mills

Through the absurd kindness of super-duo Chris and Alexi, Abby and I went to the Telluride Film Festival this weekend. It was a purely wonderful experience, entirely happy and thrilling and engaging, and Chris’ synopsis -as we all lamented our return to ordinary life- will be the coda:

On a thanatotic, bureaucratically burdened morning like today’s, memories of Alaskan Ale, Millsner’s challenges, gigantic-breasted cartoon women, reluctant maturation (!), cookies on the sidewalk, cracking up on multiple gondola rides, arguing about grossly misleading jazz documentaries, women seducing boat captains in highly unusual silk pajama pants, rain-soaked hot-tubs, pee-soaked shirts, unadulterated cranberry juice, full-bore gaffling on cycling and various nuts (sorry Alexi, sorry Abby!), jeeps with snorkels, orca-hating young Louisiana men, jort-wearing cinephiles, basketball trees and eagles in drag, bring to bear to the full power of nostalgia, the sense of pain and lost homeland already made a dolorous pleasure.

There’s nothing for it but to do it again. Hopefully it won’t be too long before Abby and I again see the fittest brainiacs since intellectualism lost its interest in physical vitality (a date which I’ll leave to others to fix).

If possible, I’ll be contributing some reviews -despite my pitifully poor grasp of cinema- to Filmosophy. I’ve already sent in some thoughts on Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, and may add my inexpert views of Das weiße Band, Breaking Point, An Education, or Vincere.

The photos are here; I hope some of them are interesting to you, and I’ll post a few I liked later.

Last night, Zachary Godshall -with whom I’m acquainted through Will and my doppelganger- screened for three of us his new documentary, God’s Architects. It was astonishing and extremely moving; if you care at all about art, obsession, and the expressions of love, devotion, hope, and madness humans undertake, you’ll love it.

The film is an immersion in five subjects: a blissful squatter in the California desert who is building “God is Love” mountain; a muscular Arkansas Mason erecting a protective memorial castle for his deceased daughter; a 92-year old minister in Vicksburg who preached on a converted bus and assembled a pink-and-red sculpture garden to attract converts; a Tennessean in mourning for his brother who created a castle next to the houses he built from spare lumber; and an absent and ghostly south Louisiana man, whose bizarre sculptural park is now unintelligible in its iconography.

I assume it is bland and banal to mention Errol Morris in discussing a documentary, but although Godshall’s film is in no way derivative in technique or concept to an Errol Morris movie, it shares something: a movingly non-judgmental evenness, a compassionate capacity to find humor and profundity in men who might otherwise be viewed as loons.

As a curation of astounding folk art -uninstructed architecture and strange decorations- the film is wonderful. But as an exploration of how people -some mad, some made miserable by tragedy- strike out to build structures of meaning and connect them haphazardly with religion, with art, with folk tales, the film is one of the most moving I’ve seen.

He’s still finishing it, and the next screening will be at LSU on October 28th. I hope that, should you be interested, you can see it some day soon. In the meantime, there is a MySpace page for it.

(Like all great movies, this one resists encapsulation in a trailer).

Sterling Powers:

“The private life is dead…” from Doctor Zhivago

I have been trying to explain for some time to Bunnynico and others why it is, precisely, that I loathe everything political; many of the reasons are immediately evident: no matter whom you like, after a few cycles of slip-up and fake indignation, everything is a talking point and all sides are “playing the game,” for example.

But it’s not simply disgust with the practice of politics that bothers me; nothing could be more naive than hoping for a politics without points-scoring and petty posturing. In a democracy, where popularity is power, all the worst elements of social interaction and media refraction are inevitable, for Obama as much as for, say, Nixon (however better the former may be than the latter).

No, what I hate about politics is that it is antithetical to the personal: to the local arena of human compassion and action that has actual transformative power. In massing humans, politics reduces their humanity and transforms them into expressions of ideologies and systems. It takes what is real and makes it facile, reductive, and subordinate.

Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, in talking about Hegel, touched on this rather well: the articulation of systems -of class relations, power dynamics, historical dialectics, political theologies- is inevitably false, as it obfuscates the only reality: that of the human. It is a falsity of scale, of scope, and of specificity.

I love this scene in Doctor Zhivago, because the Communists were right within their framework of analysis, as are all intellectuals, from Marxists to Neocons: the personal is not important when we discuss politics, so forget about poetry and casualties. For the sake of victory in class struggle, some innocents must die, they say; for the sake of security against Islamofascism, some civilians must be incinerated accidentally, others add.

You have no doubt heard of the question posed to Republicans: “Whom would Jesus bomb?” I like this question, though -as I note often- I am not religious. I also like this question: “Do you wish George Bush had been assassinated before assuming office?”

If you do, know that you -as they- believe that some political platforms justify violence, perhaps even the platform of non-violence, and thus are in my mind distinguishable from those you oppose only in degree, not in kind. But what about Hitler, you might ask? Do you oppose his assassination, too?

I do not deny that some wars are just and some are not, and that perhaps sometimes ends justify means; but isn’t the entire problem of humanity and power a problem of ends and means?  Isn’t ethical idealism preferable to what we wreak when we rule?

I am aware that in the politics of the United States, rarely are deaths the consequence of elections (at least domestically). But the principle that unites all political movements -that there are right ideas, and that those who oppose them are imbeciles and ought to be killed, disenfranchised, or at least shouted down- is a principle to which there are few rebuttals.

I do not like the world of intellectuals or the world of power. I like the world of the personal, the individual. I like the small world. My favorite bumper sticker: “Be the change you want to see in the world.” If you mourn the dearth of compassion in our society, be compassionate and inspire by example. If you hate injustice, be just in all your ways.

I admit: this is a sentimental and perhaps incoherent argument. Nevertheless, the one truth to which I subscribe is that pronounced by Errol Morris: “Error is the central feature of human existence.” The accumulation of power for the enactment of “correct” political ideas terrifies and upsets me because I don’t believe humans are capable of more than error, and the best I can say about one political party or another is that fewer will die by their mistakes.

I believe this to be true of Obama, which is why I favor his election; but it is hardly enthusing for me, and I would much rather see scores of articles every day about personal acts of decency than about how stupid and awful Republicans are.

Moreover, I believe that only though ethically decent behavior on the individual level does society improve; in the end, I think, politics is -from a moral perspective- a distraction, more often about identity-association than about actual compassion.

I apologize if this offends anyone, sincerely; after all, we’re all just doing what we think best.

KB brought me Jesus Camp last night, and watching it was excruciating, as it provokes a wide range of emotions and concerns. A documentary about an evangelical children’s bible camp, the film presents scenes which will likely defy the credulity of most viewers not familiar with this quite dramatic form of religiosity.

Although I found much of its primary material quite affecting and informative, subsequent reading alerted me to some unfortunate instances of bias. For example, the above clip (itself the work of a fan; the words “Brain Washing” do not appear in the movie) shows a sequence in which a woman says, “There are two kinds of people in the world: those who love Jesus and those who don’t,” and the moment is presented as an example of extremism; however, she continued, though it was edited out, by saying “…and they are both worthy of dignity and respect, by virtue of the fact that Jesus died for them.” (See Wikipedia for more).

Such lapses are regrettable, but not fatal; most of the movie consists of long sermons and astounding displays of fervor from the very young, and no selecting or editing is performed (or needed); such scenes speak for themselves. I recommend the film almost as a form of anthropology: this is a culture as radically ideological and fanatical as any in the world, but they are your fellow-citizens and consumers.

(Naturally, many of the best scenes aren’t included, such as when a boy of perhaps nine tearfully confesses that sometimes he has trouble believing in bible stories and his peers look at him with the searing hatred and contempt of the pure. And then there is Rachel).