What would happen if the President of the United States went insane?
I don't mean Bush, Clinton, Carter, Ford, or anyone specific -- I'm speaking generically.
Let's look at it like this. A standing president, in office, slowly, then rapidly, begins to lose his senses. His decisions become more and more suspect. His speech is slurred. He becomes paranoid. He starts talking about launching nuclear bombs against Uzbekistan when the Super Bowl champions come to visit the White House. The press corps' murmurs become roars.
Would the military take over? Could there be a quiet, internal coup? Or what if the president wasn't insane, but his policies were so far out of whack that the only choice was to smother him, figuratively, if not literally? Could it happen? In a country like America? Cambodia, yes, sure, it's almost mandatory, I think, but in the States? How about it?
Just speculatin'. Make a good movie, I think...
Monday, February 07, 2005
AUTOMATIC LIVING
'The spooky art' -- that's what Norman Mailer calls writing. He's right. If you stop and think about it, writing really is spooky.
Remember, in school, when the teacher would order you to take out a piece of paper and a pen and do five minutes of that oh-so-exciting activity known as 'automatic writing'? You were supposed to just write down anything that popped into your head. It didn't matter if your ideas were random, disconnected, even illegible. (Mine were always illegible, being a lefty. Praise Allah for computers.) You were just supposed to see where your thoughts led you.
But isn't all writing 'automatic writing'? Sure, you start with a certain concept or image in your head, but by the time you finish writing your first sentence you've thought of another idea, a different idea, and that takes you down a long and winding road that is far, far from your initial idea.
What makes it so spooky? I think it has do with language. I think it has to do with the fact that, somehow or other, almost beyond are will, the words just emerge when we want them to. We have a feeling or emotion, and then we have this weird collage of symbols we've decided to call 'letters' that allows us a reasonable facsimile of what those emotions mean to us.
Ah, but sometimes those symbols aren't enough.
Because things get even spookier when you know even a little bit of a foreign language. You start to see how fragile and constructed and sometimes futile language can be.
Take Japanese. There's a Japanese word, 'natsukashii', that is used whenever you see something that makes you feel intensely nostalgic about something. So if you hear a song that transports you instantly back to the night of your high school prom, you can exclaim: "Ah! Natsukashii!"
English doesn't have a word for that concept. Yes, of course, we have the word 'nostalgia', sure, but you never hear somebody say: "Wow! This makes me feel really nostalgic right now!" (Or, if you do, it sure is a long and cumbersome way to express that feeling, dont'cha think?)
In Japanese, the word exists -- and, by existing, by its frequency of use, it reinforces and
encourages a certain yearning for an intangible past. Its absence in the English language may, perhaps, lead us to not yearn for a forgotten era as much as the Japanese seem to. The language validates the concept, and the concept implores us to find a word to represent it.
Or maybe not. That's the thing about language; if you think about it too much, try to figure out why and how it does what it does, you end up getting nowhere. Because it's deeper than language, this whole thing. It goes to the root of what language is meant to ultimately evoke, which are those strange and silent voices that somehow make themselves heard in our heads.
They come out, these voices, through words -- and actions. Always actions. Just as we write, somehow translating our human impulses to words, so do we live, hoping against hope that our strange and glorious thoughts and feelings can somehow acquire a shape and texture and meaning out here in the (so-called) real world, the world separate from our heads and minds and hearts.
Sometimes, we put the words on paper, hoping that what we feel can somehow be identified. Sometimes, we use our eyes, our lips, our fingers, our motions.
The intent is the same, whether it's through words or actions. We want all that is within to somehow emerge. We want ourselves to be validated, by any means.
Could be a word.
Or a touch.
Or a glance.
Spooky.
Remember, in school, when the teacher would order you to take out a piece of paper and a pen and do five minutes of that oh-so-exciting activity known as 'automatic writing'? You were supposed to just write down anything that popped into your head. It didn't matter if your ideas were random, disconnected, even illegible. (Mine were always illegible, being a lefty. Praise Allah for computers.) You were just supposed to see where your thoughts led you.
But isn't all writing 'automatic writing'? Sure, you start with a certain concept or image in your head, but by the time you finish writing your first sentence you've thought of another idea, a different idea, and that takes you down a long and winding road that is far, far from your initial idea.
What makes it so spooky? I think it has do with language. I think it has to do with the fact that, somehow or other, almost beyond are will, the words just emerge when we want them to. We have a feeling or emotion, and then we have this weird collage of symbols we've decided to call 'letters' that allows us a reasonable facsimile of what those emotions mean to us.
Ah, but sometimes those symbols aren't enough.
Because things get even spookier when you know even a little bit of a foreign language. You start to see how fragile and constructed and sometimes futile language can be.
Take Japanese. There's a Japanese word, 'natsukashii', that is used whenever you see something that makes you feel intensely nostalgic about something. So if you hear a song that transports you instantly back to the night of your high school prom, you can exclaim: "Ah! Natsukashii!"
English doesn't have a word for that concept. Yes, of course, we have the word 'nostalgia', sure, but you never hear somebody say: "Wow! This makes me feel really nostalgic right now!" (Or, if you do, it sure is a long and cumbersome way to express that feeling, dont'cha think?)
In Japanese, the word exists -- and, by existing, by its frequency of use, it reinforces and
encourages a certain yearning for an intangible past. Its absence in the English language may, perhaps, lead us to not yearn for a forgotten era as much as the Japanese seem to. The language validates the concept, and the concept implores us to find a word to represent it.
Or maybe not. That's the thing about language; if you think about it too much, try to figure out why and how it does what it does, you end up getting nowhere. Because it's deeper than language, this whole thing. It goes to the root of what language is meant to ultimately evoke, which are those strange and silent voices that somehow make themselves heard in our heads.
They come out, these voices, through words -- and actions. Always actions. Just as we write, somehow translating our human impulses to words, so do we live, hoping against hope that our strange and glorious thoughts and feelings can somehow acquire a shape and texture and meaning out here in the (so-called) real world, the world separate from our heads and minds and hearts.
Sometimes, we put the words on paper, hoping that what we feel can somehow be identified. Sometimes, we use our eyes, our lips, our fingers, our motions.
The intent is the same, whether it's through words or actions. We want all that is within to somehow emerge. We want ourselves to be validated, by any means.
Could be a word.
Or a touch.
Or a glance.
Spooky.
Sunday, February 06, 2005
ALL OF THOSE ORDINARY DAYS, I MISS THEM SO
An ordinary day. A slight breeze. A sun blinding and bright. A couple clad in white posing for wedding pictures in the park across from my apartment. A handful of couples, actually, all of them smiling in the sunlight. Motos driving by. The homeless lady I often seen waiting patiently outside of the cafe, hoping for money. A few tourists, lazily strolling. The owner of the Internet cafe, wearing a white dress shirt, despite the heat, looking professional as he types away at his keyboard.
I see and feel all of this.
There will come a time and a place ten, fifteen years from now where everything I'm writing will be but a memory, or the memory of a memory, or worse, a forgotten portion of time, swallowed up by the days, weeks, months and years that follow it. This moment won't last, I tell myself, so it is best to remember it, to chronicle it, not for future reference but for reference now. If I don't remember it now, this day will be lost. Or maybe I will lose it anyways, despite my best efforts.
Think about all the days we lose! (Or are they all stolen from us? By whom?) The big ones we remember, yes, but it's those small ones, the ones that contain the actual living that somehow become submerged in our march towards whatever it is we think we are striving for. These are the days that are buried, these slow days, these lazy days, the ones where nothing much seems to happen.
I would like to find them, if I could, those days of yesterday. All those lost days from my thirteenth year, and my eighteenth, and my twenty-fourth. (Or even those from last week.) I would like to hunt them down and keep them captive, relive their boredom, wallow in their ordinariness. Just for a moment. That's all I ask. To revel in their simplicity and complexity. To see those blue skies and snowy days and try to see if I can feel them now as I felt them then, know them now in a way I couldn't before. See if the hindsight that aging provides has a real, palpable purpose.
I think this day, this moment, will be forgotten. If I'm lucky, ten, fifteen years from now, it will reappear in a flash, a spark in my mind. Then it will be gone. I want to keep it, horde it, allow it to linger. Why do they all have to dissolve, these days?
To make room for the next day, I suppose.
An ordinary day. A slight breeze. A sun blinding and bright.
I see and feel all of this.
There will come a time and a place ten, fifteen years from now where everything I'm writing will be but a memory, or the memory of a memory, or worse, a forgotten portion of time, swallowed up by the days, weeks, months and years that follow it. This moment won't last, I tell myself, so it is best to remember it, to chronicle it, not for future reference but for reference now. If I don't remember it now, this day will be lost. Or maybe I will lose it anyways, despite my best efforts.
Think about all the days we lose! (Or are they all stolen from us? By whom?) The big ones we remember, yes, but it's those small ones, the ones that contain the actual living that somehow become submerged in our march towards whatever it is we think we are striving for. These are the days that are buried, these slow days, these lazy days, the ones where nothing much seems to happen.
I would like to find them, if I could, those days of yesterday. All those lost days from my thirteenth year, and my eighteenth, and my twenty-fourth. (Or even those from last week.) I would like to hunt them down and keep them captive, relive their boredom, wallow in their ordinariness. Just for a moment. That's all I ask. To revel in their simplicity and complexity. To see those blue skies and snowy days and try to see if I can feel them now as I felt them then, know them now in a way I couldn't before. See if the hindsight that aging provides has a real, palpable purpose.
I think this day, this moment, will be forgotten. If I'm lucky, ten, fifteen years from now, it will reappear in a flash, a spark in my mind. Then it will be gone. I want to keep it, horde it, allow it to linger. Why do they all have to dissolve, these days?
To make room for the next day, I suppose.
An ordinary day. A slight breeze. A sun blinding and bright.
Saturday, February 05, 2005
INSIGHTFUL (TO ME, ANYWAYS) QUOTE OF THE DAY
"What you're doing is what you're becoming, and what you've done is what you've become."
-- Rex Pickett,
author of Sideways
-- Rex Pickett,
author of Sideways
WHIMS OF FATE
Let's assume:
That there is a God. That he monitors what he has wrought down here on what we call Earth. That he has a certain plan in mind. That there is a rhythm to his seeming indifference to our relentless suffering.
We look at what happened on September 11th, 2001. We look at the tsunami. We see the devastation and death and human suffering. We tilt our heads skyward and ask: "Why?"
No answer.
But let's suppose that there is a plan.
For example:
More than three thousand people died due to terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre. Hundreds of women lost their husbands, their life partners, the loves of their lives. It's reasonable to assume, if not inevitable, that some of those widows have remarried in the years since that terrible day. Some of these women have, undoubtedly, borne children.
Here's the awful question: What if one of those children grows up to be the person who finds the cure for cancer, or AIDS, thereby preventing the deaths of millions of people every year? Would that historic, marvellous result justify what happened on September 11th? If the terrorist attacks had never happened, the mother of that child would never have lost her husband. She would never have remarried. She would have never given birth to, literally, the savior of humanity.
Or let's look at something as senseless as the tsunami. Hundreds of thousands of people's lives, shattered. Husbands losing their wives on their honeymoon. Husbands that will remarry, bear children four, five years down the line. One of those children grows up to be the future president of the United States, the man who will, at long last, truly unite the world in peace.
Ideas like this are horrible even to contemplate, because they trivialize what takes place; they reduce death to the level of speculation and what-if, when it is all too real, brutal and cutting.
And yet, this is what we do. As humans. We ask questions, raise our fists to the sky, ask God for answers (if you have even a smidgen of religious sensibility.)
I've always felt that, even if there is a God, his authentic form and shape and origin and ultimate reality are so far beyond the realm of human comprehension that there will never be any means by which we could even begin to contemplate his true nature.
All we can do is guess.
So, for the sake of argument, let's just assume that he exists.
Who's to say he is what we think he is? Maybe he sets things in motion. Maybe he calls up plays, like a coach, with an idea of what he believes will happen, but has no ultimate say on the final execution of those plans. Or maybe he has a view of time and history that is endless and finite, but out of his control. He can only interfere at key points in time.
He knows that a cure for AIDS will be found. He even knows the identity of the person who will discover the relevant medical information. But that person will not be born unless the tragedy of the World Trade Centre bombings takes place. He knows this, and can only watch as the world mourns, its citizens not knowing that this day that will live in infamy is necessary for the survival of the human race a hundred and fifty years down the line. Perhaps what we call 'God' is merely a component of a larger, denser mechanism, not omnipotent at all, able only to tweak our lives in order to manipulate certain events for future gains.
William J.Blythe gets in a car accident in the 1940's, never seeing the birth of his son. That son grows up to be Bill Clinton. For reasons that will only be known a century from now on, God needed Clinton in office. So on that proverbial dark and stormy night over fifty years ago, the night Clinton's biological father dies, an act of God took place; a death that had to take place to align events essential for humanity's development.
How else can we look at it?? A ludicrous idea perhaps, but aren't all our notions of what a God is, should be, could be? Perhaps he's not as omnipotent as we believe; perhaps he's a role-player. Perhaps there are layers of God, each unknowing what goes on above, only that the above exists.
Our lives are littered with the debris of accident and coincidence. Car accidents, missed exams, unreturned calls. These are what shape our existence -- these random acts of blindness.
To be a cog in the machine can be a depressing thought. It can also be revelatory. Our own, individual sense of 'will' is what makes our own lives, but perhaps, just perhaps, all of those daily 'events-beyond-are-control are, in fact, quite literally, whims of fate.
Who's to say that it won't all make sense two, three hundred years from now? Every single one of us on this spinning blue orb known as Earth may be merely players in the ultimate existential game, where our juvenile concepts of 'chance' and 'luck' are found, in the end, to be nothing more than code-words for 'destiny'.
That there is a God. That he monitors what he has wrought down here on what we call Earth. That he has a certain plan in mind. That there is a rhythm to his seeming indifference to our relentless suffering.
We look at what happened on September 11th, 2001. We look at the tsunami. We see the devastation and death and human suffering. We tilt our heads skyward and ask: "Why?"
No answer.
But let's suppose that there is a plan.
For example:
More than three thousand people died due to terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre. Hundreds of women lost their husbands, their life partners, the loves of their lives. It's reasonable to assume, if not inevitable, that some of those widows have remarried in the years since that terrible day. Some of these women have, undoubtedly, borne children.
Here's the awful question: What if one of those children grows up to be the person who finds the cure for cancer, or AIDS, thereby preventing the deaths of millions of people every year? Would that historic, marvellous result justify what happened on September 11th? If the terrorist attacks had never happened, the mother of that child would never have lost her husband. She would never have remarried. She would have never given birth to, literally, the savior of humanity.
Or let's look at something as senseless as the tsunami. Hundreds of thousands of people's lives, shattered. Husbands losing their wives on their honeymoon. Husbands that will remarry, bear children four, five years down the line. One of those children grows up to be the future president of the United States, the man who will, at long last, truly unite the world in peace.
Ideas like this are horrible even to contemplate, because they trivialize what takes place; they reduce death to the level of speculation and what-if, when it is all too real, brutal and cutting.
And yet, this is what we do. As humans. We ask questions, raise our fists to the sky, ask God for answers (if you have even a smidgen of religious sensibility.)
I've always felt that, even if there is a God, his authentic form and shape and origin and ultimate reality are so far beyond the realm of human comprehension that there will never be any means by which we could even begin to contemplate his true nature.
All we can do is guess.
So, for the sake of argument, let's just assume that he exists.
Who's to say he is what we think he is? Maybe he sets things in motion. Maybe he calls up plays, like a coach, with an idea of what he believes will happen, but has no ultimate say on the final execution of those plans. Or maybe he has a view of time and history that is endless and finite, but out of his control. He can only interfere at key points in time.
He knows that a cure for AIDS will be found. He even knows the identity of the person who will discover the relevant medical information. But that person will not be born unless the tragedy of the World Trade Centre bombings takes place. He knows this, and can only watch as the world mourns, its citizens not knowing that this day that will live in infamy is necessary for the survival of the human race a hundred and fifty years down the line. Perhaps what we call 'God' is merely a component of a larger, denser mechanism, not omnipotent at all, able only to tweak our lives in order to manipulate certain events for future gains.
William J.Blythe gets in a car accident in the 1940's, never seeing the birth of his son. That son grows up to be Bill Clinton. For reasons that will only be known a century from now on, God needed Clinton in office. So on that proverbial dark and stormy night over fifty years ago, the night Clinton's biological father dies, an act of God took place; a death that had to take place to align events essential for humanity's development.
How else can we look at it?? A ludicrous idea perhaps, but aren't all our notions of what a God is, should be, could be? Perhaps he's not as omnipotent as we believe; perhaps he's a role-player. Perhaps there are layers of God, each unknowing what goes on above, only that the above exists.
Our lives are littered with the debris of accident and coincidence. Car accidents, missed exams, unreturned calls. These are what shape our existence -- these random acts of blindness.
To be a cog in the machine can be a depressing thought. It can also be revelatory. Our own, individual sense of 'will' is what makes our own lives, but perhaps, just perhaps, all of those daily 'events-beyond-are-control are, in fact, quite literally, whims of fate.
Who's to say that it won't all make sense two, three hundred years from now? Every single one of us on this spinning blue orb known as Earth may be merely players in the ultimate existential game, where our juvenile concepts of 'chance' and 'luck' are found, in the end, to be nothing more than code-words for 'destiny'.
Thursday, February 03, 2005
ENDURING PLACES
I saw him at the Foreign Correspondents club last night, Al Rockoff, the wartime photographer that John Malkovich portrayed in The Killing Fields, a move I still haven't gotten around to watching. (I've been to the killing fields; I just haven't watched the movie.)
The Foreign Correspondents is basically Phnom Penh's premier upscale restaurant, not the hoity-toity gin-and-cigar type place that the name implies; there are always a lot of foreigners there, true, but the only correspondence going on is usually between the slightly tipsy dudes and dudettes at the bar asking for another beer. Oh, and when a place is classified as 'upscale', that's just code for 'ridiculously expensive'.
Al Rockoff was here when the Khmer Rouge took over the city back in 1975 (only a few weeks before I was born, I believe), and he's still here. Not always, no, but six months out of the year, perhaps, you can find him hanging around town, drinking beer, probably taking pictures.
He was here when everything fell apart. He was here when the nightmare began, to sound a little melodramatic. And he's here to watch the backpackers come and go, sunburnt and holding their Lonely Planet guidebooks like the Bibles that they are.
What brings us to a place? What keeps us there? What makes us come back, again, again, then again?
The people, the food, the weather, the sights, the streets, the sounds, the adventure, the romance, the intrigue -- all of these, none of these, a combination. We go to someplace new to allow ourselves the hint of mystery; we stay where we are, we plant, to gain perspective.
Tricky thing is, in gaining that perspective, we lose it. Stay anywhere long enough, and you don't see anything anymore. You don't witness it. It just drifts by. Spend a few days in Japan and Cambodia and your brain, psyche, emotions and spirit undergo sensory overload; spend a few years, and something else settles in for a spell.
Call it comfort. Call it familiarity. Call it whatever you want, but you know what I mean. At some point in time, a place becomes your place. You don't have to like it, or enjoy it, or even understand it, but you endure it, and it endures you. You grow around each other.
These might not be the places you call home, no, but they're certainly the places that take you under their wing and carry you away; they serve as mentors -- not to a trade, or an art, but to that elusive combination of both, that undertaking we call 'life'.
The Foreign Correspondents is basically Phnom Penh's premier upscale restaurant, not the hoity-toity gin-and-cigar type place that the name implies; there are always a lot of foreigners there, true, but the only correspondence going on is usually between the slightly tipsy dudes and dudettes at the bar asking for another beer. Oh, and when a place is classified as 'upscale', that's just code for 'ridiculously expensive'.
Al Rockoff was here when the Khmer Rouge took over the city back in 1975 (only a few weeks before I was born, I believe), and he's still here. Not always, no, but six months out of the year, perhaps, you can find him hanging around town, drinking beer, probably taking pictures.
He was here when everything fell apart. He was here when the nightmare began, to sound a little melodramatic. And he's here to watch the backpackers come and go, sunburnt and holding their Lonely Planet guidebooks like the Bibles that they are.
What brings us to a place? What keeps us there? What makes us come back, again, again, then again?
The people, the food, the weather, the sights, the streets, the sounds, the adventure, the romance, the intrigue -- all of these, none of these, a combination. We go to someplace new to allow ourselves the hint of mystery; we stay where we are, we plant, to gain perspective.
Tricky thing is, in gaining that perspective, we lose it. Stay anywhere long enough, and you don't see anything anymore. You don't witness it. It just drifts by. Spend a few days in Japan and Cambodia and your brain, psyche, emotions and spirit undergo sensory overload; spend a few years, and something else settles in for a spell.
Call it comfort. Call it familiarity. Call it whatever you want, but you know what I mean. At some point in time, a place becomes your place. You don't have to like it, or enjoy it, or even understand it, but you endure it, and it endures you. You grow around each other.
These might not be the places you call home, no, but they're certainly the places that take you under their wing and carry you away; they serve as mentors -- not to a trade, or an art, but to that elusive combination of both, that undertaking we call 'life'.
Wednesday, February 02, 2005
WE ARE ALL ADVANCED (EXCEPT FOR DR.PHIL)
Advancement Theory:
"a cultural condition in which an Advanced Individual -- i.e., a true genius -- creates a piece of art that 99 percent of the population perceives to be bad. However, this is not because the work itself is flawed; this is because most consumers are not advanced."
-- Chuck Klosterman
Esquire December 2004
So that explains it!
The reason why a lot of the stuff I respond to is ignored by the rest of the public. The reason why movies and books I consider proof of divinely inspired talent is ridiculed by press and populace alike. It all makes sense now. It's getting clearer. Things are coming into focus...
Take Alexander, Oliver Stone's flick. I love it. Most of the world, um, doesn't. Most people who have seen it would like to burn the print they saw, torchbomb the theatre, piledrive the director's son. Fair enough.
But now this Advancement theory has come into play. It allows me to say: "Fair enough, fair enough, but the thing is, this film's too Advanced for you. In five, ten years you'll finally recognize it's greatness."
At which point I would be accused of being a pompous snob, because believing in the
'Advancement' theory implies that, if such a work of art is, in fact, Advanced, the minority who responds to it would themselves have to be advanced, no?
Maybe not.
Maybe there are just some works of art that are so far ahead of their time (or behind the time) that they generally just soar over the heads of most people, while a small group of odd, displaced others see something illuminating there.
I happen to believe Alexander is a movie like that. I think it's both intensely old-fashioned in tone and presentation while at the same time aiming for something that modern cinema hasn't quite evolved itself into, a mythic blending of eras and narrative apporaches that nobody else is attempting. Hence, people's confusion and lack of response. Maybe I'm blending my own aesthetic biases into my read of the flick, but I think that's the Advancement theory's strength:
it allows your own idiosyncratic responses to art to have a theory that validates their fundamen- tal oddness. It backs you up, in other words.
Some films are obviously Advanced. Take Stanley Kubrick's movies. Films like 2001, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket, and his final flick, Eyes Wide Shut, were both loved and hated upon release. People either thought they were non-sensical, pretentious messes, or glowing examples of cinematic genius. Nobody's indifferent to a Kubrick film.
I think Oliver Stone's film J.F.K. is Advanced. What's scary is that that film is so Advanced that when watching it, it seems light years ahead, in theme and style, than all films being made today -- and it was made fourteen years ago. In its dissection of the means by which the military
industrial complex has shaped the way we perceive reality, in its exploration of who owns and shapes and diverts the explanations for the events that shape our lives, it exhibits a level of Advancement that becomes more and more relevant with the ongoing Iraq-Halliburton-US Army connection. Stone was highlighting the importance of this stuff a decade and a half ago. Only now is that message starting to seem truly relevant.
Many movies and books are good, even powerful, but not Advanced. If everybody loves it and agrees on its worth, then it's not Advanced. If most people are left puzzled, disappointed, or even indifferent, there's a possibility it's Advanced.
Confused? So am I.
What I like about the theory, though, is that it allows personal interpretation to occupy a prominent place on the judgement of the 'goodness' and 'badness' of something. If everyone in America rushes to see a stupid action flick, than the intelligentsia proclaims the stupidity of the national public. If that same public stays away in droves from a flick, well, those same non-elected elite state that the film probably has nothing going for it, that the public sensed a turkey and stayed home. Well, which is it? Are the people morons or dilettantes?
Probably both. Satisfying taste on a mass scale is a futile quest. There is only You, and your response to things. If it doesn't mesh with what everyone else is thinking, we are taught to think of that as proof of our own deficiencies.
That's b.s. We are the sum and total of all of our experiences on this earth -- an amalgamation of our loves and trips and schools and jobs and fears and hopes and books read and music listened to. Sometimes, if we're lucky, our own DNA can mystically recognize its counterpart out there in the real world; we can link our own view of life with another's.
We are all Advanced, in our own way. (Except for maybe Dr.Phil; something scares me about that guy. Maybe it comes from living abroad, from having learned about familial and culture mores in Japan and Cambodia, but I can't help but think that all of his stuff is so temporally, geographically finite. Meaning, none of his advice would make sense twenty years ago, or twenty years from now; it would have absolutely no relevance in China, or Brazil, or Russia. And so if something's so short-term and of the moment, so locked into a specific piece of land, how worthy could it possibly be? Final verdict: Not Advanced.) We are all operating on wavelengths that most people's frequencies are not tuned in to. The next time you see a stranger on the street mumbling to herself, or dancing to their own beat, remember that they are not weird, or strange, just at a different level of Advancement. The next time you see a flick that you just...don't...get, think of it as being Advanced, ahead of its time, displaced in time. It will allow you to sidestep our judgemental culture and leave room in your head for that point in time fifteen, twenty years from now, when you'll see it again, and something will click, and its Advancedness will, finally, at long last, be revealed, and maybe even appreciated.
"a cultural condition in which an Advanced Individual -- i.e., a true genius -- creates a piece of art that 99 percent of the population perceives to be bad. However, this is not because the work itself is flawed; this is because most consumers are not advanced."
-- Chuck Klosterman
Esquire December 2004
So that explains it!
The reason why a lot of the stuff I respond to is ignored by the rest of the public. The reason why movies and books I consider proof of divinely inspired talent is ridiculed by press and populace alike. It all makes sense now. It's getting clearer. Things are coming into focus...
Take Alexander, Oliver Stone's flick. I love it. Most of the world, um, doesn't. Most people who have seen it would like to burn the print they saw, torchbomb the theatre, piledrive the director's son. Fair enough.
But now this Advancement theory has come into play. It allows me to say: "Fair enough, fair enough, but the thing is, this film's too Advanced for you. In five, ten years you'll finally recognize it's greatness."
At which point I would be accused of being a pompous snob, because believing in the
'Advancement' theory implies that, if such a work of art is, in fact, Advanced, the minority who responds to it would themselves have to be advanced, no?
Maybe not.
Maybe there are just some works of art that are so far ahead of their time (or behind the time) that they generally just soar over the heads of most people, while a small group of odd, displaced others see something illuminating there.
I happen to believe Alexander is a movie like that. I think it's both intensely old-fashioned in tone and presentation while at the same time aiming for something that modern cinema hasn't quite evolved itself into, a mythic blending of eras and narrative apporaches that nobody else is attempting. Hence, people's confusion and lack of response. Maybe I'm blending my own aesthetic biases into my read of the flick, but I think that's the Advancement theory's strength:
it allows your own idiosyncratic responses to art to have a theory that validates their fundamen- tal oddness. It backs you up, in other words.
Some films are obviously Advanced. Take Stanley Kubrick's movies. Films like 2001, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket, and his final flick, Eyes Wide Shut, were both loved and hated upon release. People either thought they were non-sensical, pretentious messes, or glowing examples of cinematic genius. Nobody's indifferent to a Kubrick film.
I think Oliver Stone's film J.F.K. is Advanced. What's scary is that that film is so Advanced that when watching it, it seems light years ahead, in theme and style, than all films being made today -- and it was made fourteen years ago. In its dissection of the means by which the military
industrial complex has shaped the way we perceive reality, in its exploration of who owns and shapes and diverts the explanations for the events that shape our lives, it exhibits a level of Advancement that becomes more and more relevant with the ongoing Iraq-Halliburton-US Army connection. Stone was highlighting the importance of this stuff a decade and a half ago. Only now is that message starting to seem truly relevant.
Many movies and books are good, even powerful, but not Advanced. If everybody loves it and agrees on its worth, then it's not Advanced. If most people are left puzzled, disappointed, or even indifferent, there's a possibility it's Advanced.
Confused? So am I.
What I like about the theory, though, is that it allows personal interpretation to occupy a prominent place on the judgement of the 'goodness' and 'badness' of something. If everyone in America rushes to see a stupid action flick, than the intelligentsia proclaims the stupidity of the national public. If that same public stays away in droves from a flick, well, those same non-elected elite state that the film probably has nothing going for it, that the public sensed a turkey and stayed home. Well, which is it? Are the people morons or dilettantes?
Probably both. Satisfying taste on a mass scale is a futile quest. There is only You, and your response to things. If it doesn't mesh with what everyone else is thinking, we are taught to think of that as proof of our own deficiencies.
That's b.s. We are the sum and total of all of our experiences on this earth -- an amalgamation of our loves and trips and schools and jobs and fears and hopes and books read and music listened to. Sometimes, if we're lucky, our own DNA can mystically recognize its counterpart out there in the real world; we can link our own view of life with another's.
We are all Advanced, in our own way. (Except for maybe Dr.Phil; something scares me about that guy. Maybe it comes from living abroad, from having learned about familial and culture mores in Japan and Cambodia, but I can't help but think that all of his stuff is so temporally, geographically finite. Meaning, none of his advice would make sense twenty years ago, or twenty years from now; it would have absolutely no relevance in China, or Brazil, or Russia. And so if something's so short-term and of the moment, so locked into a specific piece of land, how worthy could it possibly be? Final verdict: Not Advanced.) We are all operating on wavelengths that most people's frequencies are not tuned in to. The next time you see a stranger on the street mumbling to herself, or dancing to their own beat, remember that they are not weird, or strange, just at a different level of Advancement. The next time you see a flick that you just...don't...get, think of it as being Advanced, ahead of its time, displaced in time. It will allow you to sidestep our judgemental culture and leave room in your head for that point in time fifteen, twenty years from now, when you'll see it again, and something will click, and its Advancedness will, finally, at long last, be revealed, and maybe even appreciated.
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