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“Shakespeare, Rembrandt, and Beethoven will all make films,” Abel Gance proclaimed in 1927, remarking on the advent of motion picture. “All legends, all mythologies, and all myths, all founders of religion, and the very religions… await their exposed resurrection.”
Walter Benjamin replies less enthusiastically: “To an ever greater degree, the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility.”
A subtle but crucial observation. With easy reproducibility, how we think of art and what we use it for changes. In a new era of reproducibility, this time through infinite derivation, when anyone can generate a Shakespeare-ish sonnet or Beethoven-ish sonata, the originals must change, too: they are just source material for a sought-after moonlight mood, a phrase well-turned.
Something special about humanity, perhaps the most special thing, is going the way of the illuminated manuscript–in both meanings of the term.
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Whatever story I'm on, whether film or lit or lyric or ritual, my brain tunnel-vision defaults to seeing the scene in service of a plot which is in turn serving some kind of point. My personal little Big Idea watching Late Spring is that, for Ozu, the point serves the plot that serves the scene.
A cue ball, stationary on a green bed of felt, on the other hand, is seen and readily described as being such and such distance from an eight-ball that is such and such angle from the corner pocket, requiring such and such force to reach its terminus.
You who are here,
Hear,
And plant your blessings
Upon this ground,
A solemn promise resting
I can't think how to describe what it sounded like. I try to recall an image of J.B., standing there, singing a song without words, slow and sad, in C-sharp minor.
Said Barber, 'They always play that piece. I wish they'd play some of my other pieces.'
Let you be a person.
You are a person, you have a body.
If you are a person and you have a body, you have a name.
You have a secret.
The role one plays depends on the story one reads. For me, the author of the story is quite umambiguously the Philippines. I am not a central character. But I am inside her, inside her body, drawn through a passageway two years ago, reading about my role day by day.
I was driving home from this sushi place, I don't know, probably the only one in town. And I had my radio on the local NPR. Really local, know what I mean. It was Mexico music hour apparently and I fell in love instantly. Playing, one of those slow ballads with the guitarron plucking away, lullaby walking bass.
Level after level Ana had complained the game was an "endless reinforcement of the patriarchal hegemony," and each time Elle sang back "We all wanna change the world," but nobody had nullhypothesis to say when we got to the Postmodern Era. There, cyberterrorists, political action committees, rising seas and receding treelines, drug-resistant bacteria, monopolistic global corporations, cultural imperialism, sweat shops and school shootings, and all the poverty and wealth, malnutrition and obesity, sad ignorance and sadder hyperintelligence of this post-racial, post-gendered, post-industrial, post-national, post-meaning, post-nonsense, post-white-picket-fence, post-office, post-material, post-consumer-content, post-real, post-POST era vied for our attention.
Ars poetica 4 the roadtrip
A roadtrip is an ablution, a high grayed uncut line, a tome
A roadtrip is a lollipop, best sucked lovingly @ the teat
This has led me to wonder how teachers of developing writers might best negotiate their knowledge that writing is a performance when our students feel writing to be an essentialist expression of self.
I scanned a six-year long correspondence between the writer and his biographer. I watched the relationship—and the biographical project—develop from an initial, self-conscious fan letter, to mutual respect and attempts at scholarship, to, finally, a consuming labor of love: an authorized literary biography.
In his thoughts the boy made up a game that was just his own: he would pretend that perhaps he was special, the most special person in the world, because perhaps he, unlike anyone else, had no father. Perhaps he had only a mother, and this somehow gave him a special power. It was part of this mysterious power that he could run fast and could memorize the Mahabharata so easily.
Each isles craggy cliff or shingled shore
Is a soule inimitable postcard: it tales its tale
Of that windswept waterswept journey.
An each mans an islan, for poor or for worse...
'J Mark Fullmer grew up in Southern California in the 1990s. He read extensively as a child, acted in a local children's theatre group, played Little League baseball, NJB basketball, and was a boy scout. '
Frank and Joe said to aunty we must go now. We have a mystery in mind.