Archive for April 2013
“Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it”*…
Psychoanalyst and philosopher Slavoj Žižek has become potent public intellectual. Variously called “the Borat of philosophy,” “the Elvis of cultural theory,” and “the world’s hippest philosopher,” he’s published more than 50 books, countless articles, and starred in several documentaries. Indeed, there’s already a journal, The International Journal of Žižek Studies, devoted to his works.
As cultural theorists and critics go, Zižek is among the more accessible. Still, he brings out the impenetrable in his followers; to wit, a typical quote from a book entitled (apparently un-ironically) Žižek: A Guide for the Perplexed: “Žižek finds the place for Lacan in Hegel by seeing the Real as the correlate of the self-division and self-doubling within phenomena.”
Žižek himself is a little more plain-spoken, as readers can see in this Dutch documentary…
But it is as a film critic– indeed, a film fan– that (R)D invokes the Slavic Savant. Žižek writes often about movies, and hosted a the three-part documentary series, The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, directed by Sophie Fiennes (sister of Joseph and Ralph). The Pervert’s Guide places Zizek in original locations and replica sets of several classic films—David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, and Hitchcock’s Vertigo, to name just a few. Zizek’s scenes of commentary are edited with scenes from the films to give the impression that he is speaking from within the films themselves… To what ends? Well, readers can see for themselves in this clip on Vertigo:
See the whole of Part One here. And read more about The Pervert’s Guide at Open Culture.
* Marshall McLuhan
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As we move closer to the screen, we might spare a thought for Virginia Katherine McMath (whom we knew better by her stage name, Ginger Rogers); she died on this date in 1995. Rogers worked in vaudeville, then on Broadway, and made over 70 films; but she is surely best remembered for the nine RKO musicals she made with Fred Astaire between 1933 and 1939. Starting with Flying Down to Rio, and including Top Hat, Swing Time, and Shall We Dance, they revolutionized the Hollywood musical. Astaire was a grateful fan; in an interview with Raymond Rohauer, curator at the New York Gallery of Modern Art, he said, “Ginger was brilliantly effective. She made everything work for her. Actually she made things very fine for both of us and she deserves most of the credit for our success.”
Now let us praise…
In 1961, four young public school friends put together the first issue of Private Eye with typescript (created on a couple of old Selectrics), Letra-set, and cow-gum– the pre-Punk template for the Eye ever since. It was the sprouting of a thorn that has lodged firmly in the side of the British Establishment ever since… the birth of a British institution.
This new magazine chimed with the so-called satire boom, in which Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Alan Bennett and Jonathan Miller conquered the world with Beyond the Fringe, and producer Ned Sherrin made a star of David Frost (who Booker later described as a man with “..a peculiar ambition to be world-famous simply for the sake of being world-famous”) on the highly successful That Was The Week That Was—which proved so successful it was canceled after 2 series.
The Eye continued long after both these shows and the satire boom had run out of laughs, in part much aided by the backing of Peter Cook, who helped finance the magazine until his death in 1995.
What makes Private Eye essential is the ephemeral nature of its exceedingly good journalism. As Auberon Waugh once wrote (in the introduction to Another Voice—his essential collection of writing for The Spectator), “Timeless journalism is bad journalism”:
“The essence of journalism is that it should stimulate its readers for a moment, possibly open their minds to some alternative perception of events, and then be thrown away, with all its clever conundrums, its prophecies and comminations, in the great wastepaper basket of history.”
Read more of Private Eye‘s extraordinary story at Dangerous Minds. And watch this wonderful short documentary:
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As we express our gratitude for Stewart and Colbert, we might recall that it was on this date in 1982 that full-fledged member of the Hollywood nobility (daughter of Henry, two-time Oscar-winning actress, model, and anti-war activist) Jane Fonda released her first exercise tape.
Building on the success of her workout book, published the prior year, the tape helped Fonda popularize workouts for women, workouts in groups, workout videos, and indeed aerobics in general (a family of trends on which Richard Simmons, Judi “Jazzercise” Missett and many others rode). Fonda invested the proceeds of what became a fitness empire into the Campaign for Economic Democracy, an advocacy group founded by her then-husband Tom Hayden (of Chicago Eight renown). Fonda and Hayden divorced in 1989, and Fonda retired from the spotlight (if not, given her entanglement with Ted Turner, the gossip rags)… though, of course, she has returned to the movie screen in recent years.
Been there, done that…
The Associated Press reported in early February 2009 that American Jennifer Figge had just completed a 2,100-mile swim across the Atlantic. The story reported that Figge had begun at Cape Verde, in western Africa—on January 12. It took little time for sharp-eyed readers to flinch, do a double take and read that again: January 12 to early February. Not even 30 days. That would have been 80 miles daily—three miles per hour nonstop for a month—to complete the journey…
Seem impossible? It was. Read the full story– and eight other “stretches”– at Smithsonian‘s “Cheating Their Way to Fame: The Top 9 Adventure Travel Hoaxes.”
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As we burnish our travel tales, we might spare a thought for the man who told what is arguably the most amazing (albeit avowedly fictional) travel tale of all, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra; he died on this date in 1616 (though some scholars put it a day earlier)– the same day as Shakespeare died, and (most likely) Shakespeare’s birthday. As Somerset Maugham said,”casting my mind’s eye over the whole of fiction, the only absolutely original creation that I can think of is Don Quixote.”
Caveat discipulus…
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As we lick our pencils, we might send thoughtful birthday greetings to Immanuel Kant; he was born on this date in 1724. One of the central figures of modern philosophy, Kant is remembered primarily for his efforts to unite reason with experience (e.g., Critique of Pure Reason [Kritik der reinen Vernunft], 1781), and for his work on ethics (e.g., Metaphysics of Morals [Die Metaphysik der Sitten], 1797) and aesthetics (e.g., Critique of Judgment [Kritik der Urteilskraft], 1790). But he made important contributions to mathematics as well: Kant’s argument that mathematical truths are a form of synthetic a priori knowledge was cited by Einstein as an important early influence on his work.
There is … only a single categorical imperative and it is this: Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.
– Chapter 11, Metaphysics of Morals
Is it real or is it…?
Australian artist Jeremy Geddes creates oil paintings that are astonishingly– dangerously– counterintuitive, at the same time that they’re astoundingly photo-realistic. Geddes’ describes his process in this 2011 interview with Empty Kingdom.
[TotH to Laughing Squid]
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As we look away then back again, we might spare a thought for Jean-François Lyotard; he died on this date in 1998. A co-founder (with Derrida, Châtelet, and Deleuze) of the Collège International de Philosophie– the bastion of Postmodernism– Lyotard was a philosopher, sociologist, and literary theorist. As a champion of “the sublime”– in Lyotard’s rehabilitation of an ancient aesthetic concept, the pleasurable anxiety that one experiences when confronting wild and threatening sights– he would surely have approved of Geddes’ work.
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