Merry Christmas!
Noah wishes you all a very jolly time with your family and friends! As you can see, this guy loves to party!
farmhouse light
One farmhouse light
A star in a sea of snow
Blue, bright, solitary
Hours after sundown twilight
Planning, marking, making
Only a holiday approaches
A year too late I pause
A year in waiting for
The whole story to uncurl
Unearths a new fresh baby
Sleeping in the backseat
Entering the weary world
In crimson blood and water
One unlooked child
Grasping at his mother’s hair
Stretching, crying, sighing
Speaking out loud a secret
"Revive, restore, refresh"
Fashion, flexing, upwards, backwards
Fullness once again restored
And lastly fulfilled
In the sigh of a babe
One first breath
And last sigh accomplish
Blue, warm, bright
american idol and a culture of overpraise
This morning I was listening to The Current on CBC radio. They were speaking about the cultural phenomena of standing ovations. Theater critics discussed the fact that standing ovations are becoming very commonplace, rather than being saved for only extraordinary performances.
According to the guests, unmertted standing ovations may be on the rise for numerous reasons - for an audience to signify the end of the production, for the audience itself to participate in the production, for the audience to rationalize the time and money spent to see a performance, or a significant decline in performance standards and audience awareness... But in the end the experts came to the conclusion that a large part of the increase in standing ovations is due to a culture of "overpraise".
We are a people who are afraid to criticize. Part of it perhaps is our post-modernism. We are unsure of the difference between exceptional and acceptable. Because of this we cannot simply say that something is good or bad - we have to back it up... and not only with "I guess that's just my opinion".
And this is hard.
It makes me think of American Idol where clearly untalented people are under the delusion that they are the "next Mariah Carey" - and then they are so shocked with Simon Cowell's honest and un-tact criticism. They respond with tears or belligerence. "That's just your opinion! I believe I can do it - it's been my dream and you have no right to stomp on it." It's interesting that a sense of entitlement goes beyond all reason.
In the words of one expert guest: "Who loved these people into delusion?"
I guess everyone wants to be special, nobody wants to be average. But the truth is the vast majority of us are average. But that's okay. Thank goodness we don't have to judge our worth as human beings by how talented we are.
By dishonestly overpraising everyone's abilities, it takes away from the things that are truly remarkable - both in arts and culture, but also on a personal level. If we aren't able to be honest about our strengths and weaknesses, where is our basis for accountability, transparency and vulnerability?
In a recent article in Macleans Sarmishta Subramanian gives an alternative to audiences when witness to a truly extraordinary performance:
The greatest compliment Norris saw paid to a musician was in Winnipeg, after Bramwell Tovey, now with the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, conducted a piece by Delius. "When it ended, very softly, very beautifully," he recalls, "there was absolute silence from the audience. Bramwell laid down his baton and there was still complete silence. And Bramwell left the stage, and there was still silence, and the extra players for the next piece came on, and still this hush was maintained -- until Bramwell appeared again, and then the house fell in." Nobody was standing. It wasn't necessary.
Labels: culture
reviews and recommends
Apparently this blog advertizes movie and book reviews, so this post is devoted to some long coming critiques and a few Christmas favorites...
Recent books...
The New Religious Humanists; a Reader Gregory Wolfe, ed.
This book is a collection of essays by prominent Christian and Jewish authors. It is rather unfortunately titled which tends to give the wrong impression of what the book is actually about. The essays are concentrated on promoting cultural dialogue in the faith community. They tackle a variety of issues from abortion to poetry. I found some of the essays extremely relevant and thought provoking. 3.5 out of 5 stars.
Collapse Jared Diamond
This book follows the story of a handful of societies and how they became successful or how they eventually failed. Diamond's background is in ecology and geography and he basically critiques these societies from that viewpoint. I found this a bit troubling, especially in his exploration of the Rwandan genocide. Still, approaching history this way is pretty interesting. 3.5 out of 5 stars.
My favorite Christmas movies...
1. A Muppet Christmas Carol: Kermit the Frog and Micheal Cane - what could be better?
2. A Christmas Story: CBC usually shows this classic tale of a boy and his bb gun. The dad is so hilarious in this movie!
3. National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation: Paul had to literally force me to watch this one but it was soooo worth it. A Christmas classic for sure.
Now I tried to think of a "serious" Christmas movie that I liked, but I really couldn't think of one. Nor could I think of a good Christmas movie that was actually about Christ (other than the stop motion movie "The Little Drummer Boy", but that one was really kinda creepy!)... If any of you out there know of one, please tell me!
imagination is dead
Rene Magritte: a truly post-modern artist
A few months ago I caught the tail end of a CBC program discussing faith and philosophy. The guest speaker was Boston College professor of philosophy, Richard Kearney. I was interested in the first part of the program so I looked it up on CBC's website and found out that Kearney has written exensively on Aesthetics. I'm always interested in that so I purchased a four dollar copy of The Wake of Imagination. Its kind of a text book so I haven't read it cover to cover, but I've jumped around in it and I found some really interesting ideas about post-modern culture.
Post-modern culture (or the post-modern imagination) is primarily concerned with the deconstruction of narratives. This has particular conclusions when it comes to language:
"Language, as an open-ended play of signifiers, is no longer thought to refer to some 'real' meaning external to language (i.e. some 'transcendental signified' called truth or human subjectivity). Deprived of the concept of origin, the concept of imagination itself collapses. For imagination always presupposed the idea of origination: the derivation of our images from some original presence. And this position obtained regardless of whether the model of origination was situated outside of man (as in the biblical God of creation or the Platonic Ideas) or inside of man (as in the model of a productive consciousness promoted by modern idealism and existentialism)."
Kearney explains the pre-modern, modern, and post-modern imaginations in terms of light and reflection. Pre-modern imagination is expressed through the metaphor of a mirror - it reflects some kind of origin. Modern imagination is compared to a lamp - the light resonates from self. Post- modern imagination is compared to to mirrors facing one another "where the image of self dissolves into self-parody".
In the case of the visual arts (I think of photography and printmaking - favorites of the post-modernist) the "image has more dignity than the original" and you can use, shape, distort, the image anyway you like in order to say whatever you want. You can see this in any genre of post-modern culture: from tabloids to literature. John Berger put his finger on this in Ways of Seeing.
So how does one confront the so-called death of imagination? I need to read on, but Kearney alludes to a possible answer: "Behind the mask there is a face". An ethical imagination must be based on an origin.
Labels: aesthetics, faith
