cats, flies and congressional hearings

The cats spotted a fly during Sonia Sotomayor's hearings.

And Agnes Varda (who has an affinity for cats) was a welcome find last week and also made me smile. Hooray for cats and people.

the genre artist

Jack Vance, from a NYT article, here.

As with most of my drawings, this looks like someone - just not exactly the person I set out to draw.

'to love cinema is to love...'

This feels like a nice counter to JLG. Another side of the new wave.
Here's an A. O. Scott article on Agnes Varda and her films.

And, as a footnote to yesterday's post, Krzysztof Kieślowski's films - particularly The Decalogue - are deeply theological. I was just thinking the other day how good it would be to get together a group of people to watch The Decalogue, eat, drink, and talk.

'at the cinema, we do not think, we are thought'

'According to Godard, the cinema was, is, more than itself; it is both a supreme aspiration and an impossibility, a repository of history and intimate memory in the age of celebrity and forgetting, a lost golden age of self-transcendence, self-discovery, and a noble, doomed mission of folly for those who would attempt, as Godard himself continues to do, to recover and restore it.' (Everything is Cinema, p. 625)

Have just completed a slightly frenzied reading of Everything is Cinema, Richard Brody's book on the films of Jean-Luc Godard. Actually a biography of Godard refracted through his films (the two being inseparable). While there is a lot that is unsettling and, at best, distasteful, in Godard's developing philosophy through fifty years of work, he is a fascinating, even compelling figure. His early absorbtion in film and his development of narrative and thought that could only be expressed in cinematic terms are inspiring. One wonders what a theology developed, or at least expressed, only in film image and narrative would look like. (And perhaps someone else can think of someone who has done this over the course of a career - Wim Wenders is the only filmmaker who comes to mind immediately, though there was a long interesting period when Scorcese's theology was also to the fore - his more recent interests have been less compelling to me.) Definitely a huge amount of food for thought. It is an amazing book.

I love the high esteem that Brody holds film in. (And his monkish look in the author photo on the book jacket. He looks like he stepped out of a scene in Andrei Rublev.) In reference to the title of this post (a quote from Godard) Brody says, "This observation was less an avowal of passivity than of the will to self-transform through the movies."

time[piece] passing

The drawing lends itself to more reflection on how strange the days feel at the moment. But I really just wanted to post the image of the LP's alarm/clock/radio, which has been by the side of a bed for 20+ years but is now being retired. About four months ago Gus the cat knocked it over and destroyed the AM setting on the radio (which meant no more bedside BBC). Last month he took another go at it and broke the clock, the radio, and the alarm outright. It survived another month at the bedside. On Thursday I bought a much less elegant replacement. And today it is going in the recycling. I can be a wee bit sentimental about throwing things out and decided to aid the process by remembering the clock/alarm/radio here.

amos & oliver

Thoughts very scattered all day.

I became a bit gloomy but was cheered remembering this promo for another of Emmanuel Guibert's books.

the photographer

The Photographer is an amazing book. I can not do justice to it here (sleepy thoughts, trying to muster my cranial resources for job applications and 'what do I really want to do?' answers).

The NYT review is a good one. The book, in the very story it tells, is as moving and compelling an argument for pacifism as anyone should really need.

This, stolen, once again, from Mr. Dark, sums up some of the effects of The Photographer:
The question of our governing is the question of our liturgy, worship, and witness - the question of what we deem sacred. Does our sense of the sacred include the average Palestinian, the Chinese peasant who builds structures for the Beijing Olympics for slave wages, the Ugandan child soldier? Are some people less sacred than others? Will we stand beside them, look them in the eye and help them? Are people mere numbers, or are they valuable bearers of the image of God? What are we willing to sign off on? What do we underwrite? A determined dwelling on these questions is the way redeeming and revolutionary history is written - this is our liturgy.
The Sacredness of Questioning Everything, p. 198.

So much sacred human-ness in the story, the photos, the drawings.

The typo in the picture-quote is mine.

part of the day

My morning (with a wee bit of my afternoon).

no such thing as unemployed time

It has been a strange week. Time passes differently without an external work schedule; days merge into each other with more alarming speed. Where did they all go? How much of them did I waste and what could I have done differently?

In the midst of musing on this - not worried, but aware that things are a bit out of sync at the moment - it was good to come across this while continuing on through The Sacredness of Questioning Everything:


'All manner of things being redeemed' forcefully reminds me of Tom Wright's conclusions in Surprised by Hope.

I take this to be in full agreement with Frederick Buechner, when he writes, 'All moments are key moments'. And with Adrian Plass, when he states that, 'Nothing is wasted'

And I think the same point is made in the wonderful wordless telling of Carl and Ellie's adult life together in the movie UP, which I saw this week. Every life is an adventure.

Which ties back to the poem that I took the title for the blog from. I am being told this again: 'It all matters. Pay attention.'

'a diamond in the bottom of a puddle'

Abstract kitchen and a song.