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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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Levittown (again)
Tom Moody has just written an excellent post on art, war, and USA. It's here.
Hey very way cool...my plants are on samplesize!
I keep running accross references to Plato's Cave these days. (A quick refresher: the world is a cave with a bunch of people constrained to stay in it, all facing one way. Shadows flicker on the wall from the doorway and the constrained cave dwellers mistake those shadows for the real [ideal] forms that generate them, because the shadows are all they know, and all they are capable of seeing.)
Some people are both frustrated and motivated by the philosophical (some would say physiological) impossibility of seeing the world as it is. I love very much this passage below from Roadside Picnic, by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, MacMillan Publishing Company, 1977. pp.70. I see it as an elegant attempt at the impossible task of finding words to describe something that cannot even be properly perceived.
He squinted hard, sorry that he hadn't had time for an hour's nap before his important business. And then it hit him. [...] It was as though he were in a different world. A million odors cascaded in on him at once—sharp, sweet, metallic, gentle, dangerous ones, as crude as cobblestones, as delicate and complex as watch mechanisms, as huge as a house and as tiny as a dust particle. The air became hard, it developed edges, surfaces, and corners, like space was filled with huge stiff balloons, slippery pyramids, gigantic prickly crystals, and he had to push his way through it all, making his way in a dream through a junk store stuffed with ancient, ugly furniture...It lasted a second. He opened his eyes and everything was gone. It hadn't been a different world—it was this world turning a new, unknown side to him. This side was revealed to him for a second and then disappeared, before he had time to figure it out.
Back in March, I posted the text and images from one of my old three-fold flyers, a piece of art ephemera from 1996. Here is another one (with very minor edits), written just pre-Buffy, but well post-Pet Cemetery.
WARNING: Something Will Go Wrong
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An important thing to remember about bringing people or animals back from the dead is that something is bound to go wrong. It will probably seem like a great deal at first, you just perform some ritual with garlic and fingernails, or sneak around at night in the sacred burial grounds, whatever, it’s not a lot to ask to get your loved one back. Right? Right, until...well, until you actually do it and they do come back, and they’re all rotting, or they’re possessed by the devil, or they’re just plain zombies or mummies and they try to kill you or suck your blood or whatever, something will definitely go wrong. It’s as if there’s some kind of punishment for trying to do what anyone would do, and bring a loved person or animal back to life. It’s as if, when you try to do it, you become evil, or something, and from then on you deserve everything you get. |
It’s not like I really expect someone not to do it, if they've got the chance. All I’m saying is that something is pretty well definitely going to go wrong.
A friend showed me his copy of Tasman Richardson's recently released, Basement Boy Hardcore DVD. I like music best when there is something to look at and think about. This fit the bill perfectly and I want to watch it all again right now. The first track, "Vader Lives", is a sort of classical aesthetic dance beat b&w riff on Star Wars with ominous relevance and world events overtones. My favourite track is Destro My Tokyo with self-consciously cathartic, laser-eyed dog, multiple A-bomb, anime collage and scary music. There is a little taste of "Blackest Sabbath" here, but it doesn't remotely do the whole freaky thing justice. I especially enjoyed the contextualising segues in which Tasman and Wolfgang Bochar get drunk with Wolfgang's computer to talk about culture and other big things.
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If you are in Toronto next week, you might want to join in on some of this fun stuff organised by ARC for Bikeweek.
1. Moonlight Ride: Thursday May 27, 8:00 pm
Enjoy an almost all-downhill, off-road bicycle path through the ravines of Toronto. End up at a watering hole near Cabbagetown. Fun and easy ride. Meet at Warden Subway Station.
2. You Are A Hero! Good Fortune Friday: Friday May 28, 8:00-10:00 am
On your morning ride, keep a look-out at intersections throughout the city. ARC spreads good fortune by handing out cycling related fortune cookies to cyclists at various locations, proclaiming "You're a hero! Thanks for riding your bike!"
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3. ARC's 9th Annual Parking Meter Party: Wednesday June 2nd, 5:30-7:30 pm Join in this popular event where cyclists will transform downtown parking facilities into an open-air party room. Participants bring snacks, music, and furniture. After putting a few coins in the meter, voila! it's party-time! Wear your party duds. 761 Queen Street West. |
4. ARC's 2nd Annual Report Card
"Bicycling in Toronto 2003-04" is to be publicly released during Bike Week. This is ARC's second report card on bicycling conditions and the City's efforts to promote cycling. ARC grades the local government on its' work in areas including street safety, deaths and injury, bicycle routes and leadership. The idea behind this report card is to inspire the city to improve their cycling activities, and to provide a historic record of the conditions cyclists face on a daily basis. The grades are also intended to provoke cyclists and government into thinking about what makes a good cycling environment.
photo by Darren Stehr of Toronto Cranks
There are great photos posted online from last Wednesday's sad and lovely bike memorial (see previous post). Tino's are here, and Toronto Cranks' are here.
mail art #1
Remember mail art? There are artists still engaged with the medium, but in my life the practice has been replaced by blogs and email. Most of my old mail-art friends have quite rightly cut me out of the loop (because I no longer respond in-kind), while they continue to send beautiful, personalised objects to one another via Canada Post. Others are sharing code, posting to lists, posting to blogs, etc. In a recent root through my closet I just unearthed an old box of mail-art postrcards from friends, family, and otherwise-designated loved ones. Below is one of my favourites, sent to me during the Gulf War when I was living in an attic in Upper Gagetown, NB, right next door to the Oromocto army base (meaning that the house we lived in rocked with munitions testing all day long).
top: A side of cut-n-paste postcard depicting US testing of tomahawk missile in California,
middle: excerpt/detail from message on B side, bottom: detail of middle panel from A side.
I saw Big Fish recently, cause it was a good night for self-indulgence. Tim Burton makes interesting things to look at, and Ewan MacGregor still turns my crank. My friend S. used the word "forced" in a positive way to describe the weird fictive visuals. Father/son drama is about as loaded as it gets: hot cipher-on-cipher action. This movie was surprising and captivating except for all the other parts where it was tiresome and predictable. Why must Tim Burton work with Danny Elfman? (In fact, couldn't we do away with Danny Elfman's music altogether?) The fiction/reality flip-floppery was fun, but not quite fun enough to outweigh the long-winded, broad-stroke, get-out-the-violins crap. For a really intense, scary, beautiful , unsentimental (and short) father son film, see Collin Zipp's artist's project at Samplesize.
As I left my neighbourhood diner the other day, the waiter remarked, "You sure seemed to be enjoying that book." I gather I'd been chortling aloud over my pasta and pint. Great, more fodder for the neighbours' impression that I am some kind of no-good weirdo freak. No wonder I like Girls Who Bite Back, the latest project from the ever prolific Emily Pohl-Weary. I was initially a tad dubious about the topic for this anthology: female superheroes. And there are a lot of references to a certain pretty, moody blond TV icon vampire slayer. But Buffy is just a launching pad and a bunch of these essays are on a uniquely oddball edge that it feels damn good to indulge.
I'm still reading the book, and not in any particular order, but one of my favourites so far is Carma Livingstone's "Madame Mouth's Little Get Together," in which a clatch of female video game characters meet up to discuss their profession and get looped on a beverage called CircuitPlus. The cast are The Legs, The Hair, The Ass, The Brain, The Tits, and Madame Mouth. They spend the whole time agressively bickering, comparing notes on nude patches and the "bitch actresses" who are portraying them in the movie versions of their games. They all flirt with The Tits, who only has eyes for The Brain. There is violence, but I don't want to spoil the story so I'll say no more.
"Five Case Studies of Females With Enhanced Characteristics" by S.P. Bustos, is an incredibly convincing study in fictional genetics that charts mutations in the X chromosome resulting in super powers.
This mutated protein allows the subject to undergo morphological alterations of the body to resemble any person. Nerve-growth factors become up-regulated in the subject, which triggers high numbers of cells to migrate throughout the body and form various tissues, including cartilage and bone. Strict regulation of tissue formation, especially in the facial area, allows successful morphogenesis.I also very much enjoyed Sophie Levy's "A Manifesto For The Bitten," a riff on cyborgs, aliens, vampires and queers.
When cyborgs look in the mirror, do they see vampire reflections? What do they see? And how do they see it? Robot vision only becomes discernible in the movies at the point when it fails -- pixellates. Think about the last moments we share with the T-100 in Terminator II: as he dissolves himself, his vision fails, breaks up, and we are reminded (at the point of his most human action) that he is a robot. His eyes are screens upon which the world is projected. When we look into cyborg eyes, do we see ourselves reflected and distorted as on the convex surface of the television screen?I can't wait to read the rest of this strange, energetic book. The Toronto launch for Girls Who Bite Back is this Thursday evening at the Cameron House from 6 to 9pm.
For those of you in New York, go meet Emily and contributors Carly Stasko, Daniel Heath Justice, and Mariko Tamaki on Sunday, May 23, 7 pm at The Lucky Cat (245 Grand St, Williamsburg). More details about both events are here on the website.
Two cyclists were killed in the Toronto area last week. Some ARCers (not me) did a memorial ride yesterday. Sad pictures here, by Tino, of nice people taking flowers to an empty place. The other memorial ride, much more central, is planned for Wednesday. If you are a cyclist you are welcome to attend. Here are the details:
One week following the death of a 29-year-old cyclist, Toronto cyclists will ride to the site of the fatality to pay their respects to a fellow cyclist. Flowers will be left at the site to mark the death.
When: Wednesday, May 19 at 6:00 p.m.
Where: Intersection of Dundas St. W. Service Road and Dupont St.
Meet: Cyclists will gather at the Bloor/Spadina parkette and ride to the site together leaving at 5:30 p.m.
There will be a brief ceremony of solidarity and respect at Dundas and Dupont at 6:00 p.m.
At 6:30 p.m. the cyclists will leave together and ride to the Ferry terminal to catch the 7:15 p.m. ferry to Ward's Island. A ceremony and celebration of the cyclist's life organized by his family and friends will be held on Ward's Island at 7:45 p.m.
Any Canadians feeling smug about our general left-wingedness as compared to USA should read Christie Blatchford's article today in the Globe and Mail, an article about crimes committed by people wearing hoods being more heinous than those by perpetrators who are boldly bare-faced (no outright mention of skin colour...), an article that begins and ends with her $200 trip to the hair salon. Actually, I take that back: nobody should read it, but in case you feel like getting all steamed up, here's the link. I am finding it extremely disturbing that degrading images of Iraqis are still being splattered, now with musical soundtrack and voice-over narration (as on CBC's "The National"), all over the mainstream broadcast news. We have devolved the function of this footage from breaking information to yet more vaguely titillating eye-candy, a transition that opens the door for idle, decadent speculation such as Blatchford's. Reminds me of the now too famous 1968 photograph by Eddie Adams of the execution of a Viet Cong prisoner. It might be my ignorance, but I can't think of any images of white people in extremes of dehumanisation that have been adopted in this fashion, recontextualised, and mutliplied a million times by the western press.
 Power Plant brochure with painting by Daniel Richter | It takes me forever to go to art shows. I recently went down to see the current show at The Power Plant and because I'd already heard everybody else griping about how bad it is, I ended up liking it much more than I thought. In fact, I actually got caught taking pictures of Daniel Richter's work and had to erase them in front of the gallery attendant. D-OH! I'm not easily mortified, but that did it. Later I realised that the shot I wanted is the exact same one they used on the cover of the free brochure. So here's a picture of that instead, as it looks sitting on my window ledge. Enough anecdote...on with the art review! Daniel Richter's paintings caught me off guard. I spent a full five minutes in battle with myself, saying "these are horrible, and everyone knows it" while at the exact same time digging them quite a bit. They are scratchy and ugly and too big for their britches. They are animistic, apocalyptic doomsday carnivals that remind me of Euorpean science fiction and revolution. The one on the brochure, titled, "Das Missverstandnis" (now that I have the spelling right, I think the translation is "The Misunderstanding" ... any help with this would be appreciated), depicts a motely crew of feathered, costumed folk, come up from town to pay some sort of strange homage or serenade to a big tree full of birds. Yet all the while a predatory, knowing, radioactive cat is stalking the scene and giving us art viewers the nod. An interesting note on Richter is that he used to paint abstraction, and recently, suddenly, took on rendered space, representational form, and content. It's an unusual transition. There is an image of one of his abstract works from 1999 here. |
Cloaca, image stolen from artnet.com |
The main event, of course, is Wim Delvoye's "Cloaca", a big machine that has been exhibited all over the world, and takes food (in this case table scraps from a fancy downtown Toronto restaurant) and, through a complicated process that replicates human digestion, produces small, demure portions of poo. One of my friends who saw it early in the run complained that it was too clean and sterile. I believe the exact words were : "much too clinical for an ass-licker like me." But by the time I got down there the damn thing stank badly and I was kind of impressed. I could barely stand in the room for the time it took to tour of the mechanism, and fled before I'd seen quite as much as I wanted. The gallery attendant (a different one) was very generous with information, and shared with me that when she goes home from work, people sitting next to her on the streetcar wrinkle up their noses and go "sniff sniff." Geez, thanks, Wim. I liked the sad cyborg aspect of this work, but I think the digs at both corporate culture (see the Mr. Clean w/bowels icon and "buy feces now" slogan) and art world preciousness are add-ons, making up a shaky, ironic patina that fails to function as subversion, but gives the piece a detrimental sheen of political correctness. |
Last night as I was watching TV my normally restless clicky-thumb stopped on a show called The Fifties, The Fear And The Dream. The imagery that caught my eye was Levittown, a model new community in New York for GIs returning from the war to have their families. Thank you for the f88king ugly suburbs, William Levitt. The show, however, a simple straightforward Canadian-made history, cast these middle-low income burbs in a contextual light that made more sense to me than usual, the extreme social value placed on an affordable patch of lawn a reward for enduring wartime: enough with catastrophic world events, time to look after me and mine. It was an understandable reaction, too bad it's now an internalised, systemic ideology. There's a good website on Levittown here (where I stole the picture above).
My friend J. reminded me today that the USA is based on single heros doing big things, while Canada is based on groups of individuals doing small things. My reiteration here is oversimplified, but this idea somehow oddly helped me in my current anxiety about the USA. The grand symbolic gesture of the nuclear bomb...too much power...is a singular icon. Nuclear physics also employed powerful, charismatic, and icnonic personalities. In some lights Oppenheimer is the most romantic, tragic anti-hero I can imagine: responsible for the A-bomb and the deaths of cities of people, remorseful and politicised, arguing passionately against Teller's (who, I just found out, is the inspiration for the Dr. Strangelove character...makes perfect sense, duh) plans for the H-bomb and the potential deaths of countries, continents, even planets. There is footage of Oppenheimer in the documentary, a man in pain in an impossible position, speaking, imploring his country to see people in other lands (ie: potential victims of hydrogen bombs) as "men like ourselves". I've been looking for the quote and can't find it. But I did find this (below), I think from the same interview with Edward R. Murrow in 1954.
Oppenheimer on secrecy: "The trouble with secrecy is that it denies to the government itself the wisdom and the resources of the whole community, of the whole country, and the only way you can do this is to let almost anyone say what he thinks - to try to give the best synopses, the best popularizations, the best mediations of technical things that you can, and to let men deny what they think is false - argue what they think is false, you have to have a free and uncorrupted communication.
"And this is - this is so the heart of living in a complicated technological world - it is so the heart of freedom that that is why we are all the time saying, `Does this really have to be secret?' `Couldn't you say more about that?' `Are we really acting in a wise way?' Not because we enjoy chattering - not because we are not aware of the dangers of the world we live in, but because these dangers cannot be met in any other way.
"The fact is, our government cannot do without us - all of us."
Common Dreams has an excellent, cheering (in a hell-in-a-handbasket kind of way) essay by 81-year-old Kurt Vonnegut.
"By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas."
My neighbourhood has Nighthawks. In the summer I sleep with my head next to a window, and I can hear them going peent peent* as they dart around up above the rowhouses, conducting their nocturnal flycatching activities.
*according to Roger Tory Peterson (actually the cry really does sound like that, which is part of the reason I like them)
* Krazy Kat was supposedly genderless, but I guess the guy is entitled to his opinion.
Excerpts from Naomi Klein at rabble.ca, Mutiny Is The Only Way Out
"The last month of U.S. aggression in Iraq has inspired what can only be described as a mutiny: waves of soldiers, workers and politicians under the command of the U.S. occupation authority suddenly refusing to follow orders and abandoning their posts. First Spain announced that it would withdraw its troops, then Honduras, Dominican Republic, Nicaragua and Kazakhstan. South Korean and Bulgarian troops were pulled back to their bases, while New Zealand is withdrawing its engineers. El Salvador, Norway, the Netherlands and Thailand will likely be next."
"And then there's the U.S.-controlled Iraqi army. Since the latest wave of fighting, its soldiers have been donating their weapons to resistance fighters in the south and refusing to fight in Falluja. By late April, Major General Martin Dempsey, commander of the 1st Armoured Division, was reporting that “about 40 per cent walked off the job because of intimidation. And about 10 per cent actually worked against us.”
"And it's not just Iraq's soldiers who have been deserting the occupation. Four ministers of the Iraqi governing council have resigned in protest; and half the Iraqis with jobs in the secured “green zone” — as translators, drivers, cleaners — are not showing up for work. Minor mutinous signs are emerging even within the ranks of the U.S. military: privates Jeremy Hinzman and Brandon Hughey have applied for refugee status in Canada as conscientious objectors, and Staff Sergeant Camilo Mejia is facing court martial after he refused to return to Iraq on the grounds that he no longer knew what the war was about."
[...]
"There is a way that the UN can redeem itself in Iraq: it could choose to join the mutiny, further isolating the United States. This would help to force Washington to hand over real power — ultimately to Iraqis, but first to a multilateral coalition that did not participate in the invasion and occupation and would have the credibility to oversee direct elections. This could work, but only through a process that fiercely protects Iraq's sovereignty." [details follow: ditch the interim constitution, put the money in trust, de-Chalabify Iraq, demand the withdrawal of US troops]
rabble.ca is a new kind of publication, one built on the efforts of progressive journalists, writers, artists and activists across the country. We launched rabble on April 18, 2001, just before the protests against the Summit of the Americas in Quebec City, and leapt onto the Net with the kind of coverage you could only get from the point of view of the rabble. We have covered events and issues in ways you'd be hard pressed to find anywhere else ever since. rabble.ca fuses the hot energy of activism with the cool eye of journalism. We feature some of the best progressive writers in Canada. Some will be known to you; others are the new and emerging voices you've been straining to hear.
Common Dreams is an eclectic mix of politics, issues and breaking news with an emphasis on progressive perspectives that are increasingly hard to find with our corporate-dominated media.
Democracy Now! has launched an expanded, two-hour War and Peace Report in order to meet a growing demand for trustworthy, independent news and information in this time of war. The War and Peace Report provides our audience with access to people and perspectives rarely heard in the U.S. corporate-sponsored media, including independent and international journalists, ordinary people from around the world who are directly affected by U.S. foreign policy, grassroots leaders and peace activists, artists, academics and independent analysts. In addition, the War and Peace Report hosts real debates – debates between people who substantially disagree, such as between the White House or the Pentagon spokespeople on the one hand, and grassroots activists on the other.
TalkLeft is not a neutral site. Our mission is to intelligently and thoroughly examine issues, candidates and legislative initiatives as they pertain to constitutional rights, particularly those of persons accused of crime.
cyborg notes:
I recently saw Logan's Run again for the first time since I was a teenager. It's a curious film. I remembered it as a tight little dystopic narrative, a neat, discrete vision of the future to stack up with Andromeda Strain and Planet of the Apes. The first third fits this model, but as the protagonists approach and breach the boundaries of the city, the story becomes more and more surreal. Eventually Peter Ustinov shows up, talking in cryptic verse. There are serveral highly choreographed modern dance type scenes, such as the carousel, where costumed folks in tights are hauled upward on not-so-invisible wires.There is also a truly strange A.I. moment in which the computer at a security checkpoint grills Michael York about consorting with lefties (Runners) while at the same time re-assigning him to a top secret mission, and changing the colour of his palm crystal (or life clock), thereby significantly shortening his life. The computer, passive/aggressive and omniscient, says very little while Logan stumbles and staggers through a series of "questions" that seems far too evocative for effective communication with a machine. I've excerpted this discussion below. The entire transcript has been made available online by Joe Rauner. There is a pretty thorough synopsis of the film (with images) here, at transparencynow.com.
C: Logan 5, approach and identify. (APPROACH AND IDENTIFY) Sit facing the screen, Logan 5. (IDENTIFY) Identify. (IDENTITY AFFIRMED: PROCEDURE: 033-03). Logan 5, do you identify this object?
L: Negative. Question, what is it?
C: That is the name of the object, "ankh". (ANKH, SANCTUARY) Do you identify this word, "Sanctuary"?
L: Negative.
C: “Sanctuary” is a pre-catastrophe code word used for a place of immunity.
L: I don’t understand.
C: The object “ankh” has been identified with the code word “Sanctuary”. The object and the word both relate to runners who have not been accounted for.
L: Question.
C: Hold. (UNACCOUNTED RUNNERS: 1056) Unaccounted runners 1056. You may state your question.
L: 1056 unaccounted for?
C: The number is correct.
L: That’s impossible. Question, maybe they weren’t all runners. Maybe most of them reached life renewal on Carousel. (UNACCOUNTED RUNNERS: 1056) Question, nobody reached renewal? But, everybody believes that, that some ...
C: The question has been answered, Logan 5. (PROCEDURE: 03303)
L: You mean, nobody’s ever been renewed?
C: The question has been answered. You are authorized to penetrate City seals and search outside the Dome. (PROCEDURE: 033-03)
L: Umm, seals? Question, what seals? Outside? Well, there’s, there’s nothing outside.
C: You will find Sanctuary, and destroy. (PROCEDURE: 033-03)
L: Question, what if I need help from another Sandman?
C: Negative. You will begin assignment by becoming a runner seeking Sanctuary.
L: Question. I’m only a Red 6 now. How can I pretend that I’m approaching Lastday?
C: Identify. (PROCEDURE: RETROGRAM) [Red crystal below Logan glows. He is age-progressed. His life clock now blinks]
L: My life clock. Question. My life clock!
C: (RETROGRAM COMPLETE) Retrogram complete. Proceed 033 03.
L: But am I still Red 6? But I had 4 more years! I will get them back, won't I?
C: You will take the object "ankh" with you for identification.
L: Question. Do I get my 4 years back? [computer falls silent]
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Please have a look at my ongoing art and physics project, The Trouble with Oscillation. I am launching this phase of the storyboard as part of this weekend's weewerk exhibition in Toronto (with Rebecca Diederichs, Gordon Hicks and Corinna Ghaznavi). Please have a browse through the story and leave your trace (ie: make comments, post links). If you are in Toronto, come down and see the show. Many thanks to everyone on Digital Media Tree, Joe, Kristin, Mark,Tom, and other posters to this blog who have been helping me shape the project since November. |
image, Ambition, c.1998. From mrnobody.org
I admit, about 5 years ago I figured Mr. Nobody for a charismatic flash in the pan, but the dude (Tanya Read's creation/alter ego?) just doesn't go away. Missing Krazy Kat and Ignatz? How about Felix, or Steamboat Willie. Willy Loman? Rosencrantz and Guildenstern? You need a dose of Mr. Nobody. This catlike everyman cipher has Toronto wrapped around his little ...uh...finger. Now he's got telephone poles in Korea covered too.
Wow. There's a really nice spot about this blog in the current issue of THIS Magazine. I've always had a great deal of respect for THIS because of their probing, left-wing take on politics and alternative culture. It's a bit of a thrill to be on their pages again (first time was in '98 when I was quoted saying "beauty is boring." Try living that down. And yes, I said it. I'm a dork). The current issue looks really good. There's a guide to religious troublemakers, the groups who are "working to promote international debate" and who "simply refuse some of the official tenets of their faith." There's a piece on Tooker Gomberg, and an article by Clive Robertson that I can't wait to read defending the cultural value of science to left-wing activists. There's much more of course, including a really positive little write up about digitialmediatree.com/sallymckay by Joyce Byrne. Thanks Joyce! I hope it brings new people to the blog.
I do have a few small additions. Lola (the art magazine I used to work on) was co-founded by myself, Catherine Osborne and John Massier (readers of THIS might think from the piece that it was all me -- so very much not the case.) The piece also quotes me as saying that this blog is the "most intellectually stimulating thing I've ever done." I'm sure I said it, cause I do say things like that, but it's no slur on Lola. That magazine had me all fired up 24-7. Anyhow, the write-up makes me proud, and it's nice to show up in ink on paper once in a while. Thanks THIS!
Image of Totoro at the bus stop from www.totoro.org
My Neighbour Totoro (Miyazaki again) is a romantic story about animism that turned all my world weariness to jelly and melted it away (for an hour or so). There are big strange creatures, spirits resembling animals to some degree, that inhabit nature and remain neutral with regards to human concerns. Yet they might relate to us, and occasionally there can be a meeting between person and spirit beast. In this case the spirit is Totoro, a furry sleepy grumbling creature. He stands with the girls at the bus stop and although he is cute he is also scary; his eyes are inhuman and stare with fixed incomprehension at such foreign curiosities as little girls. He rumbles and roars, and when he opens his mouth it is huge enough to swallow a house. He seems to be on the brink of eating somebody most of the time. Eventually a cat bus pulls up. Yes it is a flying cat with many legs, wild eyes, a crazed manic grin and zany, bus-like enthusiasm for freakish careening around. The cat has a furry, enclosed seating area in its back. When it picks someone up it opens a door-shape in its own hide for them to enter.
Totoro gives the girls a packet of seeds and they plant them. They wait and wait for the seeds to grow. One night Totoro and his two little companions (small-sized and smaller-sized versions of Totoro) show up, hopping around by the garden. The girls run out to join them and they do a sort of yogic dance, raising their hands and bowing to the earth. The plants start to grow and all of a sudden a giant bursting tree is boiling up out of the earth. It's momentous and breathtaking. Too much growth -- that scary out-of-control power of nature spirits. But its okay, fun even, a sort of permission to mania and exultation in life. Totoro has a spinning top for flying around. The girls jump onto his chest and hang onto his fur, and up they go into the air. Then they all sit up high high in a tree branch and play little owlish night tunes on their ocarinas. It's beautiful.
Today I was inspired by Mr. Wilson's May Day post to go outside and look at plants. I am fond of plants, and prefer that they live, therefore I've given up trying to grow things myself. Luckily my good friends/neighbours can handle it, so I went over there and hung out in the back yard.
I've been directed to The Memory Hole (Rescuing Knowledge, Freeing Information) by two separate sources today (Tom Moody's blog and Ben Smith Lea's post to IDEAL mailing list). American media is by and large trying to ignore the US Military Intelligence condoned torture of Iraqi prisoners. But the bloggers are on it. The quote below is from The Memory Hole's "some favourite quotes" section.
"The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naive and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who loves his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair."
H.L. Mencken
I've been working on this blog for about 5 months and I am still feeling out the medium. One thing that I love is how fast ideas move by. As someone who thinks slowly, and has trouble being "in the moment" I find the pace here challenging and stimulating. But there are some drawbacks. I don't have time to follow up right away on all the interesting recommendations that get posted in the comments. Later, when I'm ready to go browsing/researching/video_renting, they can be hard to find. So I've made a new page of recommendations. I did this for myself, but realised others might get something out of it too. It's sort of like a links page, but not quite because often there aren't links, and each entry has a referral back to the thread where it appeared on this blog. Now that I've done the back posts, it shouldn't be too hard to maintain. I'm not sure if this is a throw-back reaction I'm having, an old-fashioned desire to hang on to things, or a genuinely useful type of archive. We'll see how it goes, I might abandon the idea if it starts to drag me down. Anyhow. Recommendations from comments on this blog are currently posted here.