The best

Films I saw in 2007
1. Lives of others
The first movie I saw, only two days into the new year was indeed the best. The actors’ performances were deep and subtle and the story was archetypical, strong and moving. The ending was probably the best ending this story could ever have.
2. Ratatouille
Having gone to see this movie with almost zero expectations (mostly due to its entirely uninspired trailer) I was incredibly pleasantly surprised. The story of the rat that can cook, is again an inspired modern tale of the underdog and the importance of being different and believing in oneself. Pixar are officially the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen’s of the 21st century.
3. Paris je t’aime
18 short stories set in Paris seemed like an extremely self-indulgent concept that I thought I might be better off passing. Obviously some were better than others but with the gems of Tom Tykwer and Alexander Payne, not to mention Feist’s fantastic song in the closing credits this movie was one of the best of last year.
4. Notes on a scandal
The story behind this movie is interesting enough: the solitude, the neediness that turns people into cannibalistic predators. But it is the performances of the two lead actresses that set this movie off the ground, their performances that are so uniquely equivalent to each other’s.
5. Atonement
Ian McEwan’s novel is one of my favourite books and I was deeply concerned of how the movie would be. The most difficult thing of the novel is the constant change of point of view, and the secrets that survive until the very end. The movie was beautiful and tender and captures the feeling of the book very well.
6. Ne dis a personne
The French cannot do thrillers very well, I think we can all agree with that. But this movie, based on an American novel was exceptional for its fast pace, its tight storyline, its good acting and the romantic spirit that underlies the entire movie.
7. I do: how to get married to stay single
French coming of age romantic comedy about a forty-year old adolescent who still relies on his mother and sisters to wash his clothes. Until he meets Charlotte Gainsbourg who subconsciously reverses all his fears. Utterly enjoyable guilty pleasure to be shared with female friends only (kisses to d/a).
8. Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy
Because Jack Sparrow is the best fictional character of the decade and Johnny Depp is the only actor who could deal with him the way he did. The concept of pirates as the last of the freedom-loving, law-non-abiding creatures of last century is truly unique. Surely the love story between William and Elizabeth is sweet enough but it the tragedy of Davy Jones and Calypso that touches my heart.
9. The Departed
Martin Scorsese’s well-deserved Oscar was a good movie, surely but I am too hooked on the original ‘Infernal affairs’. But it is Scorsese after all and Di Caprio plays well and the story is great, so I have to admit that I like.

P.S. This is obviously not all I wanted to say for 2007 but it the best I could do before Christmas. Happy Christmas to all, and I'll be back soon!

Hello Kitty's Top 'Five'

Unfortunately, I cannot contribute properly to Lady V’s TOP FIVE 2007, since my last year was overshadowed by a more worldly (in the sense of mundane though still very real) concern of handing in my f**king thesis, an ordeal which made me a prisoner not only of my own thoughts (i.e. solipsism), but also to my study/desk (i.e. a variant form of the couch-potato syndrome) – all of which severely estranged me from the exciting literary, musical and cinematic activities of the world I so love… sigh.

So, because I know you won’t want to be bogged down by all the amazing academic articles and publications on Mallarmé and Rilke which shook my 2007, I have decided that I will contribute but one offering to each category (please forgive me, Lady V). Here goes:

My top 1 book:

Finally, finally I was able to read Daniel Kehlmann’s novel, ‘Die Vermessung der Welt’, the German bestseller from 2005. And oh what a pleasure – sometimes hype IS justified!! The novel has been translated into English as ‘Measuring the World’ and, judging by the critiques, the translation seems to be o.k. This is a wonderfully imaginative narrative set in and before 1828 in which the mathematician C.F. Gauss and the scientist Alexander von Humboldt meet in an unlikely way… around such serious and pretentious Enlightenment figures, Kehlmann weaves a whimsically light, easy and, above all, humorous story, disclosing two different ways of taking the world’s measure. Admittedly, this is a smack in the face of authenticity and historicity, but that is why I love Art – an inventive piece of fiction like none I have ever come across. Please, please read!

My top 1 song:

I have chosen the tranquil electro-ballad ‘Primitive’ by Róisín Murphy from her recent album ‘Overpowered’. Sublime. Murphy’s sensual voice goes under my skin, the refrain keeps coming back to haunt me (in a good sense) and the whole song simply radiates a sense of cool eroticism. Very Moloko. And good lyrics, too.

P.S. I could also have mentioned Kylie Minogue’s ‘Speakerphone’ (from X), which I love. A cheap, tinny and wholly irresistible song – yes, pop at its best and I still don’t quite understand why I love it so, but I do. Perhaps, however, I should have chosen Yael Naim’s version of Britney’s ‘Toxic’ – which I know Lady V adores, too! ;)

My top 1 album:

My current (depressing) financial state has hindered me from purchasing many albums this past year, as I mostly had to resort to downloading songs hither and thither. (Woe unto me – although 2008 can only get better, right??) However, the one album which I absolutely adored, in its entirety, was Belleruche’s ‘Turntable Soul Music’. A jewel. And also, esp. if you are into the contemporary (post K&D) electronica scene in Vienna – think Parov Stelar, the God, ya hear me! – then it will have to Waldeck’s album, ‘Ballroom Stories’… sooo very cool. It will stun your party guests, honest.

My top 1 film:

Without thinking twice, it’s Fatih Akin’s ‘Auf der anderen Seite’, which will soon come out internationally under the English title ‘The Edge of Heaven’. Won’t say anything to spoil your excitement except for: GO SEE IT AS SOON AS IT COMES TO A CINEMA NEAR YOU! I am so proud to have Germans making good, intelligent art like this…

For some reason, and I have little justification to claim this apart from my flippant intuition, it seems to me that Fatih Akin makes films the way Marcel Proust might have done so (and I mean this solely on a stylistic and not semantic level; anyway, Proust famously thought very little of cinéma) – had someone been able to lure the great French writer out of his corked kingdom of books, ink, paper and endless manuscripts, sat him into ‘Film 101’ and thrust a movie camera into his hands. There is something about the controlled, ‘epic’ nature of Akin’s camera movement that somehow enacts the soul-searching spirit and leitmotival character development akin to Proustian prose. The way in which time, memory and the tragic intertwine. Anyway, c’est moi going off on a tangent… ;) my apologies.

Happy Christmas and all the best for the New Year!

Love, Hello Kitty. Miau.

Top 5?

The time of the year has finally arrived, the time when making lists is cool! Radio-stations will endlessly play the best songs of 2007 and Jonathan Ross will treat us to his favourite movies of the year at some point too (I hope).

I think it is only right that my fellow Lady V-ers and myself also spend some time to contemplate on the intellectual and artistic stimulation we have received during the past year.

Let's write our lists then, about movies, songs, albums and books that defined 2007 and we can comment on each other. Our (non-existent) readers can also contribute obviously.

So ladies, let's go! En attendant vos ideés...

The women who never smile

They say feminism has become a bad word these days. Any woman that defines herself as such is seen with suspicion from the female population and with contempt from the male one. The cliché obviously goes that a feminist has a fetich with bodily hair and does not wear deodorant or high heels. I rarely identify myslef as one, but yesterday, after watching the movie 'brick lane' I felt this urge to defend women all over the world.

I will not inform you of the details of the story, read monica ali's book if you want. The gist is easy: poor Bangladeshi woman is sent to London at the age of 17 to marry fat wealthy 'educated' compatriot. She lives a life of mediocrity, losing a baby son but having two daughters. Her only dream is to go back one day and see the sister she left behind. Her husband always postpones the trip so she starts working as a seamstress to earn money for the ticket. Then it gets soppy, as she meets young handsome revolutionary boy, falls in love and starts waking up. After the incidents on September 11th Muslims are feeling the pressure in London and everywhere and her husband decides it is time for them all to go back. Confused by her feelings towards the charming boy and her newly found sense of belonging to this new 'home' she stays behind.

I think this is probably not a great movie. But it made me feel extremely emotional because looking at the smileless face of the heroine, I thought of my grandmother and endless generations of women in poor countries that lived their whole lives without smiling. And this is what makes me feel like a feminist today, I feel that we are the first generation of women that have the right to smile and enjoy our lives. It is a useless burdon to feel that you live the life so many other women before you have paved the way for, but sometimes I do. I am happy that I am happy and I wish my grandmother had another chance to live like me.

The unassuming Björk

I liked Moloko. A lot. And I like Roisín Murphy and her quirky voice, her quirky headwear and her quirky pick-up lines ('do you like my tight sweater? See how it hugs my body' that even made it as an album title). So she came to give a gig in Belfast and I went (actually one of my students gave me her ticket, but that's another (funny) story/post.). It was nice and she was very energetic, I'd never seen electro-funk live before and I strongly recommend it. Awsome atmosphere (the entire gay community of Belfast in addition to a couple of Roisín-lookalikes), deafening beats and impressive guitar solos. She reminded me of Björk because she was not taking herself seriously at all: she wore weird unflattering clothes and accessories that made her look like an alien. The songs were great, very appropriate for a live and she gave an amazing performance of 'the truth' which is one of my favourite songs of all time (thanks youkali for suggesting it to me) where she even did the rap part herself.

She did not sing *any* Moloko tunes however, and that put me off a lot. It felt as if she was rejecting her past with the band entirely. Maybe she feels insecure that people go to her gigs to listen to 'fun for me' and 'the time is now' and 'sing it back' and she wants people to be there for her and her alone as a solo artist. Maybe she is just fed up with singing these songs after all these years. But it felt so stupid. I can like her alone and I can still like Moloko. What a pity, stupid girl.

...

We are now officcially the first blog with more authors than readers!
Well done to us :)

But girls, don't get lazy, write something.

Stop me

Stop me, oh
oh oh stop me
Stop me if you think that you've
heard this one before
Stop me, oh
oh oh stop me
Stop me if you think that you've heard this one before

Nothing's changed
I still love you, oh
I still love you
only slightly, only slightly
less
than I used to
my love

It took Mark Ronson's mix to appreciate this ols Smiths classic and the awsome lyrics. Only it's not the lyrics as a whole, it is the lyrics as fragmented parts of a sentence 'I still love you-only slightly-less-than I used to'. Every word is another story, every little syllable might change your world.

Blogging makes me think

I was coming home from work today and I was thinking of what I could write in the blog when it hit me: I can be ultra self-indulging (or just reflective?) and write about blogging itself. A movie within a movie (Almodovar), a dream within a dream (dreadzone), a novel within a novel (blind assasin) and now a blog within a blog (lady v). How cool is that?

So, the issue is that if I didn't have the blog, I would not be forcing myself to think about things. Sometimes life is just hectic (clishé but oh so true) that if nobody forced you, you would only think about your work, your boyfriend, your problems and so on. But having a nice little place that can host your thoughts and your (real or imaginary) audience, makes you reflect on yourself more and ask: which of my thoughts are worth mentioning? Perhaps other people (philosophers perhaps? :) ) are more reflective than me, but I can easily sink in stupidity and routine and forget about such things.

So what is my clever thought of the day? This entry.
And some other stuff about covers (song covers) that I will write on another time.

Is this a poem?

In the station of the metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

Ezra Pound

My old literature teacher in the University had asked us this question, is this a poem? Back then, with the arrogance and ignorance of my eighteen years, I had answered no. I had said that this is like a photograph, a nice image, a slice of reality. But that is not a poem.

Now I am not sure at all. It is funny how some things just persevere in your memory and you know that you have an unfinished business with them, so you keep thinking about them. This is one of those things. I was never sure about my answer and as years went by, I felt even keener to answer the opposite. Maybe I now appreciate poignant, sharp depictions of reality, even if they look like literary photographs, compared to the complexity of longer pieces of literature. One-liners have this quality of being 'to the point'. Think about it, is there a better way of visualising loneliness other than ''... the autumn leaves drift by my window''?

The silence

Maybe I liked the previous post too much and I just wanted to leave it here for as long as I could.

Maybe I am again busy and tired.

Maybe my boyfriend is here and I just don't have time for this blog.

Maybe it just takes some time to think of things properly and even more write about them.

I wish I could write cute, one-line posts that say something, but I can't...

Forthcoming: modern day fairytales from Pixar to Harry Potter and Miyazaki.

Ode to Christina

It is difficult to express my love and admiration to the same people again and again. Especially to those who have been knowing me for ages. Every year I have to deal with birthdays (and namedays for Greek friends), think of something nice to buy and write on a card and try to make the day somehow special. Celebrations and all this kind of "lets get all together and party" have not been my favourite time of the year, mainly due to the fact that it has never been a big deal in my family.

I know somebody who loves to celebrate. She loves to have all the attention around, she likes to get all sort of gifts, answer the telephone immediately and have something different to say to the ones at the other end of the line and can not wait for the next year to come to enjoy another celebration day. How cool is this.. ? I wish I could experience it the way she does. I am learning though... watching her doing the things that she does. The "celebration reaction" is only an example. I have many things to learn from her, because she is the kind of person who gives and shares. That is the main characteristic of a good friend, someone can argue. I have few friends, not all of them share. Neither their knowledge covers all the aspects of life. She, on the other hand, knows everything: politics, music, theatre, history, mythology (that's her asset!), cooking, shopping, driving, watching tv, playing backgammon, dancing flamengo, name it and she can do it! She is not very good in bargaining though... (not a great shopping partner if you wish to go to Morocco). Apart from that, she has a very rich personality and believe me that makes it difficult to argue with her as she is (almost) always right. Besides of all these symptoms, and many more what will be revealed in due time, I think she is great and I truly love her.
Happy birthday!
Hope this day is special for you!

Now I'm in love...

So, I thought I knew a thing or two about music, right? Wrong, very wrong... Beacause it took me 7 months, since it was first released in April, to get Mark Ronson. And man, have I been missing all this time... For whoever does not know him, check him out on youtube and his site (http://www.markronson.co.uk/frontpage) and tell me what you think.

I won't write much now as I just bought the album on amazon, so I'll wait to be professional and hear it all closely before I write my bloggie. But there is one thing that amazed me: his newness. His album 'version' is obviously a re-working of old tracks. The burning question with such things is how to be able to make the song sound both 'utterly modern and comfortably familiar' as guardian put it. For me, song re-working needs to have another aspect as well: it needs to bring out a new aspect of the song that was not present in the first version. You need to hear it and say: oh I didn't think this song could be done/heard like that. And this is exactly what he does. Compare his recent single 'Valerie' featuring Amy Winehouse to the original version by the Zutons. It is not a case of a better vs. a worse version. It's just so different, so fresh (and exciting) so ... cool.

I shall definately return on the issue, but only after I stop singing: 'Oh Wont You Come On Over, Stop Making A Fool Out Of Me, Why Dont You Come On Over, Valerie, Valeriiiieeeeee'

I am tired-Crap TV

Remember I said I will not get personal in the blog? Well, scrap that (again).
I just wanted to write I am tired. I am very tired the whole week and now it is almost over so I am happy.
I have applied to two more jobs and I have been teaching like crazy and now all I want to do is go home and watch TV.

Speaking of which....
They have this awsome new thing in the UK called 'no brainer TV'... How acurate. It includes gems like relity shows where older and younger women compete with each other to get a guy and stuff like that... How sick is that? But then again I am so over it these days, my guilt of watching shit TV that is. I used to feel that my intellect would be compromised if people knew I watch X factor and America's next top model. But I really don't care anymore. This doesn't define me. Or it does but only in addition to all the other things I do. So I am not feeling bad about it anymore. There was this piece in a newspaper, I don't remember which one now, where intellectual people would tell of their 'guilty pleasures'. People said stuff like picking their noses and going around the house naked when they people can see them and eating chocolate. One said watching America's next top model. That made me so happy! I felt that suddenly that all this watching stupid TV totally deflated in my mind. My only problem is when I try to explain to myself what I like in these shows. Because the cannibalism of peoples' dreams is trully awful. I almost don't approve of anything these shows stand for actually, but I still like them...

Maybe it truly is this 'no brainer' thing... Who cares?
Sorry, I have to go, it starts in a while.

Truth in translation

I didn't know anything about the Truth & Reconsiliation commission of South Africa before I went to see this play. My friend who is a lawyer told me about it and I went, albeit somewhat reluctuntly.

To put things into context: the TRC is a court-like body formed in South Africa after the apartheid, in order to avoid bloodbath and endless prosecution. Since it was immense numbers of people that were involved in atrocities during that era, it was thought that if the country were to take the route of prosecution, they would have to prosecute the entire country. So they came up with a different alternative: people were asked to come forward and tell the truth about killings and tortures and all the crimes committed during that time and in return they would get amnesty. This way, families of disappeared victims would know what happened to them and could mourn them in dignity, they could find their loved ones graves and possibly some kind of closure to their pain. Forgiveness of the perpetrators would be bonus. Apparently, amazing things happened during the hearings of the TRC, which lasted 3 years: nobel peace prizes were put to the test, mothers found their childrens' bones and killers and victims hugged. It is not clear wheather this has been the best way to go. Can victims forgive? Are perpetrators remorceful? Can there be crime without punishment? Are victims not angry, revenge-thirsty?

The play told the story of the TRC through the eyes of the translators that had to simoultaneously translate in first person the testimonies into the 11 official laguages of South Africa. They personified all the things that divided that country up until now and were dealing with each other fighting the stereotypes that are associated with each of their colour, tribes and social and economic class. By using the first person while translating, they had to empathise with victims and perpetrators alike and they felt their country's history all over again. Additionally to the multi-lingual dimension, the creators of the play use songs to dramatise some of the stories and to add the colour of African music to their piece.

The result of all this is extremely effective. You, as a member of the audience, are faced with awful narratives, powerful scenes and personal conflicts, but most of all you are faced with one country's desire to address the truth. South Africa believed that this was the only way to a new country, no prosecution necessary: people should hear what had happened (as the producer of the play put it as 'a tapestry of events'), should have to accept it and live with it.

People are still angry and 'peace and love' ideals have not emerged victorious, despite the idealists dreams.
People have not always forgiven each other.

But if some of them have, then it was all worth it.

Ute again!

http://youtube.com/watch?v=7iQ2vjPCQkY

Look at this, look at this and weep. Weep if you've seen this before and weep if you have not.

Ute Lemper is God. I have never, never seen anyone been so much better live than on CD.

Whatever I write, it is not enough. Run for tickets.

Poor Jenny, bright as a penny
Her equal would be hard to find
Deserved a bed of roses, but history discloses
That she would make up her mind...

-ish!

I love English. It is a beautiful language, a dynamic language that can find linguistic means of expressing everything on the face of the Earth – and this is saying a lot. It is a language full of endearing linguistic pearls like pitter patter. It is an extremely onomatopoeic language – a lion does indeed roar and when you are sleepy you actually yawn. So, why the need of ruining the wavy, soft sounds of this language with the ugly expression ish?
I absolutely loathe it when people use ish. I hate it when they attached it to words and I hate it even more when they use it on its own as if it is some lexical item that you can look up on the dictionary. E.g. (and this happened in a class I was attending), teacher asks student if he is understanding whatever she is talking about and he replies, ish. Teacher asks student if he is done with his work and he says, ish. Excuse me? What do you mean by that? Why can you not reply something else, like not yet, not really, more or less? I’m not a native speaker and I could come up with at least three very acceptable phrases, so replacing the ghastly ish cannot really be that hard.
And what about when people turn to you and tell you they’ll see you at around 4-ish? This just kills me. No, you’re not seeing me around 4-ish because I don’t know when that is. I know when 4 0’clock is, when ten to four is, when five past four is, but I do not under any circumstances know what 4-ish is.
Ish, like many other expressions, is a linguistic fashion. Language is not immune to fashion, and certainly not a language such as English, which is so international and who everybody claims they can speak well (ahahahahahah!). I am not immune to linguistic trends either and I hear myself, with much disgust, saying such atrocities such as totally and gosh and sometimes I even say oh my god in this very OC-like way. Excuse me – in this very OC-ish way, actually (it’s really not my fault that the only funny thing to watch on TV this summer was the OC, is it?). I despise myself for speaking like this. I see it as the ultimate betrayal to the splendour of the English language, a language that resisted the invader so many centuries ago and stood up to Norman French, a language that Conrad used to write the monument of truth and glory that is Heart of Darkness, a language that allows you to say jolly and darling and splendour in the grass and glory in the flower and love me do and dreadful, which hasn’t got such a great meaning but sounds so nice, and funny words like via, which for some reason always makes me laugh, and of course my beloved pitter patter.
I will vow to try and be immune to fashion from now on. I will vow to respect the English language and appreciate it fully and keep its integrity. And this will be my main project the next year, right after writing up my dissertation.

The love-Getting older

I know I said I don't want to get too personal on this blog, so forgive this post...

It amazes me how everybody, how I change with time. There are things that some time ago I really could not understand, but now I do: I still don't agree with them, endorse them or accept them, but now I understand where they come from. For example, when I was younger I really could not understand how people, who don't love each other any more, still stay married. But then I saw older couples who cannot define themselves any more if they are not part of this union. They are not people, they are part of a show, facing society as members of this couple-thing, organising parties together and producing children. And then I understood that for these people, living without love is not the most important thing in the world. The most important thing in the world for them is organising these parties, together. Forever. Romance?

On a quite different note, I know I am getting older because of the way I love my parents now. They are always getting on my nerves, I can always find negative things for them but I have this amazing tenderness for them, for all the things they are and the ones they are not.

So, I MUST be getting old...

One day he'll come along, the man I love, and he'll be big and strong, the man I love...

Forgive me for this very cheesy, very soppy post, but it just has to be done.
The man of my life is a cartoon called Corto Maltese. He is tall, dark, very handsome and also very intelligent with deep, mysterious eyes. He wears a golden ring in his left ear and he is a sailor. He can never love me because he is not only a fictitious character but also a seaman, who travels from port to port looking for something he does not know exactly how to define or even what it is.
At some point, someone said about him that he was too kind to be a rogue and too selfish to be religious. And this is what makes him so human and, at the same time, so impossibly unachievable. He’s not the most moral of men, and therein lies his humanity. He’s a pirate, he thinks about himself first, he wants to benefit from every situation he’s involved in. But he is also brave and loyal to his friends, he respects and defends the weak and follows his heart. He does not love anyone because he loves everybody. As a boyfriend, Corto Maltese would actually be a nightmare. He would never live with me and allow himself the comfort of having a home, a nest he could call his own. He would never make my home his or give me any sort of reliance or stability. He would feel the constant need to move around, to leave, to see more and more and more of the world. He could never be a petit-bourgeois and settle for a pleasant life with a house, a car and a couple of babies. He would never give me his heart – and I would completely understand him.
A Portuguese poet, Fernando Pessoa, once wrote about the importance of travelling and the indescribable opportunity it gives you to reinvent yourself constantly, to be someone else all the time. And this is exactly what Corto Maltese can do. He can do whatever he wants to because he can be wherever he wants whenever he wants. He doesn’t own anything and does not have to hold on to a mind-numbing job to pay rent. He doesn’t love anyone enough to stick around. He is free and the only thing he possesses is his own destiny and an immense sea that can take him where he wants to go. Corto Maltese does not even have to be himself if he gets tired of who he is – he can start over any second and change his personality as his pleases because he has no strings attached.
He’s the embodiment (insofar as a comic book character can be an ‘embodiment’) of the handsome stranger who’s gone the next day because he has better things to do and the world calls him by his name. He can do what Fernando Pessoa wrote about and what I wished I could do – to leave, to travel far away, to be someone else. If he was an actual man, women like me would sigh and cry over him and would love him forever and would never have him and would secretly envy him for his freedom and would wish they could live like that.
Also – the Corto Maltese comic books are the most beautiful, compelling comics I’ve ever read. They’re cinematographic books of firm, powerful drawing and wonderful stories. They’re must have, must read, must love books and Corto is definitely a must-fancy man.

On violence

Maybe because I am not a violent person, I like violence in movies and books. Fictitious violence is perhaps an outlet to release accumulated stress and oppression and fear. I can’t go around being rude to people, so I watch and read violence. I demand quality in violence, though. Van Damme or Seagal will just not do, but Tarantino, the obvious name, or Scorsese, or sometimes trashy Schwarzenegger are perfect. There’s a terrifying beauty in Mr. Orange lying almost dead in the most massive pool of blood you’ll ever see only to muster courage to get up slightly to shoot some guy dead, his face white and sickly. And there’s beauty in Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson pointing their guns in perfect synchrony at someone who we know will die.
Violence in language, which is what interest me the most, has the ability of being scarily beautiful as well. I will not mention Tarantino’s dialogues again, because it has become a platitude to point out how well written they are, and that’s probably because it’s true – they are brilliantly written. But a simple dialogue full of cursing and swear words such as the ones you can hear in Goodfellas is just so good you wonder how foul language can render such quality. Joe Pesci, an actor I still love despite the fact that I haven’t heard of him in ages, is the funniest, the most amazing actor delivering the “how am I funny?” lines, and he intersperses everything he says with the rudest swear words I’ve heard. And it’s brilliant and so much better, for example, than a decent, friendly language movie such as Jerry McGuire (first example that came to my mind, I really don’t know why).
Although it may be far-fetched and perhaps exaggerated, I do think that conveying violence in language is almost like poetry. One of the reasons poetry is so overwhelming is because of the work that it demands on language itself. A good poet must really know words – their meaning, their sound, their prosody. And then he must come up with a universal truth, the kind of truth that will make his readers think “That’s exactly it! This is exactly what I’ve been saying for ages!” And then this poet needs to combine his truth with the words he knows so well and only then will he stand a chance of writing mildly decent poetry (I guess that’s why there aren’t many truly good poets around). The same happens with violence, I believe. You cannot just write foul language and expect it to do the job. You can’t just come up with more or less scary threats like “I’m going to burn you alive and kill you” and expect it to be prime literary work. You must know language really well, so well that you can make the ugly words look pretty. And this is a very hard job, because ugly words are meant to be ugly, so anyone that can make them sound nice is really a true connoisseur of the language they speak. That’s why it is so thrilling to hear, for example, “your mother sucks cock in hell” coming from an innocent girl possessed by an evil entity. This is because, albeit the horror of it all, language is being used to its limit. And I guess this is why I like fictional violence.

The tragedy of having a family (Festen)

Why do Greek tragedies still define today’s movies? Because, what else is Dogme 95, if not a return to the art of storytelling in its purest form, an attempt to turn cinema into the absolute theatrical realism?
I regard Dogme as the reinterpretation of Aristotle’s definition of tragedy, only now the rules are formed to force themselves on the art of cinematography and not functioning as a mere expression of what already exists. The biggest, most profound difference between cinema and theatre is that the former can magnify the detail, any detail (in a close up, with a slow motion) and thus wins in realism, while the other is realism, by the mere fact that it is done in front of you, live, for your sake only. Dogme tries to have the best of both worlds and that’s why it is the most influential cinema movement of recent history: Dogme uses cinema’s power along with raw and unmodified theatrical conventions. In Dogme movies, you can still have the (ever so powerful) close up, but the face will have no make up. The effect created by this combination is extremely dramatic.

Ever so appropriately the first Dogme movie is Festen, which is an archetypical tragedy, almost of the purest kind. The story is simple and it has to do with the oldest and sickest of human maladies: the family in its extremely dysfunctional form.
In the pater familias’s 60th birthday celebration the whole family along with guests is gathered in the old family hotel to celebrate. In this feast, which is the definition of bourgeoisie in its correctness and adoration of the family ‘rules’, the eldest son reveals that his father molested him and his twin sister (who took her own life a month ago) when they were children. The revelation finds initially the distrust and the indifference of the guests: they continue their dinner as if nothing has happened and they easily settle for the father’s naïve excuses. The son persists, further disclosing that his sister killed herself because of this abuse, only to be treated with more articulated disbelief and even violence. A letter of the dead sister is found however and is read on the table. The truth is unveiled and the oppressor becomes the victim: the youngest son, that careless mindless macho hits the father and tries to rape him only to be stopped by the eldest son, who made all the revelation in the first place. The victim forgives his oppressor. The following morning the father enters the dining hall and makes his (very theatrical) public apology. He is ostracised from the family, by being asked to leave the table so that the rest of them can ‘have their breakfast’, been deserted even by his wife, who finally teams up with her children. He accepts his fate stoically however, because he knows that such dirt has no place within the family structure, the family structure that he created and has his rules.
The entire film is extremely realistic with the exception of the last scene: the father’s public apology and his consequent acceptance of overall defeat is extremely stylisized. It must mean something, it must mean that an institution like a family still obeys its rules (and breakfast needs to be consumed in peace) and the world’s biggest pig obeys them when he has accepted his defeat. Maybe it shows the children’s ultimate revenge, that of taking away from their father what mattered to him the most: his family, where he was king. Now they are free to make it as they like it, by marrying the waitresses or random black men. The deconstruction of the fascist family has begun. There is indeed hope.

March 2006

Democracy

It's funny how things have changed: when I was growing up, if people wanted visibility they had to be part of the system, they had to be journalists working in a newspaper or making records as part of a label. If you believed in yourself, there were not many ways to be self-promoted. But now it's all different. And I am not talking about me of course, who started my blog less than a month ago and I am read by very few friends. Look at people whose blogs get sited by newspapers and girls whose postings of themselves singing covers are getting millions of hits on youtube. Now, that's what I call democracy, that is true power to the people. You are a nobody with an opinion, a talent, a laptop and a camera and a whole new range of options is openned in front of you. Because you had the confidence to say, here I am do you like me? And people did. And then you become a star.

I can't wait.

Ute

I will see Ute Lemper live in less than a month and I am very excited.
Every time I listen to her songs, I realise how interesting it is what she does: this amazing combination of theatricality and music that constitutes the heart of the genre she adores: cabaret. She is a singer and a dancer and an actress. And even though I have never seen her act and dance, all of this is present in her singing, always. I like her when she sings Kurt Weill, Bob Fosse, Edith Piaf, Philip Glass or Nick Cave. Her voice has this amazing ability to restrain and burst at will, reminding me of the master of restraint: Amalia Rodrigues. Restraint in singing is so important because it is only through it that power can really shine. If one would only sing powerfully, it would seem that they're screaming. But Ute's and Amalia's restraint only underline their power, making it even more pronounced.

Just watch her here...

We all love House

I love House, and I know I am not alone. The goal here is to see why: is it because he is bitchy and cold, like any woman's dream? Is it because he is unavailable and has this British charm? Or is because of his so well-publisized similarity to Sherlok Holmes? Wikipedia argues that it is not only House's character that resembles the famous detective, it is also the structure of any episode, with the virus or the desease playing the role of the bad buy, Dr Wilson as Dr. Watson, and Vicodin as cocaine and voilá, here you have it! But really, do you think that House is just a spy novel disguised as a medical drama?

I think not...

I think that House is great because he has taken the notion of the ethical dilemma outside the philosophers' den and back into our lives. All episodes usually have a deep ethical issue that needs to be addressed. And dare I say that the writers of the series are doing an excellent job in making us see all possible aspects of it. I always thought that Greek tragedy is awsome exactly because of that: in Antigone there are no clear good guys and bad guys, sure Antigone is noble and all, wanting to bury her brother and stuff but Creon, who can say that Creon is a 'baddie'? The poor guy stands for law and order, while if Antigone had her way, laws would be disobeyed at will. But I digress... In House it is always clear, the complexity of life, the complexity of the ethical dilemmas that exist out there. In the episode I saw today (an old one from series one or two) the issue is the following: hot-shot 32-year-old executive is admitted for acute pain in her leg. Team thinks it might be what House has, team is wrong, whatever. House realises (after some serious stuff I got confused with) that the woman is depressed and boulimic and she self-harms so badly that she has destroyed her heart and needs a transplant. Problem is, people with such issues could be excluded from transplant lists, because they might be suicidal. House however confronts the hot-shot exec and asks her 'do you want to live?', to which hot-shot replies 'I don't want to die'. To me this is is clear, halllooooow, the woman did not say she wants to live, she only said she doesn't want to die, and the two sentences are not synonymous (linguist talking). In any case the moral question is whether House should lie to the transplant committee to get his patient a heart or not, because she might kill herself the next day.

What do you say, what do you think he did?

It is not important what he did, although he did good.
What's important is that we see this dilemma and we feel it and we think about it. I think.
And this is why we love House.

You like?

On The Radio (Regina Spektor)

This is how it works
It feels a little worse
Than when we drove our hearse
Right through that screaming crowd
While laughing up a storm
Until we were just bone
Until it got so warm
That none of us could sleep
And all the styrofoam
Began to melt away
We tried to find some words
To aid in the decay
But none of them were home
Inside their catacomb
A million ancient bees
Began to sting our knees
While we were on our knees
Praying that disease
Would leave the ones we love
And never come again

On the radio
We heard November Rain
That solo's really long
But it's a pretty song
We listened to it twice
'Cause the DJ was asleep

This is how it works
You're young until you're not
You love until you don't
You try until you can't
You laugh until you cry
You cry until you laugh
And everyone must breathe
Until their dying breath

No, this is how it works
You peer inside yourself
You take the things you like
And try to love the things you took
And then you take that love you made
And stick it into some
Someone else's heart
Pumping someone else's blood
And walking arm in arm
You hope it don't get harmed
But even if it does
You'll just do it all again

And on the radio
You hear November Rain
That solo's awful long
But it's a good refrain
You listen to it twice
'Cause the DJ is asleep
On the radio
(oh oh oh)
On the radio
On the radio - uh oh
On the radio - uh oh
On the radio - uh oh
On the radio

My second tongue

Carla Bruni is an Italian that writes and sings in French. Julie Delpy is a French that writes and sings in English. This, in addition to the easiness I have expressing myself in English makes me wonder what is it that makes writing (personal stuff or not) in another language so compelling and eventually so effective as well…
Could it be that this way one can take some distance from the emotionality our own mother tongue is usually packed with, and moving away from that we can be more accurate in what we want to say? In Greek I am inclined to pretend to write with various literary mannerisms, whereas in English I cannot do that. In English it’s just me and my clumsy thoughts. I can be honest: words carry no weight, for me they have no more meaning than what I give them on the very moment I use them. In Greek, I am tragic, I write heavily, I make no sense. I am lost in my literary aspirations to be a novelist, to write the perfect sentence that I will read afterwards and weep. In English I am ok however, I aspire nothing, I only want to say the truth.
Julie’s French accent is nice, it carries over a distance from her songs that although they are so personal and tragic (“My heart will stay yours until I die” for example) you cannot believe she means everything as tragically as she puts it. And this does not mean that she is insincere or that her songs are phoney, it just means that she is detached from them when she sings them and therefore they seem more believable. She doesn’t seem to have written to them on the spur of the moment, they don’t seem emotional songs. So people, I can take them seriously: they are not the songs of a fragile, passionate, weeping woman. They were written after a certain amount of thought. They seem songs that stemmed from heavy emotions but they were written and performed in cold blood. She wrote them with a cool head, that’s why they are so good, and she wrote them with a cool head that’s why they’re in English.
In praise of the second language then, don’t write in your mother tongues people or you’ll be soppy. Detach yourselves. C’est cool!
July 2005

What is Zatoichi?

I just looked at the side of the DVD case of Zatoichi and it said: Zatoichi, Blind Swordsman, The, Drama Foreign. I thought the use of the word drama was so curious that I had to comment on it. What does it mean for a movie to be a drama and what does it mean for a movie to play with the rules that define a genre as much as Zatoichi does? Because arguably Zatoichi is nothing more than a study of how many genres one can mix in a movie, how far you can stretch it… (Funnily enough, the only genre that does not play a part in Zatoichi is romance. Damn Japanese, always so cynical.)

I guess the use of the term drama is adequately supported by the adjective foreign: only a foreign movie could be characterized as drama, even if it looked like Zatoichi. I mean, the movie ends with a tap dance for Christ’s sake, how much of a drama can that be? But I guess the overall theme, that of injustice and how the poor deal with it in rural Japan of the last century (?) could be one of a dramatic movie. The beauty and the originality in Takeshi Kitano’s movie of course lies in the fact that although the theme is dramatic, his movie is not… What exactly it is however is a different question that maybe we answer in the end. Or maybe we might even decide that we don’t need to answer it.
What is a genre and how did it emerge as a concept in art? I mean, it would be conceivable not to have the idea of a genre at all in the history of art. When I was a child it really escaped me how did all people of a certain period write romantic poems, to use an example. It seemed very useful to me for classification and further teaching of art movements in school. It seemed useful into distinguishing romanticism vs. realism vs. magic realism, when you teach them in school but where else? Where else are these distinctions necessary?
Later in my life I understood the concept of Zeitgeist, the spirit of our times, which in art I guess it could mean that now is a time to be romantic, Love put on your faces! When times are dangerous and uncertain, people tend to lean towards romanticism more naturally and effortlessly than before. (When I started doing linguistics and due to the fact that I was reading many fashion magazines at the time, I was set out on a quest to find out why Minimalism is so trendy both in science and in fashion, architecture and music. My teacher, when I said that to her replied to me, Christina, Minimalism in linguistics is something very different. I was so discouraged but I am still looking. I still think it’s a bit relevant… Anyway…)
So yes, Zeitgeist and how it gets linked to art. I guess one can argue that it made more sense for people to create art movements and genres in previous times than now. What I mean with this is that now the very notion of interdisciplinary art/science or anything is something natural, it is the genre of our times. Take journalism for example, my favourite writer when he was writing his editorials, he was always putting underneath this text was written listening to this and that cd. He was creating his own soundtrack with which he wanted us to read his texts. Current art, video installations that are accompanied by paintings, music and the rest of it is another side of the same coin: art is more interdisciplinary nowadays, it seeks to avoid classification and it is considered an achievement when something cannot be put into a nicely labelled box. What is this then, what is this urge to avoid labels? Is it only linked to art or does it have to do with a more current and universal human tendency? Have we had enough of labels and we want to get rid of them overall? And what was the use of labels for so many years of human history that made them indispensable and what is the change that made it possible to get rid of them now?
A natural answer could be technology. Advancements in technology made it possible to make a movie that defies genres and video installations that are complex and multi culti… Multi cultural art has also played a very important role in the emergence of the non-genre: remember Moulin Rouge. The amazing soundtrack of that movie that created a genre of its own (a genre to define all genres) was an exquisite mix not only of very different songs but also of civilizations: the musical scene with the Hindi dance and the tango of Roxanne being the two best examples of ‘foreign’ musical traditions that integrated in a ‘western’ musical about fin de siècle and when they were paired with Elton John’s Your song and Gorecki by Lamb they create an amazing mix that set the pace of the things to come…Similarly, Zatoichi is an ‘entertaining’ movie as its creator likes to refer to it and in order to achieve that he mixes and matches all conceivable genres (apart from romance, let me point out again!). Zatoichi has violence, in those amazing eat-my-dust-Tarantino scenes, humour, sometimes more slapstick than others, suspense, playing the is-he-or-isn’t-he-blind game till the end, drama, the amazing scene of the male geisha dancing and having the parallel editing with him as a little boy dancing the same dance and musical, with that out of this world final tap dance scene. Why does he do that? What does he want to tell us?

I guess the message of this movie and of this overall tendency is throw away all labels and be free. These days we are all bi sexual (at least in theory), metro sexual and all that jazz. Women can be strong and not be intimidating (again in theory) and men can still put on face cream and still be as macho as they want. (I am not saying that all men that put on face cream are macho, all I’m saying is that a man can put on face cream and still be macho, if he wants to. I have issues with men that put on face cream, sorry.)

Similarly, the funny scenes in Zatoichi did not by any means undermine the dramatic aspect of the story. They just provided an agreeable alteration from life’s ultimate drama. Exactly like in life, when you are in the most pain, something happens and you burst into laughter, in the movie too dramatic and humoristic scenes are interchangeable and they provide the realism of emotions that such a movie ultimately wishes to convey. As my grandmother used to say (or all Greek grandmothers for that matter), when she was watching her favourite soap opera, everything is taken out of real life, my daughter. So with this note I will end my quest to find out what is Zatoichi’s genre, and I will call it life. Zatoichi is life at its best: drama, suspense, laughter, song and dance but crucially not romance!

I am an awful cynic lately, I apologise…

November 2004

Hero or why you should think twice before you start laughing in the cinema…

Chinese movies are cool, everybody knows that. And Japanese too, actually but this is another story. The issue here however will be, why Hero was such a good movie and why there are still stupid people that laugh in the cinema. But let’s take the things from the beginning.
I wanted to see Hero for a long time but it only opened in England last week, so I saw it two years after my Greek friends. I was really looking forward to it but I was not sure what to expect. It was dubbed as the new big thing á la Crouching Tiger – Hidden dragon, which I adored, and therefore I was excited. I wasn’t sure where the similarities lied, however, so I was also a bit sceptical: why repeat a successful recipe and in essence create a second best Crouching tiger? I was not sure…
In the beginning of the movie I could only see the similarities: the style, the fight scenes, the lonely warriors. And I didn’t mind. But I was clearly not engaged in the storyline. I caught myself thinking of the last line of Crouching tiger, that has haunted me for years: Hold your last breath to meditate and leave this world peacefully, she said. And he replied: I spent all my life meditating and now I want to use up my last breath to tell you I love you. Heartbreaking, I would say, but then again I am a girl, what do you expect?
Then I thought how when I was younger I never understood the ars gratia artis motto: I was always looking for a message, I could not see the beauty in the means not the goal… And while I was watching Hero’s stunningly beautiful fight scene between Snow and Moon in the forest with the falling leaves, I said to myself: I don’t care if there is no message here, this is beautiful. But happily, I was surprised very soon. As the story progressed this movie proved to be much more than beautiful images, not that this would have been bad.
The story was complex in the more primitive and profound way: it consisted of numerous parallel realities and the stunningly beautiful dream within a dream trick. And it all worked amazingly well, in a movie that had so much diversity: it was a pseudo-historical drama with fight scenes and complex love stories on top of that. In the three alternative stories of the way Hero defeats the notorious assassins Snow and Broken Sword that are lovers, we see unfolding before us all the range of emotions a couple can ever experience. In reality number one, the couple is not speaking for three years: she has cheated on him and they are both lost inside their pain. In order to hurt her, he sleeps with his loyal servant. And he yells at her: I know you saw us, I wanted you to see us. And she kills him. This story is red. In the second alternative, they are happy together, in love and in total harmony. They are both heart and soul into a common cause and when they are asked to decide between them who will get sacrificed for it, they go together, simply because they cannot live apart. But before they get there, she wounds him with her sword, she wounds him just enough so he is not the one that will go and fight and die. And she goes. And she dies. This story is blue. In the third story, they are still in love. And they did start with a common cause. But they drifted apart. And they do not understand each other anymore. He has deviated from the thing that was uniting them and she is hurt and does not understand him. She feels he betrayed their ideals, and along with them their love too. When they fight because she always uses the sword not words, he lets her kill him and she yells, why didn’t you defend yourself? His reply –so you can finally believe that I love you- comes as a slap in the face, to her and to us. And then in a very Grecian tragedy kind of way, she embraces him and kills herself with the same sword. This story is white… I was not expecting all this from Hero, I did not expect to see the concentrated story of every doomed love story, portrayed so accurately and beautifully: you fall in love and then you betray. Most of the times…
This trick with the couple and the three alternatives, reminded me of Run, Lola, Run. And the movie within a movie theme, that reached another level of complexity when inside the white story, we go one step further and see the past of that story too, reminded my Talk to her. Almodovar seems always relevant for me, especially when we are discussing complexity and ultimate stylisation. He is the absolute king of obsessions, his movies have the simplest messages, but he adores complex, idiosyncratic style, which he perfects religiously with every new movie he makes. And this to me is the essence of art these days: are there any new stories to be told? Are there any genuinely new ideas? No… All we have to play with is style, and this is the true essence of ars gratia artis that I said before: art is the way you chose to convey the same messages that are in the centre of human interest century after century after century… Variations on a theme, games with style. You can say it with a story of two men in love with two women in a comma, you can say it in a story of Chinese warriors, you can even say it with a frantic German girl running like mad under techno sounds to save her boyfriend from the mob. The story is the same (or similar or limited in any case), what are the storylines that made history? Boy meets girl and Good against evil. Am I forgetting something? I don’t think so…
This leads us to the last point I wished to make: the people that were laughing in the cinema… Why? Because the actors were doing the (really well-known by now) flying fight scene… How funny, indeed. I bet they laughed in Matrix too… What can I say? Just that it was so annoying. So annoying. So disrespectful and so egoistic: it totally ruined some moments for me and this was awful. But I guess those people just didn’t get it. Maybe they came for the fun of it all and I am the one ruining it for them with this text full of speculations about non-existent messages in a movie that was merely a very simple movie… Right?
You tell me…

October 2004

All that jazz or the meaning of art…

When I was younger I really could not appreciate art: it did not seem useful and I didn’t understand it for that. For example, my mother is an interior decorator and it was escaping me really how somebody could spend his life with a profession that involves choosing the right material for somebody’s couch… She was taking me to museums and I did not appreciate them at all either. I think it was especially against fine arts and architecture that my ignorance was targeted against. It was escaping me really, the meaning of it all. The more I think about it the more I decide that I could not accept the value of art without a clear message and of course I could not see the message in Goya’s or Kandisnky’s paintings or in Macintosh’s architecture for that matter. I was the type or arrogant child that would utter sentences like, ‘if you are to dedicate your life into studying something, it might as well be psychology because what could it be more important that the human psyche?’ And then I grew up to become a linguist… But that’s a different story; we’re talking about art here. So I couldn’t understand my mother’s profession or her love of fine arts.
On the other hand, as an only child I was reading a lot, I was reading all the time. So I loved literature. And of course I loved music, too. And films… My question therefore is, what is the difference between these three and all other kinds of art that I could not appreciate? What was the split I did in my head due to? Now I think that it was due the clarity of the message and my distorted ideas of what is useful, so let’s talk about that…
When she broke up with her boyfriend, my best friend answered my question, what do you do at nights, with a simple, I have my books. Today, I felt the exact same thing: my life is dull, boring and quite melancholic these days but when I read a nice piece of literature my heart smiles. I read a nice sentence and I underline it and take strength from it and write it in my diary or on my wall. I close my eyes and read it again and I get stronger because of it. Because of ‘… all this beauty in this world…’ it fills me with hope. The other night I sang, the house was empty, my flatmates were gone and I was singing for half an hour. I was singing old songs that I haven’t sang for a long time and this filled me up with strength. But why? What is it about art that gives importance in our lives? What is about art that people want to live their lives through it? Is it aesthetics, is it because art makes our lives ‘aesthetically pleasing’? Or is it something deeper? All that jazz, I think, answers that question perfectly with a little help from Shakespeare of course.
All that jazz is a movie about a Broadway director / choreographer whose life is quite of a mess, he is an alcoholic, workaholic, arrogant, unfaithful bastard. But a talented bastard as well. He is a failed ex-husband and father who cheats on his current girlfriend with random, unimportant young actresses for no particular reason. (Who cheats for a reason, anyway? That is a different story though, right? Anyway…) The only thing he knows how to do well actually is dance and direct. This is his most important means of communication with everybody: when his girlfriend and his daughter want to wish him ‘happy birthday’, they dance for him. This way is the only way he can actually feel this ‘happy birthday’ and perceive and absorb the emotion behind it. He lives his life through dance.
Smoking, drinking and all that jazz give him a stroke. And then reality and fantasy fuse charmingly with each other in the remainder of his (semi) conscious moments. But why should dance be an illusion? For this guy it is the truth, it is his life. That is the way he perceives reality, through dancing and music and art. The second half of the movie is a dazzling overture of surreal dance sequences, as they are perceived by a dieing man in his deathbed. The only way he can understand his life calling for him is through his loved ones singing and dancing ‘don’t die daddy’ and the rest of it. It seems surreal but actually it’s not: art is a part of life, it’s just that some people see it more clearly than others. In one of the last scenes of the movie he sings ‘bye bye my life goodbye’ in an auditorium full with the people of his life. As the orchestra plays the reprise, he goes towards the audience shaking hands and kissing everybody goodbye. This is where a well-known Shakespearian quote first came to my mind.
When I am sad, I find it more natural to express my sadness through a song, through somebody else’s lyrics than with my own words: ‘funny thing how two sweethearts, with the world at their feet, all at once are two strangers that look away when they meet. Funny thing, but who’s laughing? Not me…’ This is so much more accurate than anything I would ever say about how I feel. ‘I need to set my lands in order…’ and ‘let us go then you and I as the evening is spread out against the sky’ contextual jokes that only an elite would understand… A winking of an eye to an unseen friend. What is it that makes such an expression of emotions so charming? Is it the fact that we consider ourselves intellectually higher than others insofar as we can express our pain through art? And who are ‘we’? A friend once told me, beware of the generic pronouns ‘they, we’ what do they mean, what do they stand for? Educated people shouldn’t use them… I use them all the time, unfortunately…
When I write in my diary I always end with a lyric from a song or with a question. Therefore, it’s either that I am uncertain about things or I am using somebody else’s words to express my (uncertain) thoughts and feelings. What does that tell us? (Not about my fragile state of mind but about the relation between emotions and their expression and art.) I think it tells us something about why art is important. As Shakespeare wrote ‘the world is a stage and we are all actors.’ Why is that relevant? Because life is art, if we want it to be. We can live our lives gracefully and write articulate summaries of it in our diaries, summaries that resemble literature. We can cry in style, reciting Lord Byron and other romantic poets. We can drown our pain in (cheap vodka and) Godard. But, wait a second, what am I saying? Am I saying that art is just a matter of good style? Is that all? No. So? Let me start again. Disregard this last paragraph, if you wish.
‘The world is a stage and we are all actors’. Surely, this cannot mean that we are living phoney lives. Surely, this cannot mean that art’s sole contribution to our lives is to add up a bit of style and good aesthetics. It can’t mean that art makes our lives a bit less boring. What does it mean then? Why is art so relevant, why do we seek its company when we are sad? Or why truly interesting people, live with it throughout their lives?
I think this is because the meaning of art is communication. Every artist (even the ultimately cryptic ones) wants to communicate with its (potential) audience: they write, compose, draw, direct with the ultimate goal to communicate their feelings to other people. The stories they say are usually not so original anymore: when was the last time you saw a truly original movie? The world’s major issues have been explored in all so many ways: good against evil, love, friendship, growing up… Is there anything else, really? Only the style changes. And that, I think, is what we call art in the conventional sense. It is the (hopefully) original / personal / interesting / idiosyncratic means that the artist chooses to convey his or her emotions. This is where originality lies: in the means. It’s not what you say anymore, it’s how you say it. There are no original ideas, I mean how many times have we heard a song about love? How many times have we seen a movie about two doomed lovers that end up together in the end? Why are these people allowed even to make this kind of movies anymore? Because each of those artists has a (slightly, most of the times) different way of saying the same (old) story. And if art is good, then this personal way of saying that story is interesting, if art is bad then that way is boring. But do not expect any original stories any time soon, because they will not come, I assure you. Only the means will change, they will become more relevant to our times, more relevant to young people. They will force us to revisit the well-known themes and maybe think of them in a different way, maybe we pay attention to an angle we had missed.
If every story is a cliché, then what is the message behind it all? The message, I think, art’s sole message is always ‘you are not alone’; identification, we crave to identify with the characters in movies, with dancers, with singers. You are not alone, what a comforting thought. And if you in all your pain and drama, cannot put your thoughts in a coherent order, the artist (/god?) will do that for you. The artist puts in an articulate and aesthetically pleasing order, the pain of people. And people read it and sing it and watch it and they identify with it and they feel less unimportant, they feel poetic and their life and their pain acquires new meaning… Through art, you tend to relive your pain through the pain of others in a more glamorous way; it’s one thing to cry boringly and in a totally uncreative manner, drinking alcohol and cursing an ex, and it is quite another thing to identify with T. S. Elliott. I mean, excuse me but there is a huge difference here. And I don’t mean it in a bad way, not necessarily. It is truly different to see that other people have been through what you are going through at the moment and lived through it and created art because of it. (A potential counterargument to my point here might be that all important artists are depressed and ultimately suicidal, but let us ignore this at the moment.)
Sometimes, with fine arts or music the message is straighter: there is no message really, it’s pure emotions. What do you feel when you listen to Exit music (for a film) from Radiohead? You feel pain? You feel redemption? Be it as you wish, you feel something. And maybe you communicate with the composer (because he felt pain and redemption when he composed that piece) or maybe you don’t. But the mere idea that somebody was as melancholic as to compose this music that expresses the melancholy you are experiencing at the moment, is good enough of a feeling. You are not alone, indeed and this is so comforting.
So I guess that’s why I couldn’t grasp the ‘use’ of art when I was a kid: I was not in pain then, as I am now. I felt nothing for which I would need any kind of feeling of solidarity, I didn’t care if I was alone or not, I was an only child anyway… I was a happy, arrogant child as I said. Art is not for happy, arrogant people. Art is for the depressed. Art is for the thoughtful, hurt adults all these happy children have grown up to become. Art is sadness, communication through sadness. There is no happy art, and for a good reason: happy art, even the thought of it is an oxymoron. Why would anybody want to share their happiness? More precisely, happiness is far too idiosyncratic to be shared, while sadness is universal and so common to all of us. All people hurt the same way but all of us are happy in such different ways. Only friends can communicate happiness, share the same jokes. I would never know how to make a stranger happy. But I can make a stranger sad all too easy. Hurting is easier than making someone happy, unfortunately.

October 2004

Personal but not a diary

I guess the question that one needs to address when starting a blog is what kind of blog it will be: a thematic one that has a sense of purpose or continuity or a more personal one where you discuss things that are on one's mind, ideas that come and go with the risk of becoming less interesting for people to read.

My love for writing comes and goes. Or to put it more accurately, my love for writing is always here, my discipline and my drive to do it comes and goes. I guess then, this blog is here to give me my drive back. It does me good to write, to put my ideas in coherent sentences, it clears up my head.

I don't want to get very personal however, only because I think that our ideas lose their force when we don't see how they can generalize. My earlier texts tried to do that by starting off from something general (an idea, a movie, a song) and became more personal, more specific to the things that I was going through at the time. I am going to include some of these texts, although they are old.

I hope my friends will contribute to this blog. When they do, they can write about whatever they want. This way we can be a collective, but hopefully an 'autonomous collective' :)