The following is some free-form ideas on what ‘art’ means in the context of film appreciation. It developed from various combative discussions regarding, of all things, the value of Iron Man. The hyperbole was coming from all ends and inevitably the ‘A’ word was unleashed and almost immediately took on a plethora of [...]
Saturday, August 18, 2007
‘A Scanner Darkly: the pure manifestation of fluid film-thinking’
It has been a long held suspicion of mine that bad film criticism is a product of filmgoers who are themselves habitually poor listeners. By this I cast no aspersions upon those who for whatever reason neglect to recognize [...]
Monday, February 12, 2007
[post brought back from the ether to incite discussion regarding the previous post, ‘The Secret’]
In the strictest of layman terms there is an experiment wherein a photon is propelled through a precisely calibrated measuring instrument (an interferometer) which has single slits for entry and exit. According to the laws of quantum physics and the applied [...]
Monday, February 12, 2007
Last weekend a colleague of mine brought to my attention some vaguely familiar-sounding self-help phenomenon called, evocatively enough, ‘The Secret’. In a matter of a couple hours she was accosted by three different people each empathically promoting the significance of ‘The Secret’, and being an admitted self-help junkie and susceptible to naiveté she wondered [...]
Saturday, January 27, 2007
Mike asked me awhile back to write something about Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History and the Last Man.” I read the book a few years ago and found it a ripping read, the kind of big idea book that actually delivered the goods.
The book is based on an influential article Fukuyama wrote [...]
Thursday, December 21, 2006
‘But this is an old and everlasting story: what happened in old times with the Stoics still happens today, as soon as ever a philosophy begins to believe in itself. It always creates the world in its own image; it cannot do otherwise’
– F. Nietzsche
In my first year of undergraduate studies I [...]
Sunday, December 17, 2006
I have been haunted for some time now by the notion that I am somehow less human for not finding the time or inclination to write fiction, learn an instrument, or create something that was not there before, preferably in a manner which exerts a profound influence on the rest of humanity. If I [...]
Thursday, November 30, 2006
I’ve lately been experiencing something approaching depression regarding the prospect of meaningful communication between human beings. Even writing these sentences is something of a painful act, since what I’m feeling isn’t “depression” but some kind of disheartening feeling, and therefore just seeing the word “depression” depresses me further: I can’t even adequately express my frustration [...]
Wednesday, October 25, 2006
[I will revisist my views on aesthetics in the near future but I wanted to make available an accumulative post of my views on the subject with an emphasis on film aesthetics. Think of this as my mission statement with regards to my process of reviewing. This is a skeletal framework of ideas [...]
The title of this post is a play on Chris Hedges’ 2002 book “War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning.” That book was a major disappointment, because instead of exploring the allure of war and its capacity to form our sense of community and identity, Hedges simply acknowledged war’s ability to give us meaning and then spent the rest of his engaged in didactic moralizing about how awful it is that we do this.
If we agree to leave aside current politics, it seems to me that a soldier in war is perhaps the single greatest aesthetic experience left in our modern age. At least in the West, there is no reason for an artist to risk life and health for his art. (And no, not having health care due to a lack of the national health plan in America doesn’t count.) Musicians, authors, painters, actors, architects…these individuals can do their best to recreate the authentic Romantic conception of the artist- the pale, guant figure who suffers for his art so much that if harms his own health. But they are playacting. They aren’t really suffering, and at any moment they can bail and opt out of their bohemian contract.
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