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