Robert Alter - Illustrated

two translations of Robert Alter have been all the rage at college - The David Story (1&2 Samuel) and this year his translation of the Psalms.

the psalms is particularly good - his translation methodology is admirable - particularly the way he strives for terseness, in homage to the underlying Hebrew.

he has also written a great book the art of biblical narrative and translated Genesis

last year however i read an article he'd written in the New Republic called Scripture Picture. It's a four page article about the new illustrated Genesis by Robert Crumb using his translation (Crumb is probably quite famous in graphic novel circles, in others not so - check out the film Crumb where he plays himself, or even American Splendor [sic] for someone playing him in a minor roll - it's a good film!)

the article really is a good read. it's a fascinating discussion about what you do as you illustrate the bible, or depict anyone in another form. who are you when you hit the page in picture? it's hard enough to identify with yourself in print (ever critically read your own CV?), without having that then exported to another medium altogether.

there is something permanent-ising, objectifying, about turning the scriptures into pictures. the ambiguity is gone, the imagination, rather than engaging with ideas, is left to other devices - perhaps joining frame to frame in their head, filling out the missing action/movement.

and i wonder, do we do the same when children are read the scriptures as a child (i'm thinking big picture bibles)? why are we so fixated on the need for images to convey a message? do we not trust that people will do the imagining themselves?

(i think i was originally going to procrastinate about whether to buy Alter or Crumb - if you have an opinion, let me know in the comments. Cheers!)

Naked. living in the past.

Naked (1993, by Mike Leigh) is one of my favourite films ever, despite N, S, D, L, A, and any other warnings you can think of appropriately being on the video cover.

in other words, not a date movie.

but the following clip is from a section of the movie where Johnny (David Thewlis) is given a tour by Brian (Peter Wight) around the building he guards. their conversation reminds me both of conversations i've had with people who are not so well mentally, or alternatively of very very late-night chats that just get weird.
i think the only warning for this clip is L.


a great line from Johnny:

"So you think you can make the present palatable by projecting into the future. you're living in the past, pal. it's the future that f***s you up, Brian. it's the maggot in the apple."

Set List

Walk to Beautiful Fundraiser - 28/5/09

1. All Blues
   
2. Blue Bossa
   
3. I'm Beginning to see the Light
   
4. Nature Boy
   
5. Autumn Leaves
   
6. Satin Doll
   
7. Mercy Mercy Mercy
   
8. Chamæleon

let's see how many we get thru.

any requests for other songs to play on our international tour (assuming recording companies sign us up as a result of tonight)?

(if you haven't got tix yet you're too late - they're all sold out. how much that's due to the pulling power of duck5.blogspot.com and how much that's due to the movie and the cause will be told at 7:15 or 8 - the movie starts at 8.)

walk to beautiful

we're putting the band back together. we're playing at a fund raiser for the fistula hospital in Ethiopia. if you don't know what a fistula is or why they would have a hospital for them, you should probably find out.

we're playing and then they're screening the film about women who've been involved with the hospital:

This award-winning feature length film tells the stories of five Ethiopian women who suffer devastating childbirth injuries and portrays the hope provided by Dr Catherine Hamlin A C & Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital (The Hospital by the River).

Date: Thursday 28 May

Time: 7:15 pm refreshments & jazz band
8:00 pm screening

Venue: St Alban's church hall
Corner Lindfield Ave and Tryon Road, Lindfield, Sydney, Australia

Price: $20; $15 concession, includes refreshments

Tickets: Available after each service from Sunday 3 May or from the church office from Tuesday 5 May - call in or phone +61 2 9416 1703

Find out more about the film at www.walktobeautiful.com

This screening is a fundraiser to mark the Hamlin Golden Jubilee of 50 years in Ethiopia. See www.fistulatrust.org

Please come and celebrate the occasion.

And, as i said, you can hear the band. Back together.

a wrestlin' wreview

mickey rourke - tick
blood - tick
really nice hand-held camera work - tick
some rockin' 80's music - tick


yes indeed, the wrestler was just the movie six red-blooded blokes needed to get ourselves down to on tight-arse-tuesday - and the cinema was packed!

please note - a date film this is not.

the big question this flick asked us all was, at the end of the day, what would you rather have?

1. no passion, but a humdrum life of saturday night dinners with your over-emotional lesbian daughter and playing happy families with a worn-out stripper, or
   
2. the roar of the crowds everytime you walk out - RAM, RAM, RAM, RAM, RAM, RAM...

when i paint it that way, it's not that hard to choose.
but the director Darren Aronofsky doesn't make it that easy for us. one amazing scene, we share in the exhilaration of the crowd as the Ram walks out of the ring victorious. the next thing we see, however, is the pain, the staple-gun injuries, the barbed-wire tears, the chunks of broken glass that ain't gonna come out easy - and we think - why? what for? what is the point of it all? just give it up - you might actually enjoy the warmth of family, the assuredness of knowing you have a regular income so you don't get locked out of your trailer by your landlord.

is it a question of degrees of highs? do you want the heights of ecstasy (with its accompanying lows), or a mid-range life? if you want the latter - go see Revolutionary Road. maybe Rourke did - that's why he is the wrestler.

i found this movie hard, but good. good, because i didn't want to see just any old film. (i don't know if any has ever hired Mighty Ducks out since they saw it on TV in the 90's.) because we all want to feel; sometimes it's nice to go thru the wringer of emotions - the 'cut yourself to see if your heart's still pumping' idea.

but at the end of the day, i still have to ask - what was his life for? what did he fight for? was the price he paid worth it?

what do you live for, fight for, strive for, sacrifice even your own body for? do you run 'the' good race, is whatever your life is being sacrificed for (poured out as a drink offering) what you want it to be spent upon? are you pursuing fleeting pleasures - living it up now - but haven't given the rest of your years - let alone eternity - a thought for some time?

don't waste your life.


ps a good chunk of this flick is in a strip-bar. you may wanna take that into consideration. find a spot, or something. forewarned and all that.

darjeeling ltd.

not much to report from my break
sydney work, canberra christmas, sydney new year, sydney work, move out, house-sit.

i did watch a movie with my friend robin and my cousin michelle, the new wes anderson film, darjeeling limited, which i greatly enjoyed


i think the thing i like about his films is the way they grow on you. you're along for the ride, and you just take what comes.
his other films,

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004)

The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)

Rushmore (1998)

Bottle Rocket (1996)
at once are not, yet are, road movies, but they all feel like they are.

the thing i find with road movies is that you expect them to change. which they do - except they don't. the characters have these epiphanies, these experiences, which is great. but they're all external. they all happen to you.
what therefore depresses me is that we expect them to be different, we want to believe people can be changed by what happens to them, by putting yourself in a position where things can happen that will affect some change in you.
but as a rule, people are who they are, and any change is a rarity.
we may learn to adapt differently, but that doesn't mean we stop some of the more negative things that just keep happening to us.

so i still long for that life changing road-trip, i feel it's almost hard-wired into me. yet, still being a strong believer in a sovereign God, i need to keep reminding myself that the only thing that can truly affect lasting life change is a renewal in the Spirit.

Terminator Messiah

A few weeks ago i did a thing on Christ-figures in films. Some are more obvious than others, but things to look out for are sacrifice, taking the punishment others deserve, healing, having the initials J.C.; having a beard even seems to cut it in some films.

But for my thing on Heroes on Film, i thought i'd do the Christ-figures in the Terminator films.

firstly, a brief synopsis of the three films (at this time i hadn't seen T3, which filled in a lot of gaps):

• T1 T800 sent to kill Sarah Connor
  Kyle Reese to protect her because of the child she would bear.
  He would be the messiah of the Humans against the machines
  He ends up fathering a son, called John Connors
  Don’t miss the JC initials
  
• T2 T800 now the Cyborg Messiah,
  sent to protect the Human Messiah from the T1000
  
• T3 JC now the messiah he was predestined to be

These films deal with Ontological Paradoxes, that is,
An ontological paradox is a paradox of time travel that questions the existence and creation of information and objects that travel in time. It is very closely related to the predestination paradox and usually occurs at the same time. (definition from wikipedia)

c/f The End of Eternity by Isaac Asimov, written way back in 1954 - an amazing read if you can get a hold of it (mine's in a box at my parent's place in Canberra if you want to grab it)


“Critic Richard Corliss has...pointed out that the story parallels that of the New Testament, with a soldier from another world (the archangel Gabriel) visiting a woman (the Virgin Mary) to announce that she is to be mother to a messiah (John Connor has the same initials as Jesus Christ). She flees with him into the desert, where an angel of death becomes a protector/father.”

From Holy Aliens to Cyborg Saviours: Biblical Subtexts in Four Science Fiction Films, Anton Karl Kozlovic

In T2 that is.
The Cyborg Messiah takes over from the Human Messiah, taking the fore-front, and the many Christ-references.
with his wounds in his side, his Bullet Holes that Sarah needs, like Thomas in John 21, to check for herself.
The Terminator is killed by the T1000, but is resurrected, and then redeems humankind.

I guess, tho I haven’t [hadn't - ed.] seen it, that T3 is the next step, where the messiah (human John Connor, JC) takes control, on, of course, Judgement day, where he returns in power to rid the earth of evil once and for all.

For those interested, there is a fourth in the tubes, called Terminator Salvation: The Future Begins, in an odd tribute to science fiction history (in the End of Eternity), although in all probability this has more to do with the predominant US millenialist theology.

Each generation gets the cinema they deserve.


addendum - coming to Australian television screens is Terminator: the Sarah Connor Chronicles, which may or may not be any good. it's a nice idea, despite her dying inbetween the 2nd and 3rd movies, unless they give some explanation, like she had to hide herself so no terminator would be able to use her to track John. i dunno.

now for some Christmas silliness - watch this, v.v. funny h/t to locusts and honey

The Golden Compass (some thoughts)

The vitriol surrounding the next installment in the atheistic euangellion (after Dawkins’ books, his series, not to mention Hitchens and Onfray), the Golden Compass, is surely the sweetest thing to hit the producers’ ears since Nicole Kidman signed on to star in the project.

This is the movie version of Philip Pullman’s novel Northern Lights, part of the Dark Materials trilogy.
In the Sydney Morning Herald’s Spectrum from the 1st of December (I’ve been a little busy!), Pullman is quoted as saying, ”My story resolved itself into an account of the necessity of growing up and a refusal to lament the loss of innocence.”

That is, he pictures a world, which, when considered from a Religious point-of-view, is full of naughty people, who have discovered how much fun life is, with the church chasing them around and telling them to stop it. He traces this back, as I take it from his comments, to Adam and Eve in Eden listening to the serpent, who actually knew that God was a big kill-joy.

However, respectfully, I think he may be a little skew-if.
Eating of the tree of knowledge gave us not the choice of knowledge as against innocence, but the choice of doing bad as against good, i.e. what we were able to do with our knowledge.

For God isn’t against pleasure, against life. In fact, we are told “taste, and see that the LORD is good.” (Psalm 34:8)

God wants us to use our knowledge for good.

An obvious example is what we do with radioactivity – we can use it for medicine, to save lives, or alternatively we can bomb the heck out of one another, or at least threaten to, and in the process assemble enough weaponry to destroy the world many times over.


Perhaps Pullman has been hanging out with the Amish?

I say this because it’s logically implausible for the many Christian scientists, authors, futurists to not be condemned as stepping out of the orthodoxy of Ludditism.


I worry Pullman read until the third page of the Bible and never kept going, never saw the problem, the outworking of original sin.
And if that’s the case, then he obviously is unaware of God’s solution to the problem of mankind’s rebellion against him.


So sure, see the film – it sounds sort of interesting – but please know that the paper-doll this film sets up to assasinate, bears no relationship to the God of Wonders who created the universe, sustaining it by his word, and who is worthy of all glory, honour and praise.

nosferatu: a symphony of horror

i finally found a copy of this great 1922 film, which, until now, i had only ever seen quite late at night on sbs, and it always freaked me out.
in the cold light of day, unfortunately, the seams showed much more. the vision however remained ever present, which is what the 1979(?) remake draws upon.
it is interesting (for me at least) to look at the inbetween-war period of german cinema, the standouts being this, and Metropolis (1927). both remain groundbreaking, and their stories and devices are anything but simplistic.
i wonder whether the current spate of hollywood remakes will again return to these breathtaking masterpieces?

My Memory is Your Memory

I remember watching a special on memory years ago, the idea of virtual memories in particular.
Coming off things such as Johnny Mnemonic, Ghost in the Shell (Stand Alone Complex) and the 2 movies, the idea that a soul may not be innately tied to the body fascinates me.
Especially considering the oft quoted Jewish doctrine of the body and the soul being one, to what extent are we able to virtualise memory? To the extent where we have duplicated the soul?

This clip got me thinking about it, we were planning to do this with my rapacious facial hair, take a photo every day, watching the progress and regress.
It may be too late to copywrite the idea, but i would love to do it one day.
Anyway, watch the clip.:

• ahree lee: me