Poptimism THORT for the day

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

"pop is a map of the world at large (everything else is a map of 1xcommunity at small)"

That one submitted by dubdobdee.

Comments

Re: oops again

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

epistemic = i was thinking of paradigms and meant "paradigmatic"!

(epistemes is what foucault calls paradigms, i think) (except theyre probably importantly different -- however since the only reason i used the word was by mistake i'm not going to bother to find out, at least not right now)

i guess i'm wondering if "bad history" is a problem in art the way it may be in science? (i actually think it probably is, having just created a counter-example about how romero didn't know "night of the living dead" was "about vietnam" till people told him afterwards, and how if he'd know this he wouldn't have been able to make it particularly well -- propblem w.counter-example being a. it's totally made-up (romero was pretty clear about what he was doing and why), and b. the reason this kind of reductive after-the-fact "well actually it's all about [x]" stops people doing good work from the off is because it's very rarely true)

"in the end... it's about loneliness"

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

i ended the "if..." book by saying this: which was a rhetorical device obviously (it's about lots of things), but is a way of saying that anderson's own experience of loneliness -- his commitment to it, in fact -- had a shaping effect on his sense of form; in particular his sense of how to end his film (and of course i was very consciously thinking about how to end my book)

i don't in fact believe this was front-and-centre conscious on anderson's part, at least in the sense that he had decided to "make a film about loneliness" (if he had decided to do that, it would have been quite another film, and maybe not about schools at all): he tended to be fairly (too?) open about what he considered his aims and intentions in any given film

but i think once you start to think about this element in his personality, you see very clearly the impasse his politics and film-making had run into -- why he never again made as strong a film, for example

i think with aspects like form,by which i mean the feeling about when something is well-made, or the "right shape", or completed, or "what you meant", the impulse(s) can sometimes be operating at a very deep, unconscious or intuitive level, which you are resisting when operating in conscious modes: not least because these decisions are being made towards to end of a project, when your will to engage with the things that took you into it may be exhausted (as indeed may you, functioning on instinct getting something done)