Movies as insight into mass fears and desires

“[Gene] Siskel described his job as ‘covering the national dream beat,’ because if you pay attention to the movies they will tell you what people desire and fear. Movies are hardly ever about what they seem to be about. Look at a movie that a lot of people love, and you will find something profound, no matter how silly the film may be.” – Roger Ebert, from an enriching gallery on the Atlantic’s site

Helen Mirren on how songs and paintings differ from acting

“As an actor I’m always jealous painters and indeed of singers because a song can travel straight into the heart the way a painting can. What I do has to be processed by the brain. People have to follow the story. It has to make sense. A song, just a note of a song, can make you feel something. I think likewise a painting can do the same thing.” — Helen Mirren in this video clip

HT to OpenCulture.com

‘Something Wicked This Way Comes’ — the human condition and the carnival

In Ray Bradbury’s 1962 novel Something Wicked This Way Comes, a mysterious, dark carnival has come to town. Charles Halloway, father and library janitor, tries to understand the human condition in relation to the carnival:

“So, in sum, what are we? We are the creatures that know and know too much. That leaves us with such a burden again we have a choice, to laugh or cry. No other animal does either. We do both, depending on the season and the need. Somehow, I feel the carnival watches, to see which we’re doing and how and why, and moves in on us when it feels we’re ripe.”

Chekhov’s ‘The Cherry Orchard’ at the National Theatre — broadcast live from the Olivier Theatre

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Thanks to my in-laws, who are working in London, tonight I had the great privilege of seeing Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard performed at the Olivier Theatre inside the National Theatre.

This particular show was broadcast live to five continents.

Five camera guys, two with assistants, were stationed roughly in a crescent around the stage (at one point, immediately following the intermission, a cameraman got on stage with a camera on his shoulder to get closer to the action for a few minutes).

My wife Kristi, my father-in-law Tom, and I sat five rows back from the stage, on the far right of the center section (the stalls in the Olivier Theater). On our end, and on the far left, the cameras were on tracks level to the stage. Those were the cameras with assistants.

The first row was unoccupied, except for a crew member.  About a 15-foot section of track allowed the camera in front of us to move back and forth during the play. The crew member seated on the front row helped guide the chord to the camera as it moved back on forth along the tracks. At one point, the chord briefly caught on something as the camera quietly rolled right.

Throughout the play, we could tell when the camera in front of us was the one broadcasting live. Red lights around the camera’s viewing screen would light up.

This was the only downside: Sometimes the camera, camera guy, and his assistant were directly between us and the action on stage.

I had never seen The Cherry Orchard. By most accounts — Sunday Telegraph, Daily Express, Daily Mail, Evening Standard, Financial Times, The Independent, The Times, The Stage, Mail on Sunday — this was a four-star or five-star way to see it.

Each actor gave a strong, consistent, thorough performance. Andrew Upton’s version of Chekhov’s play, as directed by Howard Davies, told a story of change and class differences, with a balance of humor and bitter loss.

I hope I’m not too far off base to say the “old money” characters lost out in the story, while the middle-class, hard-working entrepreneur and the young idealistic student seemed — equally — to hold the promise of the future.

Milliner from First Things on “When Art Plays Church”

Thanks to Curator magazine’s blog for posting this: Milliner from First Things on “When Art Plays Church”.

The presence of myth in technologically advanced, scientific cultures

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Leszek Kolakowski:

“In the scientific sense, ‘true’ means that which has the chance of being employed in effective technological procedures…. Metaphysical questions and beliefs are technologically barren and are therefore neither part of the analytical effort nor an element of science. As an organ of culture they are an extension of the mythical core…. A language which attempts to reach transcendence directly violates, to no purpose, its own technological instrumentality. It reaches transcendence in myths which give a meaning to empirical realities and practical activities via relativization. A mythical organization of the world (that is, the rules of understanding empirical realities as meaningful) is permanently present in culture.” — Leszek Kolakowski, The Presence of Myth 

Facsimile

Image via Wikipedia

There’s been this raging debate as of late and a storm of controversy

Faith just pins her corsage on Easter morning’s new Mercy

We know the terrain all well but You kicked down the gates of hell

Death’s prison cell opened and You threw away the key

Love is just a plea, at the deepest point of need

We take the reasonable facsimile, most of the time

– “Facsimile,” Vigilantes of Love (Slow Dark Train, 1997)

Grandeur and sublimity serve no social or biological purpose

Today is Ash Wednesday, yet the apologetic task continues. Toward that end, I found this useful:

“The awareness of grandeur does not serve any social or biological purpose; man is very rarely able to portray his appreciation of the sublime to others or to add it to his scientific knowledge. Nor is its perception pleasing to the senses or gratifying to our vanity. Why, then, expose ourselves to the disquieting provocation of something that defies our drive to know, to something which may even fill us with fright, melancholy or resignation? Still we insist that it is unworthy of man not to take notice of the sublime.” — Abraham Joshua Heschel, Man is Not Alone: A Philosophy of Religion

What ‘joy’ meant to C.S. Lewis

“Joy is distinct not only from pleasure in general but even from aesthetic pleasure. It must have the stab, the pang, the inconsolable longing.” — C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy

Inconsolable longing? That makes me think — Maybe joy is not something that fills you up, but something that allows you to see what can fill you up.

C.S. Lewis on silencing the voice of conscience

“One very effective way of silencing the voice of conscience is to impound in an Ism the teacher through whom it speaks: the trumpet no longer seriously disturbs our rest when we have murmured ‘Thomist,’ ‘Barthian,’ or ‘Existentialist.’ – C.S. Lewis, from the preface to his George MacDonald: An Anthology