“If cinema is merely an imposition of ideology, then, as a field of study, it is both a bore and a chore. There was a brief moment in my life when I viewed cinema solely through the lens of post-structuralism, but I realized that it was jeopardizing my love for the art. Call me naive, but I believe cinema, like other artforms, can still offer aesthetic experiences worthy of the search.” — EJ Park
I would like to play piano/keyboards in a rock band, and I would like that band to sound as much as possible like Ryan Adams’ “The Shadowlands.” I would also be perfectly content if it sounded like “Political Scientist” or “English Girls Approximately” or almost any other track from Love is Hell.
“A World in Which Everything Hurts,” a profile of Arthur Miller in The Forward, gets bonus points for mentioning, in a single paragraph, three of the authors I’m writing about in my dissertation.
On some recent viewings . . . Shame (Bergman, 1968) — Liv Ullmann and Max von Sydow star as Eva and Jan Rosenberg, cultured musicians who escape to a rural island when their orchestra is… Random Musings . . .
I’m pleased to announce Cine Club, a new group blog that I hope will evolve in interesting ways. In the spirit of Andre Bazin and Francois Truffaut, I recently began hosting weekly film viewings with a small group of friends.
I invented a new game last night. It’s called, “Buy the only used copy of Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation at your local indie record shop, then watch all hell break loose when you lay it down on the checkout counter.”
My recent rambling on “relevance” is far and away the most-read, most-linked-to, most-commented-upon post in Long Pauses history, which is both strange and strangely comforting. The more I search, the more fellow travelers I find.
This essay was originally published at Senses of Cinema.
I’ve purchased my airfare. Any advice for a first-time visitor to the Toronto International Film Festival?
Since watching Caveh Zahedi’s In the Bathtub of the World on Sunday, I have probably listened to The Innocence Mission’s “Snow” thirty times. Hopefully I’ll find time to write about Bathtub in the next day or two. It’s been a long time since I was so moved by a film.
It’s interesting to see how Bush’s rhetoric has evolved. While admitting — finally — that WMD have not been found, he continues to litter his speech with allusions to them, though they’ve now morphed into “weapons of mass murder,” and — in a turn of phrase that would have made Monicagate-era Clinton proud — they are now modified with the nebulous term, “capability.”
I don’t, by any stretch of the imagination, claim to be a Merton-like contemplative, but I am suffering the realization that I no longer know what relevance the evangelical church has for me. If I leave, I want it to be a considered decision rather than the slow consequence of atrophy.
Christopher Goffard of the St. Petersburg Times interviewed Ross Miller about his upcoming “definitive” biography of Philip Roth and learned about their relationship, which extends more than twenty years and which seems to have been founded on an intellectual kinship.
Hour of the Wolf is Ingmar Bergman’s vampire film. Let me repeat that: Hour of the Wolf (1968) is Ingmar Bergman’s vampire film.
“Perhaps the best lesson of books is not to venerate them — or at least never to hold them in higher esteem than our own faculties, our own experience, our own peers, our own dialogues.” — Christina Nehring
It’s embarrassing to admit just how effective those “morning in America” spots really were.
The most recent episode of This American Life (which is worth listening to in its entirety) ends with an eight-minute reading by Sascha Rothchild. And by “reading” I mean “really funny, really frightening performance of several pages from her teenage diary.”
Dubbing itself “An intelligent guide to free and legal music on the web,” Fingertips provides links to and short commentaries on the week’s best downloads.
I’m excited to learn that Roth is melding his recent interests in mid-century American history with the more experimental projects of the late-80s and early-90s — Operation Shylock, in particular.
What he actually said: “In terms of this administration, we laid out the facts very clearly for the American people.”
“No, sadly the popularity of Bad Christian Art is not the result of a lack of Good Christian Art. It is a result of the rejection of metaphor.” — Slacktivist
I’m guessing that it’ll go something like this:
Jack Neely, everyone’s favorite chronicler of life in Knoxville, has a nice piece in this week’s issue of the Metro Pulse about his recent efforts to sell some old books. It’s a great glimpse into the lives of book lovers and the dealers who support their habits, with nary a mention of Borders or Barnes and Nobles in sight.
My wife and I spent the weekend in Louisville, Kentucky, where, among other activities, we spent two hours in a long line, in a hot hotel, surrounded by other people who thought that it might be fun to be an extra in the new Cameron Crowe film.
A nice post yesterday from slacktivist.
If you’re too hip to like Tori, do me a favor and tell me what you think of this song. It’s a nice change of pace for her. No acoustic piano. A bit of distortion. Borderline lo-fi.
“It’s not as if all preachers, including for instance John Donne, were merely dispensers of predigested, soundbite rhetoric and cliche; good preachers are gifted articulators of the thorniest, juiciest, most dangerous, most contradictory problems, dilemmas, controversies.” — Tony Kushner
Would Tarkovsky’s style, siphoned through another imagination, produce a similar effect? Would any of that strange poetic logic survive the translation? Béla Tarr’s Damnation makes for an interesting case study.
In case you missed it yesterday, Terry Gross’s interview with Thomas Friedman is well worth a listen. The first twenty minutes features a discussion of globalization, in general, and outsourcing to India, specifically.
