Formulas

Margin Notes on Culture

Some say that the profound appreciation of beauty is one of the only true good things we ever experience in life and that, fleeting but real, it makes life otherwise bearable. This seems a workable maxim, insofar as who would contest that taste is important to those who say it is important? One should not spend too much time worrying about proper taste, however. This is one of the problems with "seriousness" and its stranglehold upon culture (kulchur?). Lightness, leisure, unstrained, ideally—should anyone doubt that there is a problem when we have to work very hard, harder than anything else, to attain "culture" ... and we bear the visible marks of our hard work, on top of that? Funnily enough is in bad taste to feel more than mild or passing anxiety about "good taste." The anxiety may be a necessary part of the learning process but one must work to neutralize it, rise above it, in order to actually live well, and to appreciate beauty most appropriately. (Now the question arises as to what appreciation of beauty is "most appropriate" ...)

I'll Show You What You Are

Image of the Day

The Art of Persuasion

Wild River (Elia Kazan, 1960): a film about statecraft as the articulation of bureaucracy, a matter of public relations and, once we get down to it, persuasion. Lippmann-like technocracy comes up against the mess of implementation. It's an interesting film, to me, for its topic alone; but the treatment, too, is interesting. The surveilled lands, the problem of looking out, the space of a river island and visibility on the hill, amidst corn and weed ...

Image of the Day

Animal Love

One of the oddest eddies of State Fair (Henry King, 1933) is a passage where Will Rogers' giant pig Blue Boy locks eyes with a prize sow, camera lingering in medium close-up on presumably aroused swine.

VHS Decay

From the ending of Decision at Sundown (Budd Boetticher, 1957)

Odd

Unsettlingly, I have discovered a film blog whose author also signs posts 'ZC,' and whose links list overlaps some with mine (how did I not take note of this blog before?), and who even sort of "scooped" me on a Night Mail comment by a year and ten days: compare, my doppelganger's and mine. There is even a long post on Dumb and Dumber, which is something that I would love to one day do. I don't know if the author of this blog, Precious Bodily Fluids, has ever noticed my existence, but here on out I shall traverse the blogosphere with a mild, but augmented, sense of unease ...