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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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here's my one-line-list review of "What the Bleep Do We Know." (thanks to Joester for the idea)
- More gratuitous graphic cheeze than Brian Greene's PBS wank-doc on string theory.
- I wish they would've told us up front that the blond pundit was channelling somebody else.
- This film had as much integrity as a chiropractor talking about how the uncertainty principle means you can change reality with your mind.
- I learned that a lot of basketballs is a "field" whereas just one basketball is a "particle."
- I would've found the extended wedding party dance interlude with cute animated characters representing human cells under the chemical influence of love extremely tedious, but I stopped watching at that point and skipped to the final credits, which was the first place any of the so called "experts" who'd been spouting off all movie were identified on screen.
I very much enjoyed Doug Saunders' column in Saturday's Globe and Mail (only available w/paid online subscription), "Longing for something authentic? Watch your step." In Rome, he visited the Italian home of Massimo, a "charming and eccentric man who lives at the centre of one of Italy's more vibrant intellectual cultures." Says Saunders:
In this world of hybrids, fakes, phonies, knockoffs and massproduced corporate clones, it is a thrill to run into somebody who is undeniably authentic. [...] People have had enough of noisy music composed of machine-made samples; instead they want a CD of pure, true native folk music or genuine keep it real ghetto authenticity. They want to avoid drugs and doctors and hospitals and deliver their children at home in good grubby medieval agony. They like books with simple, genuine narratives and none of that clever, academic wordplay. They want the good old politics of nationalisim, maple leaf flags and Crown corporations, even if it meands keeping the Queen on the money. At least its real.Says Massimo, showing off his collection of art and artifacts from around the world:
Unfortunately, there aren't many people left who are interested in tradition. The Ango-American world is flattening every alternative culture with its globalization. Being a minority, I identify with the American Indians, with the Irish, with the Muslims everywhere. This is what I have been writing about for decades.And, showing off his bust of Mussolini:
It was our greatest moment. We have to build a new future in its image, but it's not going to happen like that again. [...] I'm not against other cultures or immigration, I'm just against the mixing of races. That is a constant value: authenticity, purity. I don't mind being called a facist, and for all my life I have been proud of my facist heritage. But if we are ever to win again, we will have to call it something different. It will not happen until we are a real, genuine people.Yike! Good one Doug. I've been tilting at windmills lately, irritating my friends by worrying about fascist-looking art. All of a sudden, aspects of an artist like, for instance, Istvan Kantor bother me, where in the past I would've been simply irritated or ambivalent. I recently saw a screening of Kantor's super8 film "Fish Head," in which he guts a live fish and wears it on his shaven head, like a centurion's helmet. The fish is still swishing its tail and gulping, blood runs down Kantor's cheeks. The image is iconic, and visually satisfying. It got under my skin and I can't stop mulling it over. (Does this mean its good art? - damn!) I'm not too concerned for the torture of this particular fish (I eat fish after all, and have been fishing once or twice), but rather what invocation of power rises off the scene. Granted, the film is from a long time ago (mid-80s?), and it seems to me that in the context of pre-millenial post-modernism, the punk-rock nihilism of quoting fascism was kind of sexy/quirky (a la Attila Richard Lucas), connected to fetish and individual expression more than to past political movements of oppression. But nowadays, in the wake of USA's disregard for NATO, Guantanamo Bay, the insidious erosion of human rights such as the current persecution of Times Up in New York, and the outrageous psy-ops of homeland terror alerts, I'm finding such acts and images a lot more creepy.