility, of the limited significance of even your best, most ardent actions, is better than the illusion of their consequences and the attendant self-aggrandizement.

I had good fun back in college reading Beckett’s characters playing with stones and counting their farts, etc. but now that I am dealing with this dreaded thing myself, it’s only funny on a meta-level. But perhaps I am taking these words (and my own situation) a bit too earnestly.

(via Kottke)

Specificity

Sorry for all the India related posts of late but this video of the “Indian Superman” posted at Boing Boing deserves mention. Read the comments – they give the video a much needed cultural context. The post is symptomatic of the things I get asked nowadays about India – Bollywood, curry, monkeys, vegetarianism – that annoy me to the point of aggravation. To state once again: I grew up watching Telugu films (Tollywood), not Hindi films (Bollywood).

Also: Chiranjeevi, the dude who got famous when VH1 featured his Indian thriller video, is now a politician. That second video raises all kinds of questions regarding journalism.