seeing conan

I love that, 'at this stage nothing is a mistake'. A lot to think about the time it takes to see someone here. (HT to AK)

london is the only place i am consistently homesick for

London Bus Tour from moritz oberholzer on Vimeo.

why?

a big picture

One Day on Earth - Motion Picture Trailer from One Day On Earth on Vimeo.

a brief effort to recall some of the parts of my day

A late-in-the-day effort to recall the last twenty four hours of reading and watching.
Some of those highlights:
Zizek - funniest thing I have read in the Guardian ever
Twombly - ongoing
The Tree of Life - saw it Friday - love it - This is our story. It has not ended. Jesus & God seemed to be quite palpably in this.
The thump and sigh of my heart
Inspector Bellamy
Heartbreaker
The klezmer joy surprise - stumbled upon Magpie - Live!

Sean Penn/Robert Smith Nazi Hunter

bread

candoco

CANDOCO by cemaforre
I stumbled on this 18+ years ago on BBC2. It has held an important and generous place in my imagination since then. I was surprised to find the complete unedited show online. Watching it again a lot of the specific meanings I have attached to it fell to the side (isn't that always the way?) but I came away with new wonders to ponder.

anne lamott

listening in, drawing

Not feeling very inspired and definitely not very wordy at the moment. But I was very happy finding this excerpt from a Joann Sfar work in progress, to be put out by Citizen Film.

A rough cut excerpt from Joann Sfar Draws from Memory, directed by Sam Ball from Citizen Film on Vimeo.

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.

terry gilliam DRAWS!

le chat, le chat

THE RABBI'S CAT - LE CHAT DU RABBIN - TEASER from Banjo Studio on Vimeo.

shaun tan wins an oscar

...for this.

JR

FACE 2 FACE a GENEVE - 2008
Uploaded by JR. - Watch original web videos.
I have not had a chance to watch this - so this serves mainly as a reminder. A whole movie on the photographer/artist/activist/imaginateur's work.

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

idiot with a tripod

Amazing and surprisingly moving.
Roger Ebert writes about this here.
Jamie Stuart's website is here.

We were out of town for the storm. Tried to get back ahead of it but were forced to turn around. Our second, successful, trip took 18 hours (but allowed for a movie and dinner out - ideal way to wait out congestion and become unstuck).

women are heroes

JR just won the TedPrize.

This, from such a simple idea, is heartbreaking and wonderful.

TRAILER " WOMEN ARE HEROES" from SOCIAL ANIMALS on Vimeo.

I posted about JR's work just over a year ago.

beeswax

"Beeswax" trailer from Matthias Grunsky on Vimeo.

So good.
The director, Andrew Bujalski, has a way of making the naturalism in his films really work well for the stories tells. I was not sure I was in the mood for this but am so glad I watched it. It felt like spending some time hanging out in someone else's world just like this one.

'a lively communal imagination'

Trying to gather the rest of my thoughts.

Heschel is quite astounding. There is a great primer on Speaking of Faith here. And Jim Gordon has some great reflections here.

And Joann Sfar's movie finally is released in [part of] the English speaking world. There is a a fantastic Guardian interview here. Definitely worth a listen.
And here's the trailer:


And just to mix it up a bit more. Thinking about part of what I was trying to say in my Wikileaks cartoon (and returning to what I was thinking about when I drew my very first post) I was stuck solidly by this, from the introduction to the 2001 edition of Walter Bruegemann's The Prophetic Imagination:

"Cavanagh then concludes in a reflection on [Imagining Argentina]:

To refer to torture as the ‘imagination of the state’ as I have done is obviously not to deny the reality of torture, but to call attention to the fact that torture is part of a drama of inscribing bodies to perform certain roles in the imaginative project which is the nation-state. Likewise, in Imagining Argentina, Carlos's imagination is manifested in real effects: escaping the imagination of the state means that bodies go free. The imagination is defined as nothing less than "the magnificent cause of being". Thornton's novel provides us with a glimpse of what it means to make the odd claim that the Eucharist is the key to Christian resistance to torture. To participate in the Eucharist is to live inside God's imagination. It is to be caught up in what is really real, the body of Christ. As human persons, body and soul incorporated into the performance of Christ's corpus verum, they resist the state's ability to define what is real through the mechanism of torture...

...It may be, however, that torture and consumer satiation perform the same negative function: to deny a lively communal imagination that resists a mindless humanity of despairing conformity...Numbness does not hurt like torture, but in a quite parallel way, numbness robs us of our capability for humanity." (pp. xix-xx)