And while we’re on a Christian thematic… here are a few beautiful videos set to songs by Sufjan Stevens.
Concerning the UFO Sighting Near Highland:
And two more…
I try not to comment on things I have little expertise in, but my year spent at a Catholic seminary school in Rome (with at least one resident pedophile among the clergy) gives me a bit of experiential basis for commenting on the Roman Catholic Church sex abuse scandal. Here’s my rhetorical question:
If the society you grew up in denied and suppressed the expression of your sexual urges, but at the same time offered you ONE institution in which you could not only spend a lot of time in the exclusive company of other members of the sex/gender whose contact you craved, but ALSO gave you power over them in large numbers, mentoring them as they were groomed to gain entry into the class and position of authority that you were allowed to have, why would you NOT become a priest?
There are, to my mind, three things the Vatican ought to do at this point:
(1) Institute a policy of no tolerance for the sexual abuse of minors by priests, and apologize unambiguously and make amends for what’s gone on up to now.
(2) Advocate greater tolerance for minority sexual persuasions in society at large (of the homosexual kind, not of the pedophilic kind that resulted from the Church’s public suppression and private enabling of the former). Or at least stop advocating against such tolerance and acceptance.
(3) Allow priests to marry, just as the Eastern Rite Catholic churches have done for centuries, with little apparent harm.
(A fourth step, only a little less directly related, would be to open positions of religious authority up to women as well.)
That way, wouldn’t Catholicism be able to get back to modeling the right ways to practice Christian (brotherly, and sisterly) love?
Posted in Spirit matter | Tagged Christianity | Leave a Comment »
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovsxauCwOb0&hl=en_US&fs=1&
There are two ways of being an academic. One is to burrow ever deeper into the little field one cultivates, to become a master of it, all the while propping up the fenceposts around that field to ensure that one’s terrain is left undisturbed by poachers, wild boars or raccoons, dissonant ideas, and so on. The other is to keep moving, following nomadic lines of connection from one thing to another, roping them in from time to time, but always getting diverted by the next thing that appears on the horizon. That may be the Next Big Thing (poststructuralism, postcolonialism, complexity theory, cognitive neuroscience, ecocriticism, or what have you), but it could also be a responsiveness to the world, which is always throwing up next (little) things if we pay attention to it rather than getting caught in our models of it.
Posted in Academe, Media ecology | Tagged Deleuze, great scenes, intellectual promiscuity | 4 Comments »
(great scenes, part 4)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rxpfO90mg8&hl=en_US&fs=1&
A propos the previous post…
This may be one of Antonioni’s worst, or at least most dated, films, but the climactic scene is certainly memorable, especially if you know Pink Floyd’s “Careful with that axe, Eugene” (though, honestly, once the screaming starts, the music feels pretty dated too). It’s a Deleuzian time-image if I’ve ever seen one. (Non-vegetarians might wish to fast-forward to about 3’20” to get to the meat of it.)
Visiting the point itself in Death Valley several years ago — during one of those springs when it was blooming like it very rarely does — made me realize that both the mansion and the movie are a little out of place at the real Zabriskie Point.
But the slowly exploding food does resonate with latter-day food politics, doesn’t it?
Posted in Cinema, Media ecology | Tagged food, great scenes | Leave a Comment »
I like to follow extended think-fests (such as conferences) with brief flights away from cerebrality, at least for a couple of days where possible. So following the SCMS, I visited the Santa Monica Mountains, which included a hike up La Jolla Canyon and Mugu Peak at the northern end of the range, and another up Solstice Canyon and the Sostomo Trail/Deer Valley Loop. Both were beautiful, as it was a great time to be there — warm, sunny, breezy, their chaparral and riparian vegetation in full bloom this time of year. Then I drove up from Malibu via Mulholland Highway to Hollywood — having recently re-read Mike Davis’s case for letting Malibu burn (in The Ecology of Fear) in preparation for it — and then walked from Griffith Observatory to the top of Mount Hollywood to get a great view of the whole LA area, somewhat muted by smog but not nearly as much as it would have been several years ago.
(As for letting Malibu burn, well, some of the monster homes did remind me a little of Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point, although (a) burning and exploding are not the same thing, (b) there’s still a fair bit of land set aside in the public/private patchwork of the area to keep environmentalists at least somewhat happy, and (c) I might even consider living there myself if I could afford it ;-).)
The irony, and this is part of the point, is that getting away from thinking tends to trigger new synaptic connections for thinking. This time the connections revolved mainly around two sets of foci, one having to do with the raison d’etre of my teaching, research, and writing (which I’ll leave aside for a future post), and the second having to do with aesthetics and Peircian phenomenology. I’ve been thinking a lot about the latter recently — especially Peirce’s classification of experience into firstness, secondness, and thirdness — and wondering why it was that, for all the thousands of pages he wrote during his prolifically unpublished life, he had very little to say about aesthetics and ethics. In fact, he often admitted his ignorance of both of them, even as they fit into important places within his philosophical system. (He took aesthetics and ethics to be two of the three divisions of “normative science,” the third being logic, and the three corresponding, respectively, to the beautiful, the good, and the true.)
Posted in Philosophy | Tagged aesthetics, ecological aesthetics, Peirce, travel | 3 Comments »
From Bande a Part. (Thanks to Annette for suggesting it.)
Or these two from Blow Up:
But I distinctly remember someone else coming along and kicking what was left of Jeff Beck’s guitar neck right after this. Am I misremembering? Did I see something that was never there in the first place, like the David Hemmings character hearing the tennis ball hit the rackets in the final scene of the film (below)?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9o11LTgXPtM&hl=en_US&fs=1&
Posted in Cinema, Media ecology | Tagged great scenes | Leave a Comment »
While it may be the first day of spring, traveling to warm places makes it easy to forget what that means. I’ve been enjoying LA and the SCMS all this week. Besides the three sessions devoted explicitly to ecology and cinema (or ecocriticism and cinema), there have been papers and sessions on animals, water, ecocide and the postmetropolis, and related topics — all of which indicates a growing presence of ecocinecriticism within the cinema/media studies world.
If anyone is interested in a PDF of the paper I’m giving today (partly summarized here), you can e-mail me privately about that.
Posted in Media ecology | Leave a Comment »
How à propos: Today’s Guardian’s piece on The Greatest Film Scenes Ever Shot.
What are your favorite scenes, your most indelibly etched screen memories, those “tiny pieces of time” as the article quotes James Stewart saying, that have remained with you ever since seeing them? (The comments open things up to a wider range than the actual article.)
How about the coffee cup scene from Two or Three Things I Know About Her?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4LWwhFJoUw&hl=en_US&fs=1&
Forty-four years haven’t dated it as much as I thought it would have.
Or the library, subway (below), and Nick Cave concert scenes in Wings of Desire?
Posted in Cinema | Tagged film, Godard, great scenes, Wenders | 2 Comments »
I’m on my way this week to the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference in LA, where I’ll be presenting, in miniature, the ecocritical/ecophilosophical model of cinema that I’m developing in my book-in-progress. This “process-relational” model draws on Peirce, Whitehead, Deleuze, Bergson, Heidegger, and others, with inspirational nods to psychoanalysis, cognitive film theory (which, to be honest, is a little less inspirational, but to some extent inevitable), and individual theorists like Sean Cubitt, John Mullarkey, and Daniel Frampton. Its ecophilosophical basis is that it is primarily concerned with the relationship between cinema — as a technical medium, a thing in the world, and a form of human experience — and the ecologies within which humans are implicated and enmeshed.
Here’s one articulation of that model.
The starting point: Films, or moving images, move us. They take us on journeys (metaphorical or real) into film-worlds. In this sense, films, like all art forms, produce or “disclose” worlds. These worlds are different (according to medium-specific regularities) from the profilmic or extra-filmic world. They are, for one thing, more dynamic (visually-audially) and more synthetic, insofar as they enable a complex array of fragmentations, juxtapositions, and recombinations of elements, and thus for a condensation and multiplication of meanings.
One part of my analysis is of those film-worlds themselves; a second is of our experience of being drawn into those film-worlds; and a third is of the relationship between the film-worlds (as we experience them) and the extra-filmic world.
Posted in Cinema, Eco-theory, Media ecology, Visual culture | Tagged ecocriticism, ecology, film, Ontology, epistemology, Peirce, Whitehead | 8 Comments »
Steven Shaviro has a very nice post about Kathryn Bigelow following her Best Picture and Best Director wins at the Oscars. Shaviro celebrates her “poetics of vision” and aesthetics of “sensory immersion.” On her earlier film Point Break, he writes:
“everything comes out of, and returns back to, the element of water. Bigelow shows us the ocean and the beach as they have never been shown before. The images from this film that remain most in my mind are all those telephoto lens shots of waves breaking on the shore. (Though the images of bank robbers in Presidential masks are also pretty wonderful â especially the shot of âReaganâ as cheerful incendiary). Surfing and skydiving are both modes of activity in which beautifully vapid male bodies give themselves over to the primordial elements. The homoerotic tension/attraction between Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze is itself immersed in the dynamics of waves and water. Surfer hedonism is taken up and transcended by the universal upswelling of a fluid dynamics.”
Posted in Cinema, Media ecology | Tagged aesthetics, Avatar | 2 Comments »
Readers may have noticed that I’ve turned off automatic commenting to the blog. The ever increasing amount of spam, some of which always manages to squeeze its way through the (fairly strong) spam filter, was getting intolerable. I’ve just discovered, however, that a handful of genuine comments from longtime readers also got caught in the spam filter, for one reason or another, instead of going to me for moderation. Sorry about that – I’ll check the spam filter more often. I’ll tone down the filtering if I see the spam level stops increasing. (Is that a possibility, or are we living in a universe pre-destined to choke on its own waste?)
Spammers, if you read at all, please don’t bother sending stuff here, since your messages will get deleted even if one or two of them get through momentarily.
Posted in Blog stuff | 2 Comments »
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