Did you ever see a fruit that went from green to rotten without ever ripening? I have. A mango, once. I bought it here in Paris for an outrageous price, I craved it so much.  I waited and waited... 2 days..... is it ripe yet? No.  I wrapped it in newspaper, to keep it from becoming brownish on the outside -- brown, the colour of rot -- and put it in the fruitbowl alongside temperate cousins. Another day... nothing, still green. Tough, solid mass of juice.  Forth day, I unwrap it... it smells wrong, the sweet scent of death.  I cut a slice off it, it is rotten inside.

Too soon, too late.

I put the cat in the oven and called it a cookie.

Rose hip

Hunger

Remember when you'd see a film and, when it ended, you asked yourself or those with whom you saw it: "I wonder if there's going to be a sequel!"?

That thrill of wanting more is exactly the same as leaving the table knowing you want more of that dish or dessert.  Knowing you didn't have enough, just because it was so good.

To me, the mark of a good film or book is this.  Even if at the end one is a little puzzled, not quite sure if one fully "got the message", if indeed there is a message, but wanting it to go on.

What's currently happening is the opposite of that, for the most part.  A film ends and is sometimes immediately forgotten, because forgettable.  And the sequel comes even before anyone asks if there is going to be one; then the prequel; sometimes two sequels and a prequel. The dessert no one ordered, but since it is now on the table, we eat it.  "Hey, it was there. Shrug."

Once, I heard an anecdote about a Swedish man who was offered a slice of birthday cake in a birthday party at the office. He turned it down, claiming he was not hungry. When I heard this I found it so odd, like the ppl at the office in question; since when does one have to be hungry to eat a slice of cake? But now I get it!  I had not got it till Friday, and now I do!

Toma no Brioche!

Lookalikes

Kurt Atterberg/Tilda Swinton

Slavoj Zizek/Modest Mussorgsky

Joseph Haydn/Cosmo Kramer

Mourir auprès de toi

Shift

A few months ago I came across a passage from a book written by a Brazilian writer talking about ignorance in a very fresh way.  

Unfortunately, the title of said book wasn't given by the person who recited it (an actor), and even though I looked for it it was nowhere online. 

So... I'll post my next favourite from her.  I like the idea contained in the quotation I couldn't find, which turns ignorance on its head, seeing the potential in it. (From memory, it is something like "knowledge is always limited; not knowing is limitless."  

How many of us can honestly claim to not have wished for the opportunity to read a book, listen to a piece of music, or see a film or painting, all over again, for the first time?  Only ignorance makes the first time possible. 

“I do not know much. But there are certain advantages in not knowing. Like virgin territory, the mind is free of preconceptions. Everything I do not know forms the greater part of me: This is my largesse. And with this I understand everything. The things I do not know constitute my truth.” 

Clarice Lispector

There is a certain, specific kind of liberation in the act of shifting one's perception or body in order to look at the same thing and see something new.

The idea that prejudice comes from ignorance makes the ears of reason perk up in alert suspicion.  I think this idea is incomplete. It's maimed or badly articulated.  To me, prejudice comes not from ignorance, but from incomplete knowledge of a certain thing; it comes from failure to dig deep enough, or failure to understand. Not understanding and not knowing are two different concepts to me.  There are many things one can know about or of, and yet not understand, not grasp the core of what makes the thing itself.

Trash, Art, and the Movies

Pauline Kael

I   

        Like those cynical heroes who were idealists before they discovered that the world was more rotten than they had been led to expect, we’re just about all of us displaced persons, “a long way from home.” When we feel defeated, when we imagine we could now perhaps settle for home and what it represents, that home no longer exists. But there are movie houses. In whatever city we find ourselves we can duck into a theatre and see on the screen our familiars—our old “ideals” aging as we are and no longer looking so ideal. Where could we better stoke the fires of our masochism than at rotten movies in gaudy seedy picture palaces in cities that run together, movies and anonymity a common denominator. Movies—a tawdry corrupt art for a tawdry corrupt world—fit the way we feel. The world doesn’t work the way the schoolbooks said it did and we are different from what our parents and teachers expected us to be. Movies are our cheap and easy expression, the sullen art of displaced persons. Because we feel low we sink in the boredom, relax in the irresponsibility, and maybe grin for a minute when the gunman lines up three men and kills them with a single bullet, which is no more “real” to us than the nursery-school story of the brave little tailor.

        We don’t have to be told those are photographs of actors impersonating characters. We know, and we often know much more about both the actors and the characters they’re impersonating and about how and why the movie has been made than is consistent with theatrical illusion. Hitchcock teased us by killing off the one marquee-name star early in “Psycho,” a gambit which startled us not just because of the suddenness of the murder or how it was committed but because it broke a box-office convention and so it was a joke played on what audiences have learned to respect. He broke the rules of the movie game and our response demonstrated how aware we are of commercial considerations. When movies are bad (and in the bad parts of good movies) our awareness of the mechanics and our cynicism about the aims and values is peculiarly alienating. The audience talks right back to the phony “outspoken” condescending “The Detective”; there are groans of dejection at “The Legend of Lylah Clare,” with, now and then, a desperate little titter. How well we all know that cheap depression that settles on us when our hopes and expectations are disappointedagain. Alienation is the most common state of the knowledgeable movie audience, and though it has the peculiar rewards of low connoisseurship, a miser’s delight in small favors, we long to be surprised out of it—not to suspension of disbelief nor to a Brechtian kind of alienation, but to pleasure, something a man can call good without self-disgust.

        A good movie can take you out of your dull funk and the hopelessness that so often goes with slipping into a theatre; a good movie can make you feel alive again, in contact, not just lost in another city. Good movies make you care, make you believe in possibilities again. If somewhere in the Hollywood-entertainment world someone has managed to break through with something that speaks to you, then it isn’t all corruption. The movie doesn’t have to be great; it can be stupid and empty and you can still have the joy of a good performance, or the joy in just a good line. An actor’s scowl, a small subversive gesture, a dirty remark that someone tosses off with a mock-innocent face, and the world makes a little bit of sense. Sitting there alone or painfully alone because those with you do not react as you do, you know there must be others perhaps in this very theatre or in this city, surely in other theatres in other cities, now, in the past or future, who react as you do. And because movies are the most total and encompassing art form we have, these reactions can seem the most personal and, maybe the most important, imaginable. The romance of movies is not just in those stories and those people on the screen but in the adolescent dream of meeting others who feel as you do about what you’ve seen. You do meet them, of course, and you know each other at once because you talk less about good movies than about what you love in bad movies.

Harper's, February 1969

*****

Today  went to one of my fav cinema houses in the city, La Pagode, to see a film I'd been looking fwd to, 2 Days in New York, directed by Julie Delpy, also in the lead role alongside Chris Rock.  A whole nine minutes into it I got the feeling that Delpy (who pleased me quite a bit with Before Sunrise and a little less with Before Sunset, then quite a lot with The Countess) seems to have the WoodyAllen syndrome only in reverse.

How I wish I didn't think this!  I like her work!  But wow.  

Woody Allen pleases me most when:

1- He isn't in his films and;

2- The action takes place in Europe.

Delpy tried to emulate Allen by packing her usually fresh, spontaneous French dialogue and stuffing it into a dusty suitcase to be thrown about carelessly upon arrival in the New World, forgetting to pack the most important item for this particular trip: her talent.

Instead of staying in France and doing what she does well well, she invaded Allen's turf (as he did hers?).

Either I am missing subtle parody or the Liberty Delpy has taken to be a Woody in drag makes the Statue Of seem a Lilliputian gift from France.

Here's the trouble:  some people can't be imitated.  Allen's style is so marked that anyone who uses him as an overt inspiration risks simple plagiarism.

To me, Allen is like Marcel Duchamp and James Joyce. A one-person artistic movement.

My Delpyc oracle tells me she will make quite a few phonecalls to Chris Rock in the near future as she realizes any success her film enjoys will be, if not entirely, then greatly, because of him.  His reactions to her ridiculous script which made more than 3 people (i.e. about 43% of the spectators since I went at 4PM...we were 15...um..) leave before the first hour.  I left after 65 minutes exactly, when Delpy's character's father started to tickle Rock's face with a red feather as if the scene depicted characters in an insane asylum.  Even then she'd have failed.  Her asylum is only inane.

The only bits which made me think about giggling a little involved the beginning of her relationship with Rock and language during the family dinner. 

Some of the dialogue was indeed well written and these few moments of bilingual confusion, if extended, could have redeemed the first hour of this caricature, if we exclude the feather scene which made me walk out into the cold rain.

I'm looking forward to her NEXT film, because I know she can do so much better than this.

As I breathe

When watching a film, do I want it to go faster? To end? Quickly? To last longer? Why? Why not?

How often do people say "I don't know"? 

William Blake, Newton, 1795

What is it called when a thing we don't know goes from seeming v big to becoming v compact when it is understood? 

On Parole

 Oxford English Dictionary © 2008 Oxford University Press:

parole/pəˈrəʊl/ 

▶noun

• 1 the temporary or permanent release of a prisoner before the expiry of a sentence, on the promise of good behaviour.

• 2 historical a prisoner of war's word of honour to return to custody or act as a non-belligerent if released.

• 3 Linguistics the actual language used by people. Contrasted with langue.

The private and the public spheres intersect all the time, everyday, and often it's a seamless movement; often, nothing much is stirred, uncovered.


The understanding which seems to accompany the system that is language has built into it the clues which signal to all that a statement needs modifying before it can be made public, or that it needs modifying before it can be absorbed in informal exchanges.


But the once fluid division between the public and the private is becoming more rigid, less flexible, clearer even as it confuses (me anyway!).
Because why else would any of us integrate into our daily exchanges disclaimers of all types?


Language is one system.  When it is used by individuals it temporarily becomes a function of that individual's thoughts, opinions and feelings, while at the same time remaining an abstract monster which exists in spite of any one speaker's will or influence.  It is very much like Frankenstein's monster.  Created but, once unleashed, no longer dependent on its creator.


At the same time, individuals modify, add, subtract, mix, superimpose meanings, images, sounds, and paralanguage to improve or impoverish language, every time they use it.


What interests me is the tragic development I see all around, whether in written or spoken language. I see people - individuals and groups - forgetting that when they speak, they have the power to influence listeners AND language; that when they speak, they do not have to integrate any of the vices, habits, clichés, opinions, metaphors and similes already dancing around the collective atmosphere.  Every engagement with language is a chance we all have to express our own thoughts and feelings according to how we see the world, instead of adopting someone else's views wholesale.


Our current obsession with choice is an amusing thing.  While adamant we do not want only one or two possible alternatives when it comes to food, politics, and a number of other things, we seem to be unaware that is exactly what we are getting.  The existence of different brands of the same exact product does not mean we can choose between or among different objects.  
The best example I can think of right now is news channels.  MSNBBCNN.  This Friday I watched the news on TV for a while, after a moratorium I imposed on myself since March 2010.  CNN, BBC News, Sky, Al Jazeera, France 24...  At the same time in the evening, this Friday, ALL these channels were telling me the exact same thing.  All of them.  They all start their "financial news" at the same time.  It is almost as if the directors of each channel phoned one another and said "ok... ready?  NOW!" and had their people press PLAY on the same stories.  And how varied, creative, at least authentic! do you think each channel's report was with regards to the words they used in the story?  They're in more perfect unison than the choir in my local church.


Is this choice?




This happens with language and when it does, it is even worse, because more insidious. The irony is this silent threat is loud.
Speak with 12 people and ask them all the same question. See how many give the same answer.
Speak with 12 people and see how many use the same expressions, turns of phrases, metaphors, similes, etc, to express their opinion.  See how many differ in terms of their opinions on the same issue.
Speak with these 12 people and, at the end, see how many of the expressions they used to convey their wildly differing opinions can be traced to MSNBBCNN.


Recently, talking to someone close to me, I broached this topic, and she said it is because there are a lot of not v bright people in the world.  Maybe.  I'm even willing to agree with that.  But, I asked here, wouldn't that translate into, say, 12 or at least 10 DIFFERENT stupid opinions?  How come the stupidity is so uniform?  Why is the putative stupidity being expressed in the same ways?  Surely there isn't a Stupid Club, like the Trekkies have, whereby ppl get together to exchange views on whatever, and come up with a small collection of things to say?  The "government line" of stupidity?  


But not even governments can keep their cabinet members from stepping into piles of sophistry designed by journalists who work for papers which exist thanks to advertisement from companies whose interests go against the people, sovereignty, and democracy.  


Manufacturing Consent (MC) shows this.  I know I am not discovering anything new.  What I find is that the processes outlined and examined in MC are spreading to private exchanges, to informal conversations.  The property language has of becoming a flexible tool to anyone who uses it is eroding, and no one has to make an effort to make it so.  It is just happening because too many people's mental inertia is allowing it.


The public use of language is invading our private exchanges and not being renewed by individuals' linguistic creativity, or at least not at the same rate.  Like eroded soil, linguistic rain is no longer penetrating the atmosphere, and condensation is more and more a concentrated version of a compact formula of pollutant elements designed to incite apathy and ostensible transparency.  No! Not even. Transparency is NOT a positive thing.  Seeing THROUGH something is not seeing the something itself.  I sit corrected and, after having thought it through, hereby declare those clouds to be of ostensible opacity.


Fratelli, let's think, please.  


Yknow how in churches the pastor, priest, preacher, will say, "brothers and sisters, let us pray" ?


Please, let us think.


You know it is the same thing, but saying THINK instead of PRAY changes something, does it not?


Why does it change something?


According to me, it is because we think for ourselves, but pray outwardly.  Thought is introspection, as good prayer ought to be, and often isn't.


Let us use language to fit our real thoughts.
Like the economy and economic theory, language exists and was created by us, to suit our needs, both to communicate and create.  Like the economy, it needs to fit our lives and benefit us, not the other way around.  We should not modify our thoughts merely to fit around the economy and the language being imposed on us.
Language, like the economy, does not belong to pressure groups, political parties, or academics. Like Castro Alves said "the public square is the people's, as the sky is the condor's". Language is the biggest public square. Let's not let malls own it like they do so much of the literal public square now, too much.


Let us let language fit our need to create.
We do not have to use the expressions ppl on telly use.  NO ONE has the monopoly on language. It belongs to all of us, and we can ALL of us use it how we want to use it.  


I want to put Langue, according to Def #3 at the beginning of this entry, ON PAROLE, and free Parole from the outdoors prison in which it currently floats.  Seriously.  And I'm not talking about JamesJoyce Syndrome.


This is so important because language shapes thought.  Try to think without words. Can you?

I haven't read it but like the cover

Candy in my Ears

A mondegreen is the mishearing or misinterpretation of a phrase as a result of near homophony, in a way that gives it a new meaning. It most commonly is applied to a line in a poem or a lyric in a song. American writer Sylvia Wright coined the term in her essay "The Death of Lady Mondegreen," published in Harper's Magazine in November 1954. "Mondegreen" was included in the 2000 edition of the Random House Webster's College Dictionary. Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary added the word in 2008. The phenomenon is not limited to English, with examples cited by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, in the Hebrew song Háva Nagíla ("Let's Be Happy"), and in Bollywood movies.

A closely related category is the soramimi, which are songs that produce different meanings from those originally intended when interpreted in another language.

The unintentionally incorrect use of similar-sounding words or phrases in speaking is a malapropism. If there is a connection in meaning, it can be called an eggcorn. If a person stubbornly sticks to a mispronunciation after being corrected, that can be described as mumpsimus. (Wikipedia)

Antiphon Phor

Regìna cæli, lætare, alleluia:

Quia quem meruìsti portare, alleluia:

Ressuréxit, sicut dixit, alleluia:

Ora pro nobis Deum, alleluia.

Luca Giordano, Resurrection, after 1665

HONK! If it's Good

Holy Week, Batman! It's Mad Hare Krishna!

To be as "mad as a March hare" is an English idiomatic phrase derived from the observed antics, said to occur (some say incorrectly) only in the March breeding season of the Hare, genus Lepus. The phrase is an allusion that can be used to refer to any other animal or human who behaves in the excitable and unpredictable manner of a "March hare".


Although the phrase in general has been in continuous use since the 16th century, it was popularised in more recent times by Lewis Carroll in his book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, which has the March Hare as one of its main characters.


"The March Hare will be much the most interesting, and perhaps as this is May it won't be raving mad -- at least not so mad as it was in March."