'the main thing is to document'

Jafar Panahi has been imprisoned for making movies.

This excerpt from 'This is not a Film' gets at the pressures he has been under and movingly shows his determination and ability to make films, to create, under any circumstances.

there is a lot that can not be settled here

This turns out to be a mix of this week and last. I am glad to be here.

Restrepo from Philippa Levenberg on Vimeo.

The David Foster Wallace piece is here:
Wallace made clear what he was hoping to do. He would take the most boring and repetitive job imaginable, apply to it the same formula about heightened attention and awareness that he offered to the Kenyon College graduates, and demonstrate how tedious, irksome labor could yield a path to grace and the salvation of the soul:

Ability to pay attention. It turns out that bliss—a second-by-second joy + gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious—lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (tax returns, televised golf), and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Constant bliss in every atom.

This is a variant on the old and familiar Christian theme of how to ennoble lowly toil by doing it in the service of Christ. Milton touches on it in “On His Blindness” (“They also serve who only stand and wait”), and George Herbert explores it in “The Elixir”:

…All may of thee partake:
Nothing can be so mean,
Which with his tincture (for thy sake)
Will not grow bright and clean.

A servant with this clause
Makes drudgery divine:
Who sweeps a room, as for thy laws,
Makes that and the action fine.

This is the famous stone
That turneth all to gold…

Make faces


Missing from the drawn pages was David Dark's amazing review of Love Wins - I read this in part as a gloss and expansion on the DFW business:
As Barth argues in The Epistle to the Romans, the gospel has to be (and remain) a question mark sitting strangely next to whatever we dare to deem orthodox and sound in our own thinking. And when it comes to what we hope to understand of the judgments of God, we have to leave an awful lot to unwritten history lest we believe ourselves to own the copyright on them or find ourselves explaining them away.
and
Judgment, the decision to be made, the alive and signaling, evangelical pinch isn’t to be deferred. It’s now. Or as Modest Mouse famously puts it, “If you wasted this life, why wouldn’t you waste the afterlife?” Life in the age to come is as inescapably social and ethically laden as this one, only moreso. With Jesus’ counsel to the young man to sell everything he has and give to the poor, we’re given a vision of here and there which is anything but neutral (economically, politically, what have you). “Heaven also confronts. Heaven, we learn, has teeth, flames, edges, and sharp points. What Jesus is insisting with the rich man is that certain things will not survive in the age to come.” As Bell points out, the Apostle Paul draws on the same sensibility in his vision of values, identifiers, and fixations being burned and those overly attached to them being saved, but only as one passing through the flames. No disembodied faith will. The question of inheriting olam habah can’t be evangelically distinguished from the question of what we’re up to now, because here is the new there: “How we think about heaven, then, directly affects how we understand what we do with our days and energies now, in this age.”
The news from Mr. Dark is always welcome even when it disturbs.

yohji fashions

I reflected briefly on Mr Yamamoto before here.

the david lynch recipe for happiness

All the ingredients laid out here. HT to DD.

Reading this article, I reflected on how terrifying Wild at Heart was for me. But Mr. Lynch's skills as a filmmaker are such that as long as Sailor and Lulu were on screen together I knew everything was going to be okay. Palpable love and celluloid meet.

being in the world

exit through the gift shop

Trailer BANKSY- EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP from alamode film on Vimeo.

Fascinatingwildride

interests this week

How do you pursue thoughts about what interests you? Put them together? Wondering about that led to this list (compiled in a workshop on something else altogether). I am surprised by what I missed but will post the names as they came to me and then maybe follow up with those I missed. Synthesis is the key idea I think - working artists bringing otherwise disparate parts of their lives and the world together.
Shields
Daisey
Grey
Robinson
Sfar
Demme
Chabon
Sacco
Kalman
Satrapi
Duncan
Brewin
Jonze
Dark
Kleon
Marquez
Eggers
Marker
Banksy
JR
Smith
Campbell
Howie

spaced

To keep myself from going a bit mad I watched a whole season of Spaced.

In deliberate contrast to the last post, here is my favourite episode.

run on sentences and thoughts

A friend just gave me a biography of Saint-Exupery. He's another of those blokes (see my notes on William Stringfellow), who captures my imagination and runs with it - even though I do not know very much about him beyond the wonders contained in The Little Prince.

This is my most recent notebook page, which shows a fair bit of what I have been reading, though not what I have been thinking about, which is maybe not that much. Happy messiness - hopefully ideas come out of that.

This was my attempt to get a look at Joe Sacco - I am just about an eighth of the way into Footnotes in Gaza, which is another of those comic books that blows my mind, in its immediate subject matter and in what it says about the comic as a medium that can deal with any idea, story, or history that the artist turns his/her hand to. Strangely, this drawing looks a bit more like me stressing out over my approaching unemployment anniversary than it does like Sacco in the original. I am projecting.

BASS ACKWARDS Deleted Alpaca Scene from Linas Phillips on Vimeo.

And I just watched the film from which this scene was deleted. I had some trepidation as I started watching but absolutely love Bass Ackwards. I think Linas Phillips is a kind-hearted visionary genius. I assume it is all his own story, in some way, but the film is no less a marvel for that. The alpacas are for the LP, of course.

i am a kind of pacifist too

movie holiday monday

McLibel: Trailer from Age of Stupid on Vimeo.

Spent part of the holiday watching this. Fantastic. Very scary, in an encouraging sort of way. On one level it is about the triumph of two individuals against a corporation. But it is also about the corporate takeover of global democracy. Steve Brodner has a pithy reflection on the Supreme Court-enabled takeover in the US here.

for the backstory and the ongoing drama

I have been following the wonderful Mike Riddell as he blogs the (very high) highs and (very low) lows of putting together the film of his book The Insatiable Moon. Filming has begun. Worth reading the blog from the beginning - or at least looking over the journey of the last few months. Mr. Riddell and his supporters are overcoming the seemingly insurmountable odds against them in real time.

Mr. Riddell has played with the novel form several times over the past few years. I have not been able to get a hold of The Insatiable Moon but did find Deep Stuff to be wonderfully thought provoking. Must be read slowly.

keep a notebook

Yohji Yamamoto looks like the happiest, wisest person in this photograph.

I really liked Wim Wenders' documentary, Notebook on Cities and Clothes, which focuses on Yamamoto's philosophy and on Wenders' own changing relationship to film with the advent of video.

The care that Yamamoto takes with his words is deeply moving.

'people who don't give up on the things they can't have'

I like this OP-ED on Iran from Roger Cohen at the NYT today.

And (random association alert) there was also an NYT article at the weekend on the film $9.99, from short stories by Etgar Keret, which I am intrigued by.

'i bring what i love'

We went to see Youssou N'Dour last night at BAM. One of the best, most inclusive, and celebratory concerts I have ever been to. The audience was on its feet, dancing in the aisles of the opera house.

I was very happy (grinning, clapping, dancing), with a wee side mix of sadness...

My favorite haiku:

'Even in Kyoto
Hearing the cuckoo's cry
I long for Kyoto'
Bashō

Some blogging on the concert with photos here.