Starry Night, Etretat. From the book: Travels with Van Gogh & the Impressionists, Neil Folberg
Source: yama-bato
I’ve been thinking lately about Terrence Malick’s “Tree of Life” which I saw a few month’s back. It’s a grand, ambitious and for thoroughly problematic film. Plus, dinosaurs. A review and comments in the Guardian: (http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/jul/07/the-tree-of-life-review?commentpage=all#start-of-comments) sum up well the range of responses and genuine difficulty people have had in processing what the film represents.
Here’s a selection:
cinemike
(The Tree of Life) Like faith, requires a leap.
LurcherMan
I conclude that Malick doesn’t do emotional manipulation.
bobs123
The visuals, constantly on the verge of cliche.
circling127
It does something that nothing else is doing, something good. Plus, dinosaurs.
jusquin
This would seem like nonsense or platitudes unless you are deeply embarked on your own personal journey.
lemonhat
I actually felt quilty about my cynicysm towards parts of it as it was so passionate and honest in its feelings.
I’m not going to add my own critique. It’s a great film regardless of whether it actually succeeds in fulfilling anything let alone its own ambitions. The thing that caught me though, and this is reflected in some of the comments above, was my strong desire for the film to convince me, to win me to its emotional argument, and uniquely I felt I was in the hands of an artist with the back catalogue and capacity to do just that.
Alas, I too found cynicism rising at certain points and the beach scene at the end was near unwatchable. My response to this cynicism though was genuine disappointment in Malick’s failure as an artist to consistently compel me. It brought home to me the extent to which we yearn to live in the world in a way which allows us to be open, vulnerable and unguarded and how much we need our art to allow us to believe in the possibility of such a world.
The painter Francis Bacon towards the end of his life spoke sincerely of longing to paint a sunset like Claude Monet but lamented that the possibility was simply not open to him. Malick understands that the basic kernal of the modern conditon is the impossibility of hope and while the world is entirely a better place for his films, in art like anything else, it’s just a bloody let down when someone overpromises and underdelivers.
Japanese Chiyogami
The Black with Gold Waves Chiyogami is silkscreened onto machine-made sheets of mixed kozo and sulphite. Japanese Chiyogami is a very cooperative and beautiful paper that is an excellent choice for bookbinding, collage, greeting cards, box making, book arts, and jewelry.
Source: yama-bato
White Bridge, David Quinn, Mixed media on board
California Dreamin’
In an end of year radio round-up yesterday I heard again an excerpt from Steve Job’s celebrated Stanford Commencement speech where he urges the crowd to never lose sight of the reality of death and the renewed value its looming certainty should give to all our lives.
“No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It is life’s change agent.”
Stark words to deliver to a fresh faced audience but it was clearly spoken from the heart and it would be hard to dispute that Jobs hadn’t used the awareness of his own death to spur him in building Apple into the brand it is today. A brand which ironically it could be argued, contains at its core, the wormy promise of hope in a pristine white technological future where death can (unconsciously) be dispelled as being unmodern and almost medieval. If you think this is far-fetched, consider Job’s own death and our collective response to it.
By most informed accounts a difficult and it is said an often disagreeable person Steve Jobs was driven to an exceptional degree and while we accord such people leeway in matters of courtesy, civility and even decency: (they’ve got more on their mind after all), his death and the outpourings of grief and loss which followed seemed oddly disproportionate and excessive even to someone who interacts daily with an orchard’s worth of Apple devices. Who or what was actually being mourned here? Something more than an individual, however eminent he may have seemed. A backlash was inevitable as reflected in the discussion here:
http://m.gawker.com/5847338/steve-jobs-was-not-god
The post and comments stir up so many issues it’s difficult for any mortal not to feel rankled by something but one comment is worth quoting in full:
“DrClamSalad @kyrow promoted by CapitalOrange Thu 06 Oct 2011 4:51 PM I think what sickens me about the adoration that people are giving to him is the fact that they give him this adoration because he created a fucking brand. It was his intent to make Apple an inherent piece of the urban sophisticate’s lifestyle and he did this very well. Whether he was important to the creation of computer’s is entirely beside the point because it is not why people are mourning him. If Alan Touring were alive and died tomorrow, no one would give two shits. It is because they see this brand and its Messiah as a part of their lives, they are defined by their Ipods and the music they listen to on it and they thank Steve Jobs for all of these wonderful things. As the article pointed out, he has not done anything for you. In fact, he has made the world a worse place with iphone sweatshops in china. If he revolutionized anything, he revolutionized branding and advertisements. Does that make him bad? No. What is bad is that people consider this more important than people who fought for civil rights, their country, etc. It is a sign that corporations control everything, right down to our wants and desires. Not only that, but when their CEO’s die, they get a fucking heroes burial. We might say that we want equality and for the Obama adminstration to crack down on Wall Street, but what we want more is an Iphone and the person that brings the Iphone to us is more important. Sorry, this one kind of struck a cord with me, I usually am not as hostile over the internet.”
There’s plenty here to take or leave but in case you missed it however the point that rings true as a bell is that the grieving masses define themselves through their Apple branded lifestyle. Apple products represent important signifiers of their superior taste, education, wealth, attractiveness, creativity and soulfulness but most fundamentally they represent hope for the future. A sleek machined future, free of crashes and enveloped in the peace of “backups in the cloud”. That’s a big investment to have in a phone which is systematically and literally devalued by the hand that fed it to you.
It was less Steve Job’s passing which was being mourned but the comforting security of social identity and the collective faith in an all conquering technology which Steve at the helm represented. Like a Messiah who has symbolically banished death from the collective psyche his own death exposed the terrible truth. Death was never beaten; we were just sleeping for a hundred years, enchanted by the “Designed in California” packaging.
The pity isn’t that more deserving dead aren’t celebrated in a similar fashion but that our collective sense of perspective is skewed to the point that even now that the curtain has been pulled back, we confuse a hero to mankind with a frail man crafting and selling beautiful and enticing machines to countless people, now more than ever, hungry to believe in a safer world of technological hope, where nothing dies and where everything finally and eternally “just works”.
Folly, David Quinn, 2007
Eclipse, David Quinn, 2007
Dunes (Taken with instagram)
