{"id":1171,"date":"2009-12-28T09:56:16","date_gmt":"2009-12-28T14:56:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2009\/12\/28\/xmas-in-red-blue\/"},"modified":"2021-06-10T10:07:10","modified_gmt":"2021-06-10T15:07:10","slug":"xmas-in-red-blue","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2009\/12\/28\/xmas-in-red-blue\/","title":{"rendered":"xmas in red & blue"},"content":{"rendered":"

Best gift received: Carl Jung’s Red Book<\/a>. Very beautiful<\/a>, with nice overviews and interpretations by Sonu Shamdasani. If this doesn’t revive an interest in Jung, I don’t know what can (though, as I’ve argued, we’re overdue for a new, more integrated theory of imagination<\/a>).<\/p>\n

\"red-book-4.jpg\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Stupidest film to show on an airplane that’s just spent two hours sitting on the runway, on a Christmas day when another plane has almost been bombed by an attempted terror attack, with news of it available on CNN on another channel on Jet Blue’s free television and video service: District 9<\/a>. Not that the film itself doesn’t have its redeeming qualities — there were enough to keep me watching it instead of switching to CNN like the person next to me — but the waves of adrenaline and cortisol flowing through the plane don’t exactly make for a relaxing ride.<\/p>\n

What did I make of the film itself? Its reptilian aliens look B-movie hilarious, but the filmmakers deserve credit for thinking they could get us to sympathize with them. They are clunky stand-ins for refugees and illegal aliens of all kinds, from the bantustans of pre-Apartheid South Africa (where the film was made) to the Gaza Strip, and therefore an echo of (the much better) Children of Men, and the rapid-fire montage of cable-news\/reality-TV\/surveillance-camera action aesthetics gets a little wearying. One of these days someone influential will articulate a natural\/organic\/holistic aesthetic for film viewing which, like the slow-food movement, will begin to cultivate a shift in audience tastes away from the Peckinpah\/Tarantino\/Woo\/Lucas\/Spielberg\/Scorsese\/Cameron trajectory and back, if not to an Antonioni\/Tarkovsky\/Angelopoulos slowness, at least to something less jarring than today’s norm.<\/p>\n

As for me, I’m happy enough sitting in a large room facing only the shimmering blue screen of Derek Jarman’s Blue<\/a>. With its immersive, poetic soundtrack, it’s the best antidote to all things Action.<\/p>\n

\"6a00d8341c66f153ef01156ff9dc7f970c-800wi.jpg\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Best gift received: Carl Jung’s Red Book. Very beautiful, with nice overviews and interpretations by Sonu Shamdasani. If this doesn’t revive an interest in Jung, I don’t know what can (though, as I’ve argued, we’re overdue for a new, more integrated theory of imagination). Stupidest film to show on an airplane that’s just spent two […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":99,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[688745],"tags":[352,354,4431],"class_list":["post-1171","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cinema_zone","tag-film","tag-imagination","tag-jung"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4IC4a-iT","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1028,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2009\/02\/11\/imagination-contemporary-theory\/","url_meta":{"origin":1171,"position":0},"title":"imagination & contemporary theory","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"February 11, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"This is a summary I provided to a grad student who was starting to get into this area. It\u2019s very introductory and far from complete in its coverage, but since there\u2019s so little out there on this topic, I thought it would be useful to post it. It's also a\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Philosophy"","block_context":{"text":"Philosophy","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/geo_philosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5158,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2011\/08\/06\/nature-the-popular-imagination\/","url_meta":{"origin":1171,"position":1},"title":"Nature & the Popular Imagination","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"August 6, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"I'm helping to organize this conference. Nature, Hollywood, eco-apocalypse, and the Malibu coast (the one that Mike Davis says we should let burn)... Can you resist? NATURE & THE POPULAR IMAGINATION The Fifth International Conference of the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture 8-11 August 2010,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Academe"","block_context":{"text":"Academe","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/academe\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":8394,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2015\/09\/18\/eco-humanities-glossolalia\/","url_meta":{"origin":1171,"position":2},"title":"Eco-humanities glossolalia","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"September 18, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"I've just come across the earliest outline I wrote for the course I'm currently teaching (in its third incarnation), \"Environmental Literature, Arts, and Media.\" The course has also turned into a book project I'm working on, which will be a thematic primer to the environmental arts and humanities.\u00a0Both course and\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Academe"","block_context":{"text":"Academe","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/academe\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6007,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2012\/06\/07\/nature-the-popular-imagination-keynote\/","url_meta":{"origin":1171,"position":3},"title":"Nature & the Popular Imagination keynote","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"June 7, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"Here's the abstract for the keynote I will be giving at Nature and the Popular Imagination in Malibu this August. It builds on my recent talk at Bucks College, but without the nod to pop-cultural interest in Avatar. THE AGE OF THE WORLD MOTION PICTURE starring the Cinematic Earth, with\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Eco-culture"","block_context":{"text":"Eco-culture","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/ecoculture\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":4969,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2011\/07\/11\/nature-vs-grace\/","url_meta":{"origin":1171,"position":4},"title":"Nature vs. Grace?","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"July 11, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"The latest issue of Precipitate: Journal of the New Environmental Imagination -- which looks like an excellent issue -- includes a review of Terrence Malick's \"The Tree of Life\" that reminds me how important it is to pay attention to the dialogical and heteroglossic texture of Malick's films, and how\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Cinema"","block_context":{"text":"Cinema","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/cinema_zone\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2011\/07\/jessica-chastain-tree-of-life-275x148.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":12302,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2021\/12\/14\/reimagining-religious-imagination\/","url_meta":{"origin":1171,"position":5},"title":"Reimagining religious imagination","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"December 14, 2021","format":false,"excerpt":"Wouter Hanegraaff has proposed that we rethink the study of religion as the study of \"imaginative formations.\" Much of my research has focused on something like that, or at least on the creative role of imagination in mediating the ways people come to live in the world, shape that world,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Philosophy"","block_context":{"text":"Philosophy","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/geo_philosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2021\/12\/9780231189460.jpeg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1171","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/99"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1171"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1171\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11900,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1171\/revisions\/11900"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1171"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1171"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1171"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}