a beautiful film

last night t & i went to see a beautiful film...well, beautiful because the scenery was beautiful. i'd gotten free passes to the motorcycle diaries, a movie based on the CHE's early travels through latin america...the travels that, supposedly, converted him from disafected bourgeois to revolutionary.

it really is a beautiful film...except it uses digital cameras...from what i could tell. it leaves a graininess in the picture, has troubles with long distance shots, and the color, on bright sunny shots is often washed-out. but i didn't really have a problem with that. digital technology has helped to create a new boom in latin american film. in the sixties, heady from the cuban revolution and the promise that this political revolution offered to artists, there was a boom in latin american film. often, in fact, these films followed what has been called an aesthetics of hunger: which is to say purposely sloppy editing, grainy films, and the like to create in the viewer a sense of discomfort...it was an attempt to remind first world viewers at art houses and film festivals that in latin american everything was done on a shoe-string budget and a wing and prayer. the use of digital technology, though it may not overtly mean that the director ascribes to such an aesthetic, does allow poorer nations to film. (though, this isn't necessarily a "poor flim" being a collaboration between the US, UK, Germany, Argentina)

but as i keep saying it's beautiful film...but it's beauty lies in the beauty of the south american landscape...and in the portrayal of youthful idealism. and that is one of its problems. you don't come away from the film better understanding the CHE. his myth remains intact. he was a pure soul. for the most part, he is utterly incapable of lying. (he does lie near the middle and is quite good, but soon after, he reverts to truth telling) he can't dance. he can't woo a woman...much unlike his traveling companion who is a profligate. he is even presented as almost virginal. (he may have gotten to homebase with his girlfriend, and it is she who calls things off with him breaking his heart.) at the moment in the film when they go visit the leper colony, he single handedly turns things around in the colony by treating the inferm as normal individual returning to them the dignity that the illness and the nuns had taken away from them. in fact, on his birthday, he decides to swim the amazon river (the nurses and doctors stayed on one side, the sick on the other) to spend the night with them. despite his asthma, despite it being at least a mile wide, despite the swift currents and the man-eating fish, he swims it and celebrates his birthday with the lepers. the young CHE is presented as such a beautiful person that there is no Ernesto Guevara there.

likewise, it is a film that tells the story of a young man coming face to face with bone-shattering poverty and callous, inhuman treatment of the poor by the rich. but it is such a beautiful film. and i still haven't figure out what they were trying to do with the beauty and the poverty. because at times it seems that they tried to make the poverty beautifulthey made it so by focusing on the individuals, the ir faces, their stories. and i still don't know what is being said by making poverty into an aesthetically pleasing event...even if it is through the portrayal of beautiful, exotic people being beaten down by the system.

posted by Jeremy at 10:47 PM

stew

At the sound of the tone, I will have been awake for 19 hours and 41 minutes. TONE!

Frankly, I have no good excuse to be awake at this hour. Since Labor Day kl & I wake every weekday at 5.00 and grind coffee, which we drink as we fold newspapers for an hour. About 6.20, when it's just light enough to see the Old Capitol dome from our porch, we hit the sidewalks and deliver Routes 11 and 14 of The Daily Iowan to the people who, this very minute, are gaily yelling at each other as they piss their overworked livers onto the tires of our car.

The only reason I'm still up is because I'm pissed. Or, rather, because I was pissed. Mildly unsettled, how about? Why is that Butters is the only one who readily admits to plans to destroy the world? Sure, he never does more than switch the soup bowls at Bennigan's, but he at least claims immediate responsibility for it. That's more than the gay man at right would ever do, even though he's been caught red-handed trying to steal Republican fashion. I mean, really! Carson would never take over the world in buttoned-down plaid.

But I suppose some historians might think the real revolution was in the engagement ring. For such historianswell, for that historianthough, the point is less in the band than it is in the banned: it's economics that censors history. Which is true enough if you compare the salary of a great historian (either the reviewer and the reviewed) with that of even a worse-than-average businessman.

But what does it all mean? That, in the end, is what has me pissed. I don't know. All I can do is sing Tears for Fears until dawn:

I can't stand this indecision
Married with a lack of vision
Everybody wants to rule the world
Say that you'll never never never need it
One headline why believe it?
Everybody wants to rule the world

But I cannot sing too loud: I don't want to insense kl. But it's sense that is the matter: Tears makes even less sense to me now than it did 1985.

So I've decided that the next sermon I preach will be on the poor woman whom Jesus applauds for having given everything she had, though she only gave a penny. It will be only vaguely related to politics, but I will preach it before election day because October is the best time: election exhaustion will make it funny. The whole premise will be to suppose Jesus had rabid press corps to report what he says as well as a blogosphere to both lionize and demonize his every move. It'll be just like The Last Temptation of Christ when the lion and the snake walk out of the desert during Jesus's Indian ritual. When Jesus says, "Look at this woman!" reports will shoot across the world claiming, "That woman never deserved even to have that penny: she works for a rich guy and doesn't pay taxes!" "She was hired by Peter to pretend she was poor!" "Don't you have any compassion or sympathy for the working class?" And other such fatuousness. All of it will be, of course, to work around meaningfully to this:

"To you I will give their glory and all this authority; for it has been given over to me, and I give it to anyone I please. If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours."

Jesus answered him, "It is written,
'Worship the Lord your God,
and serve only him.'"

And somehow, with all of that said, I know it'll all become mercifully clear.

posted by Greg at 1:29 AM

i've made my bed...

life as a professor, at the moment, is rather hectic. i think i may have already mentioned this. but i chose this little school of pomona pass u. and so here i am.


instead

j's guide to homebuying:

1it may be too late, you may have bought one...but don't.

once you buy a house, you've gotta fix the toilet, you've gotta cut the lawn, you've got to plane the door if it's sticking. in an apartment you can get the owner to do this.

2if you just gotta buy a house, try to get the people to do as much of the minor repairs as possible, unless it's new, of course. granted, the rule of thumb is that the seller should take care of any repair that is structural or any safety concern.

this is something you work out in the bargaining phase.

3i think we might have had 3 rounds of price adjustments. our agent asked us what our true price was and went 10k lower than that. the price we paid was about 5k lower than the listed price, and they paid all closing costs, which would've been about 5k on our part. closing costs, though, vary from state to state.

4be prepared to start worrying about lawns and keeping up in the rat-race of the well-maintained yard. it could be that we have a magnolia that drops its leaves all the #^%$%^$ time, but you realize once you have a front lawn that middle class morality has more to do with how your yard looks than whether or not your daughter turns out to be a tramp and your son and drug-dealing pimp.

5be prepared to become a republican...or at least that is what a number of friends of mine congratulated me on..."oh, now that you're a homeowner you'll be a republican soon." but i say, don't let this "ownership society crap" dupe you. so you might not be living the hippie-commie ideal of the property-less society, but owning a home doesn't mean you can't choose the color you paint it...trust me, we live around some purple beauts.

6unless you are a gardner, get perennials and forget about them. unless you are a gardner, there's absolutely no need to worry with planting and unplanting and all that jazz.

for the moment, that exhausts my advice list.

posted by Jeremy at 11:02 PM

A third poem, a third day

Get in the zone:
Auto Zone!

If you want it,
and you need it,
Just ask us,
and we'll get it.

Get in the zone:
Auto Zone!

posted by Greg at 7:53 PM

another poem for another day

Reunion (from T. Crunk, Living in the Ressurection)

What we mistook for flight
was only the long struggle
to surface, and we arrive
at a place familiar as a socket ¯
sitting by a dirt road, watching wind
bristle the raw corn stubble,

discussing gravity and how,
with the invention of dust,
things began to pick up speed,
how October lays bare
the age of the world, how we
may yet to find the word we seek,

which may be a labyrinth
with nothing at the center,
or a snowy egret that will rise
above the houses and the wires,
or which may again be the root
that, pulled up, lies twisting in our hands…

posted by Jeremy at 1:29 PM

a poem for today

The Letter (from R.S. Thomas, Mass for Hard Times)

I look up from my book,
from the unreality of language,
and stare at the sea’s surface
that says nothing and means it.

This morning there came this letter
from the heart’s stranger, promising
to pray for me. What does that
mean? I, who am a man of prayer,

ask and am silent. Would he
make me insolvent? Strip me
of initiatives in order to repay
trust? Must I refrain from walking

this same sea, lest sinking
I should deride him? Operate
m vehicle at no speed
to attribute to him the safety

in which I arrive? I think his god
is not my god, or he would not
ask for such things. I admit
he has driven me to my knees

but with my eyes open so that,
by long looking over concealed
fathoms, I gaze myself into accepting
that to pray true is to say nothing.

posted by Jeremy at 7:05 PM

i'm a blogger...but not one of those

everybody's been talking about the bloggers lately. and how the bloggers are keepin' everybody straight. and how the bloggers are maybe, just maybe, even more demanding than corporate news when it comes to sources and facts and the like.

bill moyers asked, and this off the topic only slightly, since he quickly began asking about bloggers, why cbs went with the sketchy documents when the testimony of the ben barnes would've sufficed...but this off topic. i am not one of those kind of bloggers.

no, i'm a i had eggs for breakfast kind of blogger.

life since getting the phid has been hectic...there have been maybe 2 weekends where we haven't had visitors or gone somewhere. this weekend we've got t's step-aunt whose in town for a scrabble tourny.

i didn't expect assistant professoring to be as hectic as the last few months of grad school, but it is. i'm back to keeping very late nights as i try to read and get my conference papers ready. and stay ahead of my students.

at the moment, we are in the market for a car. but, everything is either too large or too small or too expensive. we're not minivaners and we are morally, yes morally opposed to suburban assault vehicles. and i have thought this since well before the jesus ads.

yes i know what Pat Robertson thinks: "I think the concept of linking Jesus to an anti-SUV campaign borders on blasphemy, and I regard it as a joke," the Rev. Pat Robertson of the Christian Broadcasting Network said, in a statement.

but frankly, i think that Rev. Robertson verges on blasphemy almost any time he opens his mouth.

but, i won't bore you with quotes. postive atheism has compiled a long list of "scarry" quotes some are truly scarry, some are only scarry to atheists, but most are just really stupid

and you're right, they aren't blasphemous...they're something else...just like his dealings with dictators in third world countries isnt' blasphemous, they're something else.

anyway, we looked at a scion...i like them. very roomy. this way, with our bug we could have the boxiest and the roundest cars on the road.

ohhh, so many decisions to make as one prepares for the arrival of a child.

posted by Jeremy at 2:08 PM

Got a few hours?

So I'm teaching The Kingdom of Matthias this week, and I'm struck again at what a brilliant little book it is. Narratively tight, it's the story of a misogynist Prophet in 1830s New York whose Kingdom fell due to loose sex (Ann Folger exclaimed of the Prophet, "he alone could 'penetrate to the Sanctum Sanctorum'" (128)certainly moreso than her husband could, although she didn't stop letting him try!), jealousy, and an accusation of murder. You can read it entire in a few hours. Every one is worthwhile.

posted by Greg at 2:47 PM

Something worthwhile

Tired of seeing the mantislike mug of James Carville everywhere you look? Annoyed at the the they say/we say/I say/he says back-and-forth of this ugliest of campaign season? It won't get any better. Just like the Swift Boat Veterans for "Truth" got so much more publicity than the "truth" of their allegations deserved, it looks like Kitty Kelley (of unauthorized biography fame) is on the horizon with The Family, a probably salacious expose of the Bush family. I suspect it won't matter one way or the other whether there's any truth to what she has written: Zeitgeist says, sensationalism and bravado sells.

kl tells me she's burned out by the season already. I'm getting there. But I'm still drawn to it, dog to vomit-like. Still, every once in a while I discover small pockets of sanity. I haven't looked very deeply yet, but The Columbia Journalism Review's campaigndesk.org seems to be one of pockets.

posted by Greg at 9:26 AM

from An American Childhood

The adult members of society adverted to the Bible unreasonably often. What arcana! Why did they spread this scandalous document before our eyes? If they had read it, I thought, they would have hid it. They didn't recognize the vivid danger that we would, through repeated exposure, catch a case of its wild opposition to their world. Instead they bade us study great chunks of it, and think about those chunks, and commit them to memory, and ignore them. By dipping us children in the Bible so often, they hoped, I think, to give our lives a serious tint, and to provide us with quaintly magnificent snatches of prayer to produce as charms while, say, being mugged for our cash or jewels. (134)

(who else but A. D.?)

posted by Greg at 9:01 AM

nerd-creativity

I just changed the "received new mail" sound file on my office computer. now, every time i get an email message, my computer plays audio of the President saying "I'm George W. Bush, and I approved this message."

I think of it as my homage to the Patriot Act.

posted by Chris at 3:46 PM

If Jeremy is the man

Instead of writing assignments for my class, I've been reading RNC coverage all morning. Here's how I know that the phrase "mainstream media," in popular usage, is abstract and meaningless: Because Joe Scarborough deploys it to complain about everybody else's coverage.

Oh to be sponsored by Microsoft and NBC!

posted by Greg at 11:16 AM

Misplaced Patriotism

I sought, but I did not succeed in finding, an image of Bill the Cat wearing American-flag patterned thong underwear, because I wanted to use it as a visual counterpoint to the following text, which I found this evening while I was thumbing through old notebooks:

As of April 1st 2002 We Will No longer Accept checks. We are sorry for any inconvenience. Thank you for your patriotism. If you have any questions please see a manager. Thank you the management staff.

• Sign on the door of Chili's Bar & Grill, Coralville, IA. 30 Mar. 2002

(By the way, Berkeley Breathed's got a new strip on his site...)

posted by Greg at 1:15 AM