Father Knows Best (And Will Always Be There To Protect You From Yourself)

The latest entry at the new blog-art project as part of my participation in the "Decades of Influence" exhibition ...

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Metadata: art, blogging, blog, remix, Walter Benjamin

A Sensual Obsession

Finally, after waiting over 25 years, Nicolas Roeg's Bad Timing: A Sensual Obsession has been released by Criterion. The "A Sensual Obsession" subtitle has mysteriously disappeared, but I remember it well when it first opened in L.A. back in 1980.

From the hype:

Amid the decaying elegance of cold-war Vienna, psychoanalyst Dr. Alex Linden (Art Garfunkel) becomes mired in an erotically charged affair with the elusive Milena Flaherty (Theresa Russell). When their all-consuming passion takes a life-threatening turn, Inspector Netusil (Harvey Keitel) is assigned to piece together the sordid details. Acclaimed for its innovative editing, raw performances, and stirring musical score—featuring Tom Waits, the Who, and Billie Holiday—Nicolas Roeg’s Bad Timing is a masterful, deeply disturbing foray into the dark world of sexual obsession.

Seeing it again, I am reminded how taken I was by it. My response was similar to the experience I had after viewing the by now impossible-to-see films of my professor-guru Alain Robbe-Grillet the two years prior to my move to L.A., that is, I knew that one day I had to start making foreign films. [This is not the time to discuss my current work-in-progress and first feature in my "foreign film series," but suffice it to say that I am following through on that early desire...]

Theresa Russell was only 22 when she made this film. One. Of. The. Best. Acting. Performances. Ever.

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Metadata: movie, film, art, erotic

Techne+Poiesis

Stravinsky, in his Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons:

All creation presupposes at its origin a sort of appetite that is brought on by the foretaste of discovery. This foretaste of the creative act accompanies the intuitive grasp of an unknown entity already possessed but not yet intelligible, an entity that will not take definite shape except by the action of a constantly vigilant technique.

Is it too Romantic to be totally intoxicated with the creative process itself?

Maybe, but I'll still take mine with a twist of liminality...

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Metadata: music, poetics, lesson

It's The Media, Stupid...

Will the Fouth Estate ever have its comeuppance?

Does media matter?

The defining issue of our time is not the Iraq war. It is not the "global war on terror." It is not our inability (or unwillingness) to ensure that all Americans have access to affordable health care. Nor is it immigration, outsourcing, or growing income inequity. It is not education, it is not global warming, and it is not Social Security.

The defining issue of our time is the media.

Another reason why teaching creative writing in the context of new media art and digital rhetoric has some value: it enables the media consumer to see-through the conservative media narrative being projected by the traditional corporate-owned, government-sanctioned, talking robots and supplicant scribes.

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Metadata: politics, media, narrative