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film club: a man escaped
For the last few weeks, Film Club has been interested in movies that present strategies—some successful, some not—for weathering the forces of cultural oppression. At a certain point, when a film has amassed a sufficiently complicated set of interrelated strategies, I think we can officially say that it is actually depicting a scheme. We have good reason to perk up here: the development of a scheme is a great narrative device, and, in the hands of a competent filmmaker, a deeply satisfying one. Think of films like Rififi, Man on Wire, and Oceans 11: very different films, but each one is built around a scheme, and as their schemes unfold they each yield similiar pleasures. To this list we could add this week's pick, Robert Bresson's A Man Escaped (1959). The plot is simplicity itself. A police liutenant in occupied France is imprisoned by Germans. He intends to escape. That's pretty much it. He is planning this escape literally every second we see him on screen, starting when he's being driven to the prison. Before we even see his face we see him trying to figure out if he can get out of the car and make a run for it: It's not the most successful attempt: So, OK. He chalks this up to "if at first you don't succeed" and carries on. The next attempt, made from within the belly of the prison, is going to have to be more complicated than a simple jump-and-run. But that's OK: the more complicated the scheme is, the more enjoyable it is to see enacted. This hinges, of course, on a filmmaker who is willing to visually represent the details as they unfold. To his enormous credit, Bresson lavishes loving attention on these details. There are passages in this film that are practically like an Instructables video on How To Break Out of Jail: Part of the reason that Bresson can spend so much narrative time on examining these details is that he rigorously strips out any element of the narrative that doesn't have to do directly with the protagonist and the plan. It's not hard to imagine a less assured filmmaker building in a villainous German character, as a way of establishing their threat level: Bresson just takes it as a given and moves on. A less assured filmmaker would likely show us the other prisoners being executed: Bresson just relies on word-of-mouth, and the occasional sound of machine-gun fire. This may sound like its short on visceral thrill, and, it's true that we're not dealing with Oz here. But Bresson has a different goal in mind: he wants to put us in the head of our protagonist, to impress upon us the "thrill" of the smallest details. Bresson is right that, to a prisoner, something subtle like approaching footfalls or the quickest glimpse of a weapon can hold enormous menace: ...and he is right that, to a prisoner, the smallest utilitarian object can convey enormous advantages: ...can be, in fact, a source of hope and courage: This goes all the way down, in Bresson's conception, to finding a splinter of wood that is the correct size for one's purposes: When we begin to discuss the ways in which the quotidian can be charged with enormous meaning, we begin to move out of the realm of filmmaking, and into the realm of spiritual or mystical belief. (Bresson himself has been quoted as saying "The supernatural is only the real rendered more precise; real things seen close up.") His religious belief has been amply discussed elsewhere, and it's really beyond the scope of this blog post, but I will say that by the point in the film where one character refers to incarceration as a way of moving into a state of "grace," I'm prepared to believe it. (Especially impressive: the film has invested this observation with the weight of truth through craft, rather than through the easy application of sloppy sentimentality.) This film makes a great introduction to Bresson; I hope to watch more of his films in the future. Next week: Film Club member Tiffanny E. writes "I wanted to explore more the idea of being imprisioned but avoid actual jails ... so I am picking The Diving Bell and the Butterfly." Stay tuned~ Labels: control, film club, media commentary, resistance, spirituality
Sunday, March 01, 2009
geek apotheosis
Earlier this week: ...and, well, I meant it. Take "Red F," for instance. For the first two minutes it's a pleasing blend of frenzied drum programming, synthesizer noise, and geek anthemics—which already hits my pleasure center pretty hard—then, just before the 2:00 mark, it gives one final push into the transcendent. If this is what my God looks like, then this track is what my angels sound like. Caution: loud. Labels: audio, audio_commentary, mp3s, spirituality
Saturday, February 28, 2009
what news looks like
Flickr user blprnt_van has been using Processing and the New York Times Article Search API to track the occurence of "organizations and personalities" over the course of the year. "Connections between these people & organizations are [then visualized as] lines," and the mind-blowing results are below: Click on the image for a giant-sized, legible version. Information visualization edges ever closer to graphically representing something that matches my most deeply-held conception of what God looks like. Found via the Daily Clique, and indirectly through BLDGBLOG's delicious links. Labels: design, information, information_visualization, spirituality
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
nonlinear fictions
As promised, here's the second half of what I'm thinking of as my Well-Intentioned Hypertext Rant, in which I argue that even literary / narrative works that aren't traditional hypertext as such are often nevertheless designed to be rewardingly navigated in non-linear fashion (hypernavigated?). Ready? Here goes: "[M]y [earlier] examples are all non-fictional, a little bit of a cheat on my part given that this whole thread got started discussing the merits (or lack thereof) of hypertext as a literary / fictional form. I'll grant that most fiction is designed to be read sequentially, although I'd point to the existence of a "scene selection" menu on nearly every DVD out there as evidence that people value and appreciate non-linear ways of navigating narrative as well. (I can only think of one filmmaker who has successfully resisted the popular pressure to segment the DVD release of their movies this way: David Lynch.) This also gets a little trickier when moving out from the level of the individual text into a "mega-corpus" of related stories, or a storytelling ecology. If we were Star Wars fans, we might read Star Wars tie-in novels in the order of their publication, or in the chronological order that continuity prescribes, or just randomly: each contributes another puzzle-piece to the overall Star Wars mega-corpus in a way that traditional hypertext theory very tidily provides a framework for describing. Comics continuity works similarly: only the most hard-core X-Men collector(s) can even begin to make an attempt to read the overall "story" of the X-Men in the order in which it occurred: the vast majority of readers are instead navigating the mega-corpus in partial, fragmentary ways, assembling the logic of it as they go. Again, hypertext theory provides a very handy way of thinking about this kind of reading. Mythic narrative systems work similarly: Dan [another commenter on the thread] observes that "[r]eligious texts can be read for narrative or as fiction, but that kind of reading generally doesn't involve skipping around." That's definitely true for the Old and New Testament, but less true for the heavily-annotated Torah, and even less true for pre-book mythic systems like the Greek, Egyptian, or African myths, which can be appreciated as fiction or narrative but have no coherent sequential order. Thanks for putting up with me while I indulged my need to be this guy. Labels: comics, fandom, hypertext, narrative, spirituality
Friday, March 07, 2008
macrocosmos | supercontexts It's perhaps worth noting that the task of creating an "everything device" (see Tuesday's post) crops up outside of artistic circles as well: a great many mystical or occult systems hinge on the idea that usable models of the macrocosm (or "God's design" if you prefer) can be created here on the microcosmic level of reality, and initiates to mystical or occult traditions are often encouraged to familiarize themselves with the workings of these models. Viewed from this perspective, things like the i Ching, Tarot decks, runes, or the Kabbalist's Tree of Life all can be said to qualify as "everything devices" of one sort or another. Someone like Grant Morrison sits pretty squarely on the intersection of "occult weirdo" and "cultural creative," and so it doesn't really come as a great surprise to hear him talk about The Invisibles as a sort of microcosmic distillation of his own macrocosmic ACEPOS, the "Supercontext." From this page of this interview: ""The Supercontext to me is what you get born into when you 'die' - remember at the end that these are just my personal metaphors for something that may be quite different. These are the words; I'm straining it down through The Invisibles, that's the shape I'm straining it down through. The Supercontext to me is a fifth-dimensional, informational continuum where things that we don't quite understand go on - higher processes, adult processes." Still planning to talk about the Kim and Spahr poetry books in this context, but I'm currently in Hartford on the eve of the Birds of Delay / Son of Earth / Number None tour, so deeper thoughts on poetry may be a week or so away yet. Stay tuned. Labels: spirituality
Thursday, March 23, 2006
a theology of trash Earlier this summer, I eBayed a copy of In Pursuit of Valis, an out-of-print collection of writings from the Exegesis, a 35,000-page heap of notes and journalings that Philip K. Dick worked on from 1974 to the time of his death in 1982. As one might expect, it's an extremely interesting piece of reading. I've always admired Dick as a spiritual thinker, in part because of the way he tempers his deep faith with a skeptic's suspicion of totalizing systems: "Probably the wisest view is to say: the truth—like the Self—is splintered up over thousands of miles and years; bits are found here and there, then and now, and must be re-collected; bits appear in the Greek naturalists, in Pythagoras, in Plato, Parmenides, in Heraclitus, Neo-Platonism, Zoroastrianism, Gnosticism, Taoism, Mani, orthodox Christianity, Judaism, Brahmanism, Buddhism, Orphism, the other mystery religions. Each religion or philosophy or philosopher conains one or more bits, but the total system interweaves it into falsity, so each as a total system must be rejected, and none is to be accepted at the expense of all the others (e.g., 'I am a Christian' or 'I follow Mani')." As a conspiracy-eater, I'm also attracted to his esoteric interpretation of Scripture: "Mark 4:11 says that the parables were intended to confuse and not inform everyone except the disciples, the latter understanding the esoteric meaning, the outsiders getting only the exoteric meaning which would fail to save them: this was especially true regarding parables about the approaching Kingdom of God." not to mention the topsy-turvy worldview that comes from believing in a hidden (yet immanent) salvific Christ: "Our whole reality is a hologram-like fake, and into and onto it in the guise of fakery, [Christ] substitutes the (truly) real. So the nonsense phenomena are real, the substantial & normal & expected & sensible are not. Our criteria for distinguishing the real from the irreal are totally reversed: to us, the real is the solid, the heavy, the serious and the irreal is St. Elmo's fire, will-o-the-wisps." Perhaps as a result of this kind of thinking, PKD begins to develop a theology of the cast-off, wherein God is found in "trash": "A random assortment of trash blown by the wind & there is God. Bits and pieces swept together to form a unity." The Exegesis notes are a less polished and more fragmented "behind-the-scenes" version of the ideas found in PKD's great novel Valis, but anyone who's enjoyed that novel would also get a lot out of reading this book. I know I've enjoyed it. Labels: spirituality
Monday, August 22, 2005
A lesser banishing ritual, which features a discussion on the use of god-names in ritual. Intriguing. Thanks once again to Brian.
As for the side of myself that's received a new name? Well, I've been working lately, with Chris, on assembling the new Number None CD-R (Chicago readers stay tuned: we may be having a CD release party in the very near future). But in culling through the recordings we put together over the last year, I noticed that I had amassed a sizeable body of ecstatic noise experiments that didn't fit in any obvious way with the Number None project. I decided that the side of myself that was producing these pieces deserved to have an identity of its own (and thus a name).
Hence: Noah Opponent.
(Those of you who participated in the dream-recording project should be receiving a copy of the disc very soon; the rest of you can download an MP3 version of the completed collage of dream narratives and somnolent noise from this page (the track title is "in the lake of dreams").) Labels: personal, spirituality
Tuesday, April 15, 2003
Today I plan to once again try to get the site commenting system working.
In the meantime, enjoy this comment from Raccoon reader Kat McLellan:
"[In Raccoon] you said: 'As I understand it so far, apophasis seems to be a mode of religious discourse which confronts the problem of language's inability to express the inexpressible event at the heart of the mystical experience.'
At its best, poetry seems to work this way. In Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel, there is a line which attempts to capture the soul's ascendence into heaven. The words are ordinary, but it is the only line in the poem which is not in iambic pentamenter... it has an extra foot. Beyond words, its structure attempts to lead the reader to the brink of something of which language is incapable.
It's not always a religious event... but the value of poetry seems to me to lie in its ability to express an awareness of the incapacity of language... to lead a person to the lurching experience of approaching the space just beyond the edge of where language breaks down.
This seems to me also to function as a passable definition of consciousness: an awareness of the limitations of language, a desire for language to do something which it cannot." Labels: language, poetry_commentary, spirituality
Friday, February 28, 2003
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