In the midst of a long article about the Junos Denis McGrath says:If I remember correctly (and I might not be getting this right; that's the nice thing about blogging vs. journalism, I can put that caveat right there and wait for the hive mind to correct me in comments)
Photo © Jenny Rollo
"Technology adds nothing to art," he says. "Two thousand years ago, I could tell you a story, and at any point during the story I could stop, and ask, Now, do you want the hero to be kidnapped, or not?" But that would, of course, have ruined the story. Part of the experience of being entertained is sitting back and plugging into someone else's vision.
"The fact of the matter is, since the beginning of time, you could buy a Picasso and change the colors. That's trivial. But you don't because you're buying a piece of Picasso's fucking soul. That's the definition of art: "Art is one person's ego trip."
Penn says he and Teller "have been offered a huge amount of money and a huge amount of technology to do interactive shit. We have turned them down. Not that the technology wasn't up to snuff, but because we don't have any ideas."
"The whole fucking world is pretending the breakthrough is in technology," he says, as we whiz by the Blade Runner-like landscape of New Jersey oil refineries. "The bottleneck is really in art."
If you make stuff, it is not yours to command its destiny in the world. God help you, you should be grateful if it has one. It's fantastic if anyone cares.
Copyright is a “right” in no absolute sense; it is a government-granted monopoly on the use of creative results. So let's try calling it that—not a right but a monopoly on use, a “usemonopoly”—and then consider how the rapacious expansion of monopoly rights has always been counter to the public interest, no matter if it is Andrew Carnegie controlling the price of steel or Walt Disney managing the fate of his mouse. Whether the monopolizing beneficiary is a living artist or some artist's heirs or some corporation's shareholders, the loser is the community, including living artists who might make splendid use of a healthy public domain.
The cardinal difference between gift and commodity exchange is that a gift establishes a feeling-bond between two people, whereas the sale of a commodity leaves no necessary connection. I go into a hardware store, pay the man for a hacksaw blade, and walk out. I may never see him again. The disconnectedness is, in fact, a virtue of the commodity mode. We don't want to be bothered, and if the clerk always wants to chat about the family, I'll shop elsewhere. I just want a hacksaw blade. But a gift makes a connection. There are many examples, the candy or cigarette offered to a stranger who shares a seat on the plane, the few words that indicate goodwill between passengers on the late-night bus. These tokens establish the simplest bonds of social life, but the model they offer may be extended to the most complicated of unions—marriage, parenthood, mentorship. If a value is placed on these (often essentially unequal) exchanges, they degenerate into something else.
Art that matters to us—which moves the heart, or revives the soul, or delights the senses, or offers courage for living, however we choose to describe the experience—is received as a gift is received. Even if we've paid a fee at the door of the museum or concert hall, when we are touched by a work of art something comes to us that has nothing to do with the price. The daily commerce of our lives proceeds at its own constant level, but a gift conveys an uncommodifiable surplus of inspiration.
This is the reason why even a really beautiful, ingenious, powerful ad (of which there are a lot) can never be any kind of real art: an ad has no status as gift; i.e., it's never really for the person it's directed at.
And we too often, as hucksters and bean counters in the tiny enterprises of our selves, act to spite the gift portion of our privileged roles. People live differently who treat a portion of their wealth as a gift. If we devalue and obscure the gift-economy function of our art practices, we turn our works into nothing more than advertisements for themselves.
As a novelist, I'm a cork on the ocean of story, a leaf on a windy day. Pretty soon I'll be blown away. For the moment I'm grateful to be making a living, and so must ask that for a limited time (in the Thomas Jefferson sense) you please respect my small, treasured usemonopolies. Don't pirate my editions; do plunder my visions. The name of the game is Give All. You, reader, are welcome to my stories. They were never mine in the first place, but I gave them to you. If you have the inclination to pick them up, take them with my blessing.
At long last Steph and I settled down to watch Tsui Hark's Green Snake, a film alternately praised and reviled by critics. Teleport City praises it, but their reliability is shaky with us (why would anyone praise crap like The Stormriders?) The girl at the video store LOVED it, but she loved Vampire Hunters: The Twin Effect, so who knows? Tsui Hark (especially in these later years) has been pretty hit-or-miss, too (I still feel bad for Anita Mui in The Magic Crane), so there was justifiable trepidation on our part.
Large portions of this film are devoted to loving slow-motion shots of the two ladies more-or-less (or even completely) undressed, rolling around with each other in the rain or in a flower-filled bathtub. It's hard to hate. Especially when even that stuff never outstays its welcome.
When our heroines unload their awesome magical powers, there's very little in the way of depiction. Basically, they stand on a fake hilltop and wave their arms around. There's some smoke and some trickery, but it happens very fast and really, you just get shown enough so you can figure out what's going on. Then it's on to the next thing. The speed of the narrative, the incredible rate at which things happen, makes Hark's casual indicating of each moment acceptable. If the story didn't move at such a breakneck pace, this light touch would feel unfinished and hollow. It wouldn't satisfy, maybe only because you'd have enough time to say, "Wait a minute. That's pretty obviously a paper-mache snake Maggie Cheung's rolling around in the water with." Instead, you get just enough time for your brain to say, "Holy crap, lookit Maggie rolling around in the water. I guess that's a snake there with her." And then you're off to the next bit.
Andrew Currie's just-released feature film Fido is a very charming, amusing and even heart-warming take on the zombie film. If you can imagine that. I'm sure you can, you're very imaginative.
The early parts of the film echo Brad Bird's The Iron Giant in their mockery of mid-20th-century self-righteous propaganda, but Fido's got different axes on the grindstone than did Mr. Bird. Even with the same basic idea of a young boy who befriends a stranger that adults view with fear, Currie ventures into distinctly more uncomfortable terrain than Bird. Timmy's burgeoning friendship with Fido, as pathetic as it is, unravels the society around him, peeling away the layers of hypocrisy that allow everyone to deal with the unending terror of a world beset with the walking dead.
Zack Snyder's 300 is a fantastic bit of puffy/silly cinematic hoobajoobery. Decapitations, orgies, naked male torsos, horrible death, rape (sort of... more on that later) and a final sacrifice justified through terrible retribution.
This is the woman who is married to King Leonidas, the guy who's so unbelievably righteous he murders messengers just for not being polite enough. Head of a society so rigid little kids are sent out into hostile wastes to prove they deserve a place among their elders. It's unclear, but presumably marriage vows are handled with similar ferocity and lack of compromise.
Leonidas is a typical (one might say stereotypical) Miller hero: possessed of unquestioning confidence in his own moral judgement, which is of course backed up by his unmatchable physical prowess. Miller's universes mostly figure physical prowess as demonstrative of moral rectitude. His rejection of Ephialtes is unsurprising, indeed, necessary, in order that the moral quality of the film's universe remain consistent. There cannot be discord amongst the rippling torsos of the Spartans. There can't even be hairy chests, which for a bunch of Greek guys has to be considered one of the most egregious anachronisms of the film (followed closely by David Wenham's BLONDE Spartan).
But it was still tons of fun. And very educational. You really learn when you practice with someone who's studied with others. Everything is different -- timing, distance, speed. All the little things, all the things that add up to complete unfamiliarity. You have to pay attention.
Zanshin. Awareness. Even after you've finished, even when you're not practicing, staying aware of all that is happening around you. I find this lesson constantly needing renewal -- it's so easy to trick my focus into a narrow world and to forget that all else is really and truly part of the same system that I'm in. The guys practicing behind me aren't a distraction or something I need to shut out of my senses; they are part of the environment that I share, and as I practice, I must retain my awareness of them and where they are.
And just learning the basic stances and cuts again and again. You try and copy what Sensei teaches you, practice it and practice it, and then realise you've misunderstood something and have to overcoming all the conditioning you've already put in to the incorrect form. And then you do it again.
Look! It's Salma Hayek and Penelope Cruz dressed up like cowgirls! Look at how charming they are! They've got guns, too! Cute hats! And it looks like a cowboy movie, so they probably ride around on horses, wear chaps and maybe corsets and look at them!
If anyone can explain how advertising a movie with Penelope Cruz and Salma Hayek by covering up their faces is a good idea, I'd love to hear it. I mean, come on, this is a total hamsmacker, and with any hamsmacker, your every effort ought to be towards selling the obvious. Penelope Cruz and Salma Hayek are beautiful women. Anyone who's going to see this movie is going to see it pretty much for that reason alone -- because they want to see Salma and Penelope dress up as cowgirls. Not cover their faces with hankerchiefs.