Sunday, December 31, 2006
A New Harvest
A champion of the season;
I cross my fingers for the coming new year.
I hold my head high.
I blow off the dust of last year good-bye.
The band plays its tune on stage
As I gaze across the floor at the dancers.
Drunk and smiling sober and crying.
The New Year crosses over.
How do we sing?
How do we live?
To our new song we write
Each year that makes us fight.
How long does this last?
How powerful is the blast?
How can I better myself?
How can I retain my health?
So many things come through my mind.
A new year.
A new day.
A new life.
A new world.
We all harvest our reality.
We are all captains of our own
Destiny.
Wednesday, December 27, 2006
A blind man told me.
It’s a blind man that told me.
He told me he was going to rob a bank.
Here I am sittin on bench in Venice beach, California.
Trodden and dirty this blind man about forty walks up to me. As if he could really see. As if for some reason a rope was leading him to me.
Lucky me.
He sat next to me. More like plopped down.
He’s a thin white man.
Short grey hair.
Long beard. Sunglasses covering his eyes.
Lines of age criss crossing his face like a road map of life.
“Mind if I sit here”
His voice was cracking.
I looked up from my notebook and said.
“No go ahead.”
I noticed he was blind by his cane.
A long white cane with two red marks at the end.
The cane let off a series of tones telling the man information on distance.
I moved over a bit to give him some room.
“I’m gonna do it”
I looked up to him again.
“Excuse me.” I answer carefully.
“I’m gonna do it.” He drawls then coughs.
“Do what?”
I ask.
“I’m gonna rob that cocksuckin bank.”
Humm..I almost let out a small chuckle.
But I could tell this blind stranger was serious.
“Why would you do that…?”
“Why…?”
“Huh…To get cash…”
“Right..” I felt a bit stupid for asking that question.
“Well…that’s not a good idea…”
“Who asked you?”
I went back to my notebook not answering the man.
“You know my wife died.”
I tried to pretend I didn’t hear him.
“I’m sorry to hear that”
“She’s buried on a hill.”
“Is she?”
Lots of flowers and a huge oak tree shade her grave.
Some skate boarders zoom by.
A blonde with a thong bikini rolls by on some blades.
“I used to be an actor.” He says.
“Really?”
“Oh yeah. That was before when I could see.”
“So sorry.”
“Sorry for what.” He barks at me.
“Never mind.”
I get back to my reading.
“Never mind what?” He pushes.
“Look. I’m trying to write here…I mean all you’ve done is act rude…”
“Have I?”
“Yeah..”
“Sorry bout that.”
“You know my wife died.”
“So you said…I’m sorry.”
“I’m 56 years old. I used to be an actor.”
“I have a son somewhere.”
“Really…”
“Have I seen you in anything?”
“What?”
“TV movies. Would I have seen you in anything?”
“Maybe. You ever watch Adam 12.”
“The cop show from the seventies?”
“Yeah that’s the one.”
“I was a suspect in that and a few other cop shows.”
“Great…”
“It was work.”
“And now…look at me.”.
“You know there are lots of blind people who live normal lives…”
“Are you preaching to me?”
“No I’m just…”
“I was on Broadway.”
“So are you going to look for your son?”
“Yep. I have a lot of catchin up to do. Thirty years worth.” He hangs his head down.
“I walked out.” He looks up.
“Did you?”
“We lived in a trailer at the time.”
I looked closer at the strangers face.
His eyes. His jaw line. His hands.
I put my book down.
“My father walked out on my family when I was young.” I say.
My stomach began to turn.
“My wife died. I remember the first time I saw her. She was so beautiful…she was so beautiful that grey skies would clear up and turn into sunny days.”
“Sounds like a movie.” I smile.
“Where was this trailer park?”
“Ohhh it was around Long Beach.” He looks away.
I stood up.
It was as if I was slapped.
How could this be happening?
“Okay…stop the shit who are you?”
“Just a guy.”
“Bullshit!”
“How…”
I look around almost expecting some kind of hidden TV show camera to come popping out.
“Are you really blind?”
“Yep.”
“Who are you?”
“Who did you think I am?”
“I don’t know. Some crazy guy.”
“Are you?” I stop myself.
Some things in life you can’t explain.
Chance meetings.
A bird shitting on you.
Being hit by lighting.
I guess some things happen for a reason.
If you believe in that kind of stuff.
Was this man standing in front of me my father?
He told me that he had been coming to this bench the same time for four years. Telling his story over and over.
He told his tale to anyone.
Anyone who would listen.
He said he was going to do it until one day he would find his son.
One day he would find his son and try and mend all the heartache he caused.
In his mind he thought that finding his son would somehow fill a void.
A very dark void in himself.
He thought that reason would come back to his life.
He knew what a monster he was when his son was a boy.
He knew the abuse he caused probably left an emotional scar on his son.
He knew that in those days when he drank he forgot who he was.
He forgot everything.
Until one day he forgot the one thing that was dearest to his heart.
His family.
He refused the love and blocked out the pain he caused.
And instead. He Ran.
He ran to forget his past.
To forget his life.
To forget who he was.
He went to Mexico.
He met a woman and married her.
They went to Texas.
Only this time his new wife became very ill and died.
After her death he became ill and started to lose his sight.
He was alone. Alone with himself.
He decided to find his son.
He contacted family who all thought he was dead.
They told him his son lived by the ocean in California.
That he was happy and had his own family.
They told him that he never talked about his father.
And that to him his father was dead.
That was four years ago.
From then on he came to this bench everyday.
And as crazy as it sounds.
Everyday he told his stories in hopes to find his son.
Hoping to one day make that connection.
Perhaps on this day.
He found him.
Copywrite@danglinginthetournefortia2006
Thursday, December 21, 2006
The Anchor
I'm just a borrowed anchor rusted and rotting in this tin pan ally of a life.
I’m walkin up that hill.
I’m walkin up that reason.
I’m playin the dice.
I’m makin a fence.
Doing my goddamn.
Livin my days looking over broken bottles scattered and broken on the floor.
I’m just a borrowed anchor rusted and rotting in this tin pan ally of a life.
What do they say as you cross the floor.
As you dance through the crowded bar.
Same faces wear the same looks as a week ago.
Faces of desperate silent rage.
They smile and say “Hiya doin Slim”
“Doin Fine” I say in my inebriated gaze.
Every look telling a story of ripped up hearts and tarnished dreams.
I exit the bar.
I take a deep breath.
Morning.
The cold snappy snap of the winter air flowing down my rusted air pipes.
A new day.
A new day.
Got to head over to the mall and be Santa for the day.
Thursday, December 14, 2006
You Should check out "SHOULD"
Re-releases of fairly innovative, yet somewhat obscure bands are somewhat of a two-sided coin. On one hand, you get to hear some great music by a group that you probably wouldn't have heard before (which is the case of this release), but at the same time, in the years that have passed since the original pressing, chances are that the innovative qualities the band held in the first place have been repeated scores of times by others. Granted, it doesn't diminish the quality of vision of the first release, but it inadvertantly takes some of the excitement out of hearing it.
Originally released as an 7 track EP clear back in 1995, A Folding Sieve is a nice example of the early shoegazer scene with flourishes of other styles. Expanded to double the songs and well over twice the amount of music as the original, this re-release offers a good batch of extra material, which compliments the older tracks nicely and helps to fill out the edges a great deal.
The album begins with the tracks from the original EP, and the first of them is a twinkling ambient piece called "Rolling." Mixing piano with some almost disconcerting noise samples, it drones along while vocalist Tanya Maus adds some haunting vocals. "Breathe Salt" moves into more familiar territory, as the group lays in a round of nicely feedbacked guitars while the two part harmony vocals of Maus and Marc Ostermeier combine in a way that recalls those of Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker of Low. It's one of the best tracks on the release for the duo and mixes a touch of My Bloody Valentine with early 4AD work by Lush.
They continue with a similar sound on the next couple tracks before dropping off into dark territory on the dark, rhythm and drone of "Resonate." With vocals that fall into a cold baritone range, the track sounds like something that could have come off a Projekt release. Arriving after the tracks of the EP are two tracks from a 1997 7" release, which tread the same sort of lo-fi feedback-drenched slowcore/shoegaze feel of the beginning of the disc. Some of the newest tracks find the group working into a slightly more pop feel, with upped tempos, while still holding onto their core sounds.
As mentioned in the first paragraph, one of the pitfalls of re-releasing an album 7 years later is that many groups have done things similar. Taking the easy route in my review, I even fell prey to referring to other bands in comparison of Should's sound. While one of their most recent songs is also their best (a cover of 18th Dye's "Merger"), I'm not even sure if the group is still together (their last true release came out in 1998). Some very good moments from the group, and if you're into some of the groups mentioned above, you'll probably find lots to enjoy.
You can download this band at www.emusic.com. Then do a search for the band.
Enjoy.
Friday, December 08, 2006
Trajectories of Decay: An Interview with Bill Morrison by Maximilian Le Cain and Barry Ronan
Having coming out of film school in the later half of the nineties my background was mostly experimental. Filmmakers like Stan Brakage, Maya Deren, Bill Morrison and Chris Marker were the people that fueled my passion for filmmaking. Being able to be abstract and still be powerful was very attractive to me. And that brings me to filmmaker Bill Morrison whose work contains all those traits and passion that inspired me as a an eager film student.
The following is an interview with Bill Morrison.
Over the past fifteen years, Bill Morrison has created a remarkable series of found-footage films that highlight the ravages of time and decay on the filmed image. These are as much celebrations of the sometimes-frightening beauty of decomposing film as laments for vanishing relics of cinema’s origin. Although not drawing exclusively from early cinema, Morrison specialises in this originary epoch of movie history. On the material level, he appreciates the paradoxical fact that nitrate simultaneously offers what he considers the most perfect film image and is also notoriously unstable. Beyond this, he sees the invention of film as the only precisely locatable birth of an art form, one whose inception is not lost in the mists of time but is more or less contemporary with the emergence of modern man. From the decaying body of film, he extrapolates an analogy for the fate of the human mind and body.
As an introduction to his films, he explains:
The frame pauses briefly before the projector’s lamp, and then moves on. Our lives are accumulations of ephemeral images and moments that our consciousness constructs into a reality. No sooner have we grasped the present, it is relegated to the past, where it only exists in the subjective history of each individual. The images can be thought of as desires or memories: actions that take place in the mind. The film stock can be thought of as the body, that which enables these events to be seen. Like our own bodies, this celluloid is a fragile and ephemeral medium that can deteriorate in countless ways.
This statement appeared in the catalogue of the 2006 Cork Film Festival, which held a three-programme retrospective of Morrison’s work. This selection traces his career from early pieces like Footprints (1992) and Photo Op (1992), which first appeared as part of stage productions, through the semi-documentary, The Film of Her (1996), and the reconfigured narrative, The Mesmerist (2003), to the more detachedly contemplative recent works, Who By Water (2006) and The Highwater Trilogy (2006), and the ‘city symphony’, Gotham (2005). Moving away from silent-era material, he also uses more recent home-movie found-footage in Porch (2005), newly shot images in East River (2003), and has made a very mysterious short narrative, Ghost Trip (2000), shot under the influence of Dead Man (Jim Jarmusch, 1995).
Whilst several of his films are masterpieces – The Death Train (1993), Trinity (2000), The Mesmerist – two stand out in particular as the highpoints of his endeavours to date. These are the feature-length Decasia (2002), the apocalyptic culmination of his nihilistic view of man’s place in history, and the contrastingly ecstatic Light is Calling (2004), in which bodies and movements dissolve in swirling waves of golden light, the film’s decay radiating as a glorious self-immolation.
An important element of Morrison’s filmmaking is its collaborative aspect. He continues to work with Ridge Theater and has had his films screened in installation, concert and other performance contexts. As he emphasises, sound accounts for at least fifty percent of his work’s impact. The contribution of composers, such as Michael Gordon (Decasia, Light is Calling, City Walk (2003), Who By Water) or Bill Frisell (The Film of Her, The Mesmerist) and sound designers like Michael Montes (Trinity, Ghost Trip) or Jim Farmer (Footprints, The Death Train), is crucially important to his cinema.
We met with Bill Morrison when he was in Cork to present his work at the October 2006 Film Festival retrospective.
* * *
MAXIMILIAN LE CAIN and BARRY RONAN: Your background is in painting. How did you come to work in film?
BILL MORRISON: I was taught by the great animator, Robert Breer, who was a painter-turned-animator. I was a painter in art school, interested in how painting could command attention over a period of time. You could stare at a really great painting, but an average painting you’re just going to glance at. I was interested in film because it dictated how long you could look at it and what you could hear while looking at it.
Robert Breer espoused this theory of 24 paintings a second and I started to dabble in animation and then deconstructing pre-shot 24 frame images. So, I was looking for pre-existing footage and especially footage where you’re aware that each frame was different. In early cinema – for instance, in that footage that’s depicted in The Film of Her, where it’s been transferred to paper – each frame has its own blemishes and so, when it’s projected, you realise you’re looking at a number of different pictures. That has an energy that I find exciting.
In some ways, it deals with memories: you can think of all our days as a series of frames. So, I started looking at old footage for that reason, for its material qualities. And, more often than not, it’s in the public domain, so it’s available for life!
I started to introduce that footage into the theatre company. I started out shooting Super8 off a VHS monitor and optically printing it, always this very compromised image. With the nitrate, there’s this added tension that, when it’s not ravaged by time, the pristine image is cleaner than anything else we see. There’s more silver content in the nitrate than you’ll have in your safety film and so, when you can see a face or an image where there isn’t a swathe of decay going through it, it’s incredibly pristine. It’s all the more violent when something does happen to it and that’s an added dimension of the tension that I was interested in.
MLC-BR: You started out working in the theatre and much of your work has had a theatrical context.
BM: Coming out of art school, I was eager to join any community, basically. And there happened to be a theatre group that was working with a composer who used a lot of sampled sounds. So, it seemed like a good fit that, if I was using sampled images, I’d work with a composer using sampled sounds.
When I started, they would ask me to make films to exist within their performances. Back then it was 16mm film and I started thinking what the implications of this would be. The real performance element of a film projection is, of course, that it’s a piece of film running through the projector in real time. And this is what it has in common with the theatre: it’s happening in the room at the moment.
So, I started making films that were referential to the fact that the film was alive, and the frame was being frozen for a millisecond in front of the lamp and the shutter was open. I was interested already in film being a collection of images, but it became a collection of images being shown, that became the subject matter.
I still work with the [Ridge] theatre company. The staging of Decasia is done by the same group. I’ve married the set designer and there are three of us who are the principals now. We work on things together. I think we’re up to 20-22 productions that we’ve done together.
So, to a degree, I still see this work as having a theatrical context. There are certain pieces that were built for musical performance that have retained this really ambient feel to them. There are not as many quick cuts as in my earlier work.
MLC-BR: How do you approach presenting these films in a cinema context when the live show is finished?
BM: Yesterday you saw Footprints. That intro with the 20th Century Fox logo was from a different part of the theatre show.
Footprints was pretty much shown intact, but it was before we had our relationship down. It was like, “Okay, everything grinds to a halt and we watch this film.” And, of course, that killed the theatrical buzz. So traditionally I would take footage from disparate parts of the show and put it together and release it afterwards. With Photo Op all the footage would loop for minutes at a time. That was cut down to a five-minute piece from the intro. Death Train pretty much showed as it was in the theatre. I think it was a little bit longer and I clipped it down.
With Decasia, there was no way I could make sure of hitting the beats when we did the performance. So, I made a rather atmospheric installation type of edit. Then we made the record that was going to be the master skeleton of the finished film. I re-cut and condensed it down to match those musical cuts. Its life in a multimedia theatrical performance was its first incarnation and was much more sprawling.
MLC-BR: How great do you find the difference in audience reaction between versions?
Decasia
Decasia
BM: Sometimes I think the live theatre show is more appropriate. I think with Decasia, in particular, it’s such a forceful symphony that it can be quite oppressive to watch in the cinema. You literally have nowhere to run. If you don’t like the music, you’re trapped there. If you don’t like the imagery, you’re trapped there. In the installation environment, there are people all around you, performers and audience members, and you’re actually invited to get up and walk around. So, it becomes sort of a state of mind for an hour rather than a bludgeoning. If there is a failing to Decasia that I can acknowledge, it is that it’s created for that installation environment and it may be a bit too forceful to put on an audience, just saying ,“Listen to this now.”
MLC-BR: Do you feel under any pressure to ensure these films have a life after the show?
BM: I wouldn’t say “pressure”. I determine whether I think they could have a life and whether I should go that extra mile. It’s quite a bit of work once the show’s over and quite a bit of money because, after we’re done with the show, all the commissioning funds are gone. You have to make a soundtrack, and title it and re-edit it. And everyone else is rather bored with the project by then.
The most recent piece, the one that’s making the festival circuit now, is The Highwater Trilogy. It was part of a multi-media project called Shelter that was performed early last year in Germany and late last year in New York. In those contexts, it was shown on video because it’s loaded into the computer as a series of QuickTimes, so you can hit the beats as the performers perform. The decision to go from that cheap medium back to the original 35mm nitrate was a proposition of something like $20-25,000. It was an expensive project but what happened in the ensuing months … The subject matter is floods and storms, and we had incredible news stories where the tsunami and Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans were dominating the headlines, as was global warming.
I had these two projects I’d done with Shelter, and one I’d done with David Lang, on a separate project the same year called How to Pray. And they all sourced the same archive in South Carolina – Fox Movietone News Reel Outtakes – that dealt with flooding and high water. I put them together and called them The Highwater Trilogy, and released it as a 35mm film because it was now informed by world events. It’s something I probably wouldn’t have done had there not been those disasters.
MLC-BR: How do you go about sourcing the footage you work with? Have you ever taken a concept from footage that you’ve discovered or do you always bring the concept to the footage?
BM: What’s nice about the way I work is that there are incredible conversations between those two things and I’m allowed the latitude to make these decisions, which a lot of directors aren’t. In most documentary films, I think, you get out in the field with a team and a camera, and you think you’re making one film but there’s this guy that’s much more interesting than whatever you set out to make the film about and you redirect the project. I certainly allow myself that.
Whenever you go to search, you need a laundry list of what you are looking for and you have to figure out where you’d be apt to find whatever theme you’re looking for. You have to think, “Where would that evidence itself?” And then, in so doing, you’re looking through a series of tapes that are a collection of stories and you’re fast-forwarding to get to the one you think is going to show The Futility of Man in the Face of Nature and, two stories before that, there is this incredible piece of footage. Then you start thinking, “That might not show the futility of man in the face of nature. But whatever it does show, that’s what my film is about.” [Laughs.] So I try to leave myself open to that.
If it’s not that movie, then it’s another movie. In The Highwater Trilogy, there’s a whole sequence that’s entirely icebergs. I’m working with Gavin Briars on a project about the sinking of the Titanic, so originally I just started looking for footage of icebergs for obvious reasons, literal reasons, and never thought that same footage would end up in a piece by David Lang in which there’s maybe two or three notes going on for ten or twelve minutes. But when I thought of David’s music, I thought of that footage and went back to it.
MLC-BR: You take advantage of chance discoveries?
BM: Absolutely. For instance in The Film of Her, there was never a porn star who inspired an archivist to rediscover an early film collection. I think in real life that guy is gay, so I don’t know if he’d been inspired by that woman. I don’t even know if a straight guy would be inspired by that woman! The fact of the matter is I was looking for a plot point that would have some passion in it, because the reasons he has giving me in the real-life interviews weren’t adding up; he was just wondering what was down there. As it turns out, there have been various accounts that Theodore Huff of the Museum of Modern Art told him this collection was down there and this guy was used as a sort of pawn for Huff. But, of course, he wasn’t telling me that side of the story and I hadn’t heard of that yet. So, there was this sort of blank, like, “What was the impetus for him to discover this thing?”
The Film of Her
The Film of Her
At that moment, I was rummaging through a flea market or a second-hand store and found all these stag films which contained the starlet in The Film of Her and the extended footage in Trinity. I thought it contained this awareness of the camera that made you think, “Who is this actress who looks directly into the camera?” It is an incredibly amateurish production, but the carnality had to do with the physicality of the film as much as how old it was.
And, of course, I fell in love with this footage. I think if I had found it a few years later or a few years before, I might not have remembered it but, because I was looking for this thing at that moment, it was like, “I have to take this. This is the moment.” It’s somewhat frivolous, but I think I’m working in a way that not only allows that, but sometimes demands it.
MLC-BR: Do you see yourself working in a cinematic tradition of found-footage filmmakers: Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son (Ken Jacobs, 1969) or Bruce Conner, for example?
BM: Certainly Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son was an enormous influence on me, in that I had never heard of the paper-print collection before that and I had read Ken Jacobs’ catalogue notes in which he attributed the reason he was able to see that film to a photographic engineer, Kemp Niver, who took each paper print and painstakingly photographed it. I got interested, thinking, “Well, who is this guy?”, because I was in a way doing the same thing. I was taking these pieces of films and rephotographing them into modern viewership. In researching him, I realised that he did very little of the work at all. He had some cameraman who did it and someone else had discovered the films, and both these people are forgotten by history. And so I made The Film of Her to sort of rewrite that. That was a direct result of Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son.
I’d say with the modern work and the orchestral work, Berlin, Portrait of a Great City (Walter Ruttmann, 1927), and, more obviously, Koyaanisqatsi (Godfrey Reggio, 1982), I still remember seeing when it came out and not being able to comprehend that there was a film that didn’t have characters or plots or dialogue. Someone took me to it, and said, “You have to see it”, and I had never been so excited by a movie before in my life. It’s hard to remember a time when it was hard to conceive of that being a film. And Godfrey became a friend and was an influence on me in the years after that.
MLC-BR: How do you work with your sound designers and composers? Sound is hugely important in your films.
BM: It’s at least half the thing, and I’m deeply indebted to these guys. In most cases, I’m cutting to the music, so it’s usually what the point of departure is. We’ll usually start with a project that’s either been commissioned by the same source, or we’ve approached a sound designer whom we want to work with. But ultimately I’m cutting to the sound.
MLC-BR: A lot of the films we saw yesterday had sound by Michael Montes.
BM: Actually, it was pretty evenly split yesterday. It was two by Jim Farmer, two by Michael Montes and two by Bill Frisell, one half of which was also [Henryk] Gorecki. And then two other composers we worked with in the early nineties.
Today’s screenings will all be Michael Gordon and tomorrow will be an assortment of Bang On A Can collaborators: Michael, his wife Juliet Wolf and his other Bang On A Can cohort, David Lang.
Decasia was basically a commission for Michael to write a new symphony. They had European cultural funds, enough so that they could support a visual apparatus that go around the music. We had collaborated with Michael before, he’d brought us along, and I had seen this imagery. I had recently visited an archive and had seen this boxer seemingly boxing a boxing bag. But the boxing bag had exploded into this amorphous blob of decay and it seemed like a very powerful image to me, so I suggested we build the whole thing around this image, this idea of decay and fighting decay.
MLC-BR: What draws you to found footage?
BM: Well, I guess if I were to go back in time, the obvious answer is that it looks really cool. The Mesmerist looks pretty cool.
MLC-BR: To what extent is the decay in films like The Mesmerist as you find it?
The Mesmerist
The Mesmerist
BM: Entirely. What’s remarkable about The Mesmerist, and really sets it apart from anything else I’ve done, is that, not only have I borrowed the images, I’ve also borrowed the plot points. But I’ve reshaped the plot. The Mesmerist was originally a 1926 feature called The Bells, directed by James Young, and starring Lionel Barrymore and Boris Karloff. It is a particularly odd film in that the protagonist, [Mathias Barrymore], commits cold-blooded murder and it basically solves all his problems. I wanted to re-invent the film so he doesn’t get off the hook, as it were.
What was incredibly fortuitous was that there was this pristine print in the Library of Congress and they had this one where two or three rolls of it had been damaged or had deteriorated. They knew already from my work on Decasia that I fancied this kind of stuff, so they set it aside and they said, “Oh, this is the film you should have included in Decasia.” I said, “I’ve already made Decasia and now we’re onto the next thing.” I looked through it and it was quite remarkable that you had this decay in the scenes of the fairgrounds, but the scene of the murder is relatively pristine. In the original, the murder plays in a linear sequence, but in my version it replays as a flashback. The decay becomes representative of a dream state or, in this case, a reality state, and the pristine film became a dream state.
MLC-BR: The decay representing the ravages of conscience on perceived reality?
BM: Yes, exactly.
MLC-BR: How does your work with found-footage relate to films you shoot yourself – Ghost Trip, for instance?
I’m certainly known as a found-footage guy and I wanted to have some sort of faith in the medium. So, I loaded two friends into this Cadillac hearse – I bought the hearse – and we went off across the country. It sounded like a great time; it had its moments. I didn’t really want to start out with much of a plot, but I knew I was going to hit these spots along the way. I knew there was this preacher in Mississippi; I knew there was the guy that sang over his mother’s and grandmother’s graves in New Orleans. I knew that I could stop in New Mexico and see Godfrey Reggio, for instance, and the landscapes would present themselves and, at the end, I would have a film of sorts.
So, that was an experiment. It would have been very difficult for me to have a shooting script and go out with these two guys and say, “Okay, now you guys act!”, but that was the trip I could make at the time. They were two childhood buddies who, at the time, I was getting along with and so we could do it. Anytime they spoke, I ended up cutting it out because they’re not actors. So, for them, it was very frustrating, because they thought that were embarking on their movie careers. But, for me, they were ciphers.
Basically, it’s a guy getting from the beginning of the film to the end of the film, and you can see the road as the film and these things that intercept him as markers along the way. In some ways, it’s an imperfect film, but I very much like to see it. There are some quite nice bits in it.
MLC-BR: The journey appears important to several of your films and it seems linked to the progress of the film passing through the projector or the camera. All of these trajectories don’t seem to lead anywhere; they just seem like evolutionary loops.
BM: Right, often the first frame and the final frame are the same.
MLC-BR: The journey, the passage of film through light and the evolutionary patterns are linked in your work?
BM: I guess this must have been a big theme. [Laughs.] It seems a little bit nihilistic to think we haven’t made any progress at all, but I’m not sure we have. I think we are doomed to repeat our mistakes. And film is somehow fascinating to us because, every time we unspool, we see this hero go through the same thing unwittingly, not knowing what’s going to happen at the end.
With Ghost Trip, I see it the same way: this guy walks into the ocean and comes back in limbo, unaware that he’s dead and everyone he’s met is dead. That is the fate of the film character.
MLC-BR: You’ve compared film to a decaying human body. Yet images of machinery – notably film equipment and vehicles – feature prominently in your work. How do you relate the solidity of machinery in your films to the very organic processes of decay you explore?
Trinity
Trinity
BM: That’s a good question and one I haven’t been asked before. I think we’ve created these machines, of course, and the way our brains work in order to understand this organic decay is to cut it down to these little increments that run at 24 frames a second. In this way, we analyse it and pass the shutter over it twice within a microsecond. And this way we study it.
Maybe this was the point of Trinity: to try to capture this woman and understand all her mysteries. Of course, we can’t, but the way that the western male mind works, it thinks, “Okay, we’ll break it down into tiny, discreet intervals and study them. This way we’ll know something.”
So, in some way, the machinery is running at odds with amorphic organic decay that is unknowable. But, at the same time, it’s the way that we’re given to view the world, the model that we’ve created, and, for better or worse, the projector is the closest we’ve gotten to expressing our ability to see and hear in time.
MLC-BR: What is your opinion of video?
I’ve relied on video editing since 1996. Decasia was cut on a flatbed, but that was the last film I cut on a flatbed and I dare say it was the last film I will cut on one. It certainly was the most difficult film to cut … and I’ll never go back. [Laughs.]
There are people who swear by the hard cut. I had the great fortune of collaborating in the capacity of an actor with a young filmmaker, Andrew Bujalski. He cuts on 16mm and really believes in the violence of the hard cut. I just saw something he recently shot on HD, where he was able to attain some of that. But he didn’t trust it as much, of course, because he couldn’t have done it a frame here, or a frame there. I think there is something to the physicality of film, being able to hold it, that we’re losing and, of course, I’m someone who’s talked about that: how film interfaces with the material world.
On the other hand, the capacity that I’m using Final Cut Pro in is to match back to original film when I’m making a 35mm print. In this way, it’s an editing tool and I’m somewhat distrustful of these cookie-cutter filters that people apply – though of course, like anyone, I’ll tweak contrast or colour correct.
That said, I think it’s amazing the access it’s given people, and I think it’s something we’re only starting to tap into. There’s always been this utopian idea that this overweight ten-year-old girl from the Midwest could create an epic about her family with a $150 video camera. We haven’t really seen that yet ...
MLC-BR: Will you be sticking to found footage or shooting more of your own films as well?
BM: I like to do that, but Ghost Trip was certainly challenging for me and it tested how many hats I could wear on the set. The two guys I went on the ride with were little help. They were a lot of fun, but they didn’t lift too many boxes!
I’d need to have a team assembled and that’s not a way I’m used to working. On the other hand, I’ve received an enormous grant to do just that, so I have to figure out how to make a narrative film again – or how I’m going to make a narrative film I can live with. As I go through the course of the day, I’m always seeing things that I think would be beautiful moments. So, maybe it’s just a matter of collecting this.
MLC-BR: It sounds as if you have a distrust of narrative filmmaking.
BM: Maybe of the big teams and the lights and the craft services and stuff like that.
Yes, it intimidates me. I think there are people who are quite good at it and I don’t mean to demean what they do in any way because I simply just can’t do that … Some of my best friends are narrative movies! [Laughs.] … Those are the films I like to see like anyone else.
It’s very tough to sit through a programme of Bill Morrison films, even for me. It’s more that I wonder – maybe too much – how my previous work would relate to a narrative film or any of the things I’ve already established in cinema as somehow being in conversation with it. But maybe that’s over-thinking and the thing to do is just to do it.
MLC-BR: You still remain between three art forms: painting, theatre and cinema, drawing from all of them yet, perhaps, not belonging completely to any of them.
BM: Right, because whenever I feel I’m belonging to something, I run away.
Maximilian Le Cain is a filmmaker and cinéphile living in Cork City, Ireland. Barry Ronan is a filmmaker currently based in Cork, Ireland.
© Maximilian Le Cain and Barry Ronan, 2006
The following is an interview with Bill Morrison.
Over the past fifteen years, Bill Morrison has created a remarkable series of found-footage films that highlight the ravages of time and decay on the filmed image. These are as much celebrations of the sometimes-frightening beauty of decomposing film as laments for vanishing relics of cinema’s origin. Although not drawing exclusively from early cinema, Morrison specialises in this originary epoch of movie history. On the material level, he appreciates the paradoxical fact that nitrate simultaneously offers what he considers the most perfect film image and is also notoriously unstable. Beyond this, he sees the invention of film as the only precisely locatable birth of an art form, one whose inception is not lost in the mists of time but is more or less contemporary with the emergence of modern man. From the decaying body of film, he extrapolates an analogy for the fate of the human mind and body.
As an introduction to his films, he explains:
The frame pauses briefly before the projector’s lamp, and then moves on. Our lives are accumulations of ephemeral images and moments that our consciousness constructs into a reality. No sooner have we grasped the present, it is relegated to the past, where it only exists in the subjective history of each individual. The images can be thought of as desires or memories: actions that take place in the mind. The film stock can be thought of as the body, that which enables these events to be seen. Like our own bodies, this celluloid is a fragile and ephemeral medium that can deteriorate in countless ways.
This statement appeared in the catalogue of the 2006 Cork Film Festival, which held a three-programme retrospective of Morrison’s work. This selection traces his career from early pieces like Footprints (1992) and Photo Op (1992), which first appeared as part of stage productions, through the semi-documentary, The Film of Her (1996), and the reconfigured narrative, The Mesmerist (2003), to the more detachedly contemplative recent works, Who By Water (2006) and The Highwater Trilogy (2006), and the ‘city symphony’, Gotham (2005). Moving away from silent-era material, he also uses more recent home-movie found-footage in Porch (2005), newly shot images in East River (2003), and has made a very mysterious short narrative, Ghost Trip (2000), shot under the influence of Dead Man (Jim Jarmusch, 1995).
Whilst several of his films are masterpieces – The Death Train (1993), Trinity (2000), The Mesmerist – two stand out in particular as the highpoints of his endeavours to date. These are the feature-length Decasia (2002), the apocalyptic culmination of his nihilistic view of man’s place in history, and the contrastingly ecstatic Light is Calling (2004), in which bodies and movements dissolve in swirling waves of golden light, the film’s decay radiating as a glorious self-immolation.
An important element of Morrison’s filmmaking is its collaborative aspect. He continues to work with Ridge Theater and has had his films screened in installation, concert and other performance contexts. As he emphasises, sound accounts for at least fifty percent of his work’s impact. The contribution of composers, such as Michael Gordon (Decasia, Light is Calling, City Walk (2003), Who By Water) or Bill Frisell (The Film of Her, The Mesmerist) and sound designers like Michael Montes (Trinity, Ghost Trip) or Jim Farmer (Footprints, The Death Train), is crucially important to his cinema.
We met with Bill Morrison when he was in Cork to present his work at the October 2006 Film Festival retrospective.
* * *
MAXIMILIAN LE CAIN and BARRY RONAN: Your background is in painting. How did you come to work in film?
BILL MORRISON: I was taught by the great animator, Robert Breer, who was a painter-turned-animator. I was a painter in art school, interested in how painting could command attention over a period of time. You could stare at a really great painting, but an average painting you’re just going to glance at. I was interested in film because it dictated how long you could look at it and what you could hear while looking at it.
Robert Breer espoused this theory of 24 paintings a second and I started to dabble in animation and then deconstructing pre-shot 24 frame images. So, I was looking for pre-existing footage and especially footage where you’re aware that each frame was different. In early cinema – for instance, in that footage that’s depicted in The Film of Her, where it’s been transferred to paper – each frame has its own blemishes and so, when it’s projected, you realise you’re looking at a number of different pictures. That has an energy that I find exciting.
In some ways, it deals with memories: you can think of all our days as a series of frames. So, I started looking at old footage for that reason, for its material qualities. And, more often than not, it’s in the public domain, so it’s available for life!
I started to introduce that footage into the theatre company. I started out shooting Super8 off a VHS monitor and optically printing it, always this very compromised image. With the nitrate, there’s this added tension that, when it’s not ravaged by time, the pristine image is cleaner than anything else we see. There’s more silver content in the nitrate than you’ll have in your safety film and so, when you can see a face or an image where there isn’t a swathe of decay going through it, it’s incredibly pristine. It’s all the more violent when something does happen to it and that’s an added dimension of the tension that I was interested in.
MLC-BR: You started out working in the theatre and much of your work has had a theatrical context.
BM: Coming out of art school, I was eager to join any community, basically. And there happened to be a theatre group that was working with a composer who used a lot of sampled sounds. So, it seemed like a good fit that, if I was using sampled images, I’d work with a composer using sampled sounds.
When I started, they would ask me to make films to exist within their performances. Back then it was 16mm film and I started thinking what the implications of this would be. The real performance element of a film projection is, of course, that it’s a piece of film running through the projector in real time. And this is what it has in common with the theatre: it’s happening in the room at the moment.
So, I started making films that were referential to the fact that the film was alive, and the frame was being frozen for a millisecond in front of the lamp and the shutter was open. I was interested already in film being a collection of images, but it became a collection of images being shown, that became the subject matter.
I still work with the [Ridge] theatre company. The staging of Decasia is done by the same group. I’ve married the set designer and there are three of us who are the principals now. We work on things together. I think we’re up to 20-22 productions that we’ve done together.
So, to a degree, I still see this work as having a theatrical context. There are certain pieces that were built for musical performance that have retained this really ambient feel to them. There are not as many quick cuts as in my earlier work.
MLC-BR: How do you approach presenting these films in a cinema context when the live show is finished?
BM: Yesterday you saw Footprints. That intro with the 20th Century Fox logo was from a different part of the theatre show.
Footprints was pretty much shown intact, but it was before we had our relationship down. It was like, “Okay, everything grinds to a halt and we watch this film.” And, of course, that killed the theatrical buzz. So traditionally I would take footage from disparate parts of the show and put it together and release it afterwards. With Photo Op all the footage would loop for minutes at a time. That was cut down to a five-minute piece from the intro. Death Train pretty much showed as it was in the theatre. I think it was a little bit longer and I clipped it down.
With Decasia, there was no way I could make sure of hitting the beats when we did the performance. So, I made a rather atmospheric installation type of edit. Then we made the record that was going to be the master skeleton of the finished film. I re-cut and condensed it down to match those musical cuts. Its life in a multimedia theatrical performance was its first incarnation and was much more sprawling.
MLC-BR: How great do you find the difference in audience reaction between versions?
Decasia
Decasia
BM: Sometimes I think the live theatre show is more appropriate. I think with Decasia, in particular, it’s such a forceful symphony that it can be quite oppressive to watch in the cinema. You literally have nowhere to run. If you don’t like the music, you’re trapped there. If you don’t like the imagery, you’re trapped there. In the installation environment, there are people all around you, performers and audience members, and you’re actually invited to get up and walk around. So, it becomes sort of a state of mind for an hour rather than a bludgeoning. If there is a failing to Decasia that I can acknowledge, it is that it’s created for that installation environment and it may be a bit too forceful to put on an audience, just saying ,“Listen to this now.”
MLC-BR: Do you feel under any pressure to ensure these films have a life after the show?
BM: I wouldn’t say “pressure”. I determine whether I think they could have a life and whether I should go that extra mile. It’s quite a bit of work once the show’s over and quite a bit of money because, after we’re done with the show, all the commissioning funds are gone. You have to make a soundtrack, and title it and re-edit it. And everyone else is rather bored with the project by then.
The most recent piece, the one that’s making the festival circuit now, is The Highwater Trilogy. It was part of a multi-media project called Shelter that was performed early last year in Germany and late last year in New York. In those contexts, it was shown on video because it’s loaded into the computer as a series of QuickTimes, so you can hit the beats as the performers perform. The decision to go from that cheap medium back to the original 35mm nitrate was a proposition of something like $20-25,000. It was an expensive project but what happened in the ensuing months … The subject matter is floods and storms, and we had incredible news stories where the tsunami and Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans were dominating the headlines, as was global warming.
I had these two projects I’d done with Shelter, and one I’d done with David Lang, on a separate project the same year called How to Pray. And they all sourced the same archive in South Carolina – Fox Movietone News Reel Outtakes – that dealt with flooding and high water. I put them together and called them The Highwater Trilogy, and released it as a 35mm film because it was now informed by world events. It’s something I probably wouldn’t have done had there not been those disasters.
MLC-BR: How do you go about sourcing the footage you work with? Have you ever taken a concept from footage that you’ve discovered or do you always bring the concept to the footage?
BM: What’s nice about the way I work is that there are incredible conversations between those two things and I’m allowed the latitude to make these decisions, which a lot of directors aren’t. In most documentary films, I think, you get out in the field with a team and a camera, and you think you’re making one film but there’s this guy that’s much more interesting than whatever you set out to make the film about and you redirect the project. I certainly allow myself that.
Whenever you go to search, you need a laundry list of what you are looking for and you have to figure out where you’d be apt to find whatever theme you’re looking for. You have to think, “Where would that evidence itself?” And then, in so doing, you’re looking through a series of tapes that are a collection of stories and you’re fast-forwarding to get to the one you think is going to show The Futility of Man in the Face of Nature and, two stories before that, there is this incredible piece of footage. Then you start thinking, “That might not show the futility of man in the face of nature. But whatever it does show, that’s what my film is about.” [Laughs.] So I try to leave myself open to that.
If it’s not that movie, then it’s another movie. In The Highwater Trilogy, there’s a whole sequence that’s entirely icebergs. I’m working with Gavin Briars on a project about the sinking of the Titanic, so originally I just started looking for footage of icebergs for obvious reasons, literal reasons, and never thought that same footage would end up in a piece by David Lang in which there’s maybe two or three notes going on for ten or twelve minutes. But when I thought of David’s music, I thought of that footage and went back to it.
MLC-BR: You take advantage of chance discoveries?
BM: Absolutely. For instance in The Film of Her, there was never a porn star who inspired an archivist to rediscover an early film collection. I think in real life that guy is gay, so I don’t know if he’d been inspired by that woman. I don’t even know if a straight guy would be inspired by that woman! The fact of the matter is I was looking for a plot point that would have some passion in it, because the reasons he has giving me in the real-life interviews weren’t adding up; he was just wondering what was down there. As it turns out, there have been various accounts that Theodore Huff of the Museum of Modern Art told him this collection was down there and this guy was used as a sort of pawn for Huff. But, of course, he wasn’t telling me that side of the story and I hadn’t heard of that yet. So, there was this sort of blank, like, “What was the impetus for him to discover this thing?”
The Film of Her
The Film of Her
At that moment, I was rummaging through a flea market or a second-hand store and found all these stag films which contained the starlet in The Film of Her and the extended footage in Trinity. I thought it contained this awareness of the camera that made you think, “Who is this actress who looks directly into the camera?” It is an incredibly amateurish production, but the carnality had to do with the physicality of the film as much as how old it was.
And, of course, I fell in love with this footage. I think if I had found it a few years later or a few years before, I might not have remembered it but, because I was looking for this thing at that moment, it was like, “I have to take this. This is the moment.” It’s somewhat frivolous, but I think I’m working in a way that not only allows that, but sometimes demands it.
MLC-BR: Do you see yourself working in a cinematic tradition of found-footage filmmakers: Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son (Ken Jacobs, 1969) or Bruce Conner, for example?
BM: Certainly Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son was an enormous influence on me, in that I had never heard of the paper-print collection before that and I had read Ken Jacobs’ catalogue notes in which he attributed the reason he was able to see that film to a photographic engineer, Kemp Niver, who took each paper print and painstakingly photographed it. I got interested, thinking, “Well, who is this guy?”, because I was in a way doing the same thing. I was taking these pieces of films and rephotographing them into modern viewership. In researching him, I realised that he did very little of the work at all. He had some cameraman who did it and someone else had discovered the films, and both these people are forgotten by history. And so I made The Film of Her to sort of rewrite that. That was a direct result of Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son.
I’d say with the modern work and the orchestral work, Berlin, Portrait of a Great City (Walter Ruttmann, 1927), and, more obviously, Koyaanisqatsi (Godfrey Reggio, 1982), I still remember seeing when it came out and not being able to comprehend that there was a film that didn’t have characters or plots or dialogue. Someone took me to it, and said, “You have to see it”, and I had never been so excited by a movie before in my life. It’s hard to remember a time when it was hard to conceive of that being a film. And Godfrey became a friend and was an influence on me in the years after that.
MLC-BR: How do you work with your sound designers and composers? Sound is hugely important in your films.
BM: It’s at least half the thing, and I’m deeply indebted to these guys. In most cases, I’m cutting to the music, so it’s usually what the point of departure is. We’ll usually start with a project that’s either been commissioned by the same source, or we’ve approached a sound designer whom we want to work with. But ultimately I’m cutting to the sound.
MLC-BR: A lot of the films we saw yesterday had sound by Michael Montes.
BM: Actually, it was pretty evenly split yesterday. It was two by Jim Farmer, two by Michael Montes and two by Bill Frisell, one half of which was also [Henryk] Gorecki. And then two other composers we worked with in the early nineties.
Today’s screenings will all be Michael Gordon and tomorrow will be an assortment of Bang On A Can collaborators: Michael, his wife Juliet Wolf and his other Bang On A Can cohort, David Lang.
Decasia was basically a commission for Michael to write a new symphony. They had European cultural funds, enough so that they could support a visual apparatus that go around the music. We had collaborated with Michael before, he’d brought us along, and I had seen this imagery. I had recently visited an archive and had seen this boxer seemingly boxing a boxing bag. But the boxing bag had exploded into this amorphous blob of decay and it seemed like a very powerful image to me, so I suggested we build the whole thing around this image, this idea of decay and fighting decay.
MLC-BR: What draws you to found footage?
BM: Well, I guess if I were to go back in time, the obvious answer is that it looks really cool. The Mesmerist looks pretty cool.
MLC-BR: To what extent is the decay in films like The Mesmerist as you find it?
The Mesmerist
The Mesmerist
BM: Entirely. What’s remarkable about The Mesmerist, and really sets it apart from anything else I’ve done, is that, not only have I borrowed the images, I’ve also borrowed the plot points. But I’ve reshaped the plot. The Mesmerist was originally a 1926 feature called The Bells, directed by James Young, and starring Lionel Barrymore and Boris Karloff. It is a particularly odd film in that the protagonist, [Mathias Barrymore], commits cold-blooded murder and it basically solves all his problems. I wanted to re-invent the film so he doesn’t get off the hook, as it were.
What was incredibly fortuitous was that there was this pristine print in the Library of Congress and they had this one where two or three rolls of it had been damaged or had deteriorated. They knew already from my work on Decasia that I fancied this kind of stuff, so they set it aside and they said, “Oh, this is the film you should have included in Decasia.” I said, “I’ve already made Decasia and now we’re onto the next thing.” I looked through it and it was quite remarkable that you had this decay in the scenes of the fairgrounds, but the scene of the murder is relatively pristine. In the original, the murder plays in a linear sequence, but in my version it replays as a flashback. The decay becomes representative of a dream state or, in this case, a reality state, and the pristine film became a dream state.
MLC-BR: The decay representing the ravages of conscience on perceived reality?
BM: Yes, exactly.
MLC-BR: How does your work with found-footage relate to films you shoot yourself – Ghost Trip, for instance?
I’m certainly known as a found-footage guy and I wanted to have some sort of faith in the medium. So, I loaded two friends into this Cadillac hearse – I bought the hearse – and we went off across the country. It sounded like a great time; it had its moments. I didn’t really want to start out with much of a plot, but I knew I was going to hit these spots along the way. I knew there was this preacher in Mississippi; I knew there was the guy that sang over his mother’s and grandmother’s graves in New Orleans. I knew that I could stop in New Mexico and see Godfrey Reggio, for instance, and the landscapes would present themselves and, at the end, I would have a film of sorts.
So, that was an experiment. It would have been very difficult for me to have a shooting script and go out with these two guys and say, “Okay, now you guys act!”, but that was the trip I could make at the time. They were two childhood buddies who, at the time, I was getting along with and so we could do it. Anytime they spoke, I ended up cutting it out because they’re not actors. So, for them, it was very frustrating, because they thought that were embarking on their movie careers. But, for me, they were ciphers.
Basically, it’s a guy getting from the beginning of the film to the end of the film, and you can see the road as the film and these things that intercept him as markers along the way. In some ways, it’s an imperfect film, but I very much like to see it. There are some quite nice bits in it.
MLC-BR: The journey appears important to several of your films and it seems linked to the progress of the film passing through the projector or the camera. All of these trajectories don’t seem to lead anywhere; they just seem like evolutionary loops.
BM: Right, often the first frame and the final frame are the same.
MLC-BR: The journey, the passage of film through light and the evolutionary patterns are linked in your work?
BM: I guess this must have been a big theme. [Laughs.] It seems a little bit nihilistic to think we haven’t made any progress at all, but I’m not sure we have. I think we are doomed to repeat our mistakes. And film is somehow fascinating to us because, every time we unspool, we see this hero go through the same thing unwittingly, not knowing what’s going to happen at the end.
With Ghost Trip, I see it the same way: this guy walks into the ocean and comes back in limbo, unaware that he’s dead and everyone he’s met is dead. That is the fate of the film character.
MLC-BR: You’ve compared film to a decaying human body. Yet images of machinery – notably film equipment and vehicles – feature prominently in your work. How do you relate the solidity of machinery in your films to the very organic processes of decay you explore?
Trinity
Trinity
BM: That’s a good question and one I haven’t been asked before. I think we’ve created these machines, of course, and the way our brains work in order to understand this organic decay is to cut it down to these little increments that run at 24 frames a second. In this way, we analyse it and pass the shutter over it twice within a microsecond. And this way we study it.
Maybe this was the point of Trinity: to try to capture this woman and understand all her mysteries. Of course, we can’t, but the way that the western male mind works, it thinks, “Okay, we’ll break it down into tiny, discreet intervals and study them. This way we’ll know something.”
So, in some way, the machinery is running at odds with amorphic organic decay that is unknowable. But, at the same time, it’s the way that we’re given to view the world, the model that we’ve created, and, for better or worse, the projector is the closest we’ve gotten to expressing our ability to see and hear in time.
MLC-BR: What is your opinion of video?
I’ve relied on video editing since 1996. Decasia was cut on a flatbed, but that was the last film I cut on a flatbed and I dare say it was the last film I will cut on one. It certainly was the most difficult film to cut … and I’ll never go back. [Laughs.]
There are people who swear by the hard cut. I had the great fortune of collaborating in the capacity of an actor with a young filmmaker, Andrew Bujalski. He cuts on 16mm and really believes in the violence of the hard cut. I just saw something he recently shot on HD, where he was able to attain some of that. But he didn’t trust it as much, of course, because he couldn’t have done it a frame here, or a frame there. I think there is something to the physicality of film, being able to hold it, that we’re losing and, of course, I’m someone who’s talked about that: how film interfaces with the material world.
On the other hand, the capacity that I’m using Final Cut Pro in is to match back to original film when I’m making a 35mm print. In this way, it’s an editing tool and I’m somewhat distrustful of these cookie-cutter filters that people apply – though of course, like anyone, I’ll tweak contrast or colour correct.
That said, I think it’s amazing the access it’s given people, and I think it’s something we’re only starting to tap into. There’s always been this utopian idea that this overweight ten-year-old girl from the Midwest could create an epic about her family with a $150 video camera. We haven’t really seen that yet ...
MLC-BR: Will you be sticking to found footage or shooting more of your own films as well?
BM: I like to do that, but Ghost Trip was certainly challenging for me and it tested how many hats I could wear on the set. The two guys I went on the ride with were little help. They were a lot of fun, but they didn’t lift too many boxes!
I’d need to have a team assembled and that’s not a way I’m used to working. On the other hand, I’ve received an enormous grant to do just that, so I have to figure out how to make a narrative film again – or how I’m going to make a narrative film I can live with. As I go through the course of the day, I’m always seeing things that I think would be beautiful moments. So, maybe it’s just a matter of collecting this.
MLC-BR: It sounds as if you have a distrust of narrative filmmaking.
BM: Maybe of the big teams and the lights and the craft services and stuff like that.
Yes, it intimidates me. I think there are people who are quite good at it and I don’t mean to demean what they do in any way because I simply just can’t do that … Some of my best friends are narrative movies! [Laughs.] … Those are the films I like to see like anyone else.
It’s very tough to sit through a programme of Bill Morrison films, even for me. It’s more that I wonder – maybe too much – how my previous work would relate to a narrative film or any of the things I’ve already established in cinema as somehow being in conversation with it. But maybe that’s over-thinking and the thing to do is just to do it.
MLC-BR: You still remain between three art forms: painting, theatre and cinema, drawing from all of them yet, perhaps, not belonging completely to any of them.
BM: Right, because whenever I feel I’m belonging to something, I run away.
Maximilian Le Cain is a filmmaker and cinéphile living in Cork City, Ireland. Barry Ronan is a filmmaker currently based in Cork, Ireland.
© Maximilian Le Cain and Barry Ronan, 2006
Thursday, December 07, 2006
A Small Rant
This week has been a rough one. I've been working on a new TV show for ESPN2 called Micheal Waltrip:A new Era. It airs this Sunday.
In the midsts of working on this show I'm also getting married and working on finishing my new feature script.
I work nights at my editing job. 5pm to about 2am M-F. I've been doing this for about five years now.
Last night I didn't get home until almost 5am finishing up the show.
There is a team of great people working on the show. And I really do love my job.
The problem though is me.
I tend to be very hard on myself.
Hard on myself when it comes to my work and getting things done.
I tend to take a lot of the burden on myself. When in reality I need to be a bit more removed emotionally.
Well, as you can tell I'm venting right now.
The good news is that the wedding plans are all set. Everything is great. And I did get my feature script finished. Now the next step. Getting the film made.
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
Director Robert Altman, 81, Dead
Robert Altman, the man behind the lens on "M*A*S*H," "Nashville" and "The Player," died Monday night at a Los Angeles Hospital, his Sandcastle 5 Productions Company said Tuesday. He was 81.
The cause of death was not disclosed, but a news release is expected later today, Associated Press reports.
Altman was nominated for an Academy Award five times for directing, most recently in 2001 for "Gosford Park." He was given a Lifetime Achievement Oscar in 2006, where Altman revealed in his acceptance speech that he had a received a heart transplant a decade earlier.
Altman's most recent film was "A Prairie Home Companion," starring Meryl Streep.
Robert Altman's films have inspired me and has fueled my passion as a filmmaker.
His work was unique and stood out in style and writing from any other American director. He's our Truffaut, Antonioni, A true master to learn by. His films span a generation. He made films till the end. For that is what its like to be an artist. To live it. To breath it. To ends one life doing what one loves.
Today we lost a real original.
Friday, November 17, 2006
Flipside Interviews Aaron Cometbus
AL: What's the name of your fanzine?
Aaron: The general name is Cometbus, but every issue has a subname.
Joe: Are the different names just to trick your way into getting more fanzines from Flipside?
Aaron: And records!
Joe: Has this actually happened before?
Aaron: Oh yeah, but mostly in the past. Then, they found out that I don't do reviews.
AL: Why didn't you ever review fanzines or records?
Aaron: I figured there were already plenty of others doing it and that people didn't really give a shit about my opinions. I want to be different, so I do book and movie reviews, cereal news and things like that.
AL: You started out as a small fanzine, right?
Aaron: It started out with me and a friend doing a weekly little newsletter during the summer of '81, when he was 12 and I was 13. When he left for Pittsburgh, I started doing my own, Tomorrow's Hope in October 1981. The names were never terribly important. They were just to confuse people and have some fun. Originally, it was 1/2 page size, but my printer thought it would be kind of a novelty to make them 3" X 2". So, we ended up printing them that small for two years until it got kind of boring. Then, I went bigger because I wanted to do more with graphics and stuff. Originally, it was only eight pages. Eventually,
it got to be forty eight.
AL: I can't believe that you actually sold to distributors that small.
Aaron: No, because I didn't sell them. They were always free until about a half year ago because they were so cheap to print. It was always easy to distribute them because people would always put them in with their mailing. For example, MDC would send them out with albums.
AL: Do you prefer doing zines with hand printing instead of typing?
Aaron: I believe hand printing adds a personal feeling and quality. But, it's not always that easy because it takes a lot more time to do. I forgot how to type after I learned. So, now I have to use the two finger method which seems to take me just as long as writing.
AL: You mentioned that you took the pictures in the early fanzines.
Aaron: I used to do a lot more photography because I had a class at school which gave me a good opportunity. Later, I changed schools, so I can't do that any more. I did try having a darkroom in my basement, but the quality of the pictures just wasn't good enough.
AL: I know that many of the bands which you've interviewed became popular as opposed to bands that get together, you interview, then they brake up. What criteria do you use?
Aaron: The important part is the local aspect because I think that there are enough local fanzines covering only big out of town bands. I like to interview bands that aren't known. I don't wait until they have a record out. Right there, I think other fanzines miss out. I'll interview a band which has something interesting to say even if I might not agree with them. I think that, if you interview a band, it's not unfair to put them on the spot because they get the chance to prove themselves or come out looking pretty stupid. Either way, the interview turns out to be better.
Joe: What's kept you motivated over the years? Many people burnout on fanzines fairly quickly.
Aaron: If I didn't do it, I wouldn't feel right. I can't exist without being productive.
Joe: Have you ever thought of channeling your energy into another area?
Aaron: Well, I tried to channel it into a few other areas, like music and a few others: a tape magazine, four compilation tapes, and some radio stuff. But, when I was in school, it was pretty hard to slide through that and, at the same time, do a fanzine.
Joe: Do you find doing your fanzine a rewarding experience?
Aaron: Sometimes... I put more into it then what I get out, but I don't think that is necessiarlly bad because I want to do the fanzine and the rewards are just extra.
AL: Did you ever think about writing for another zine instead of doing your own?
Aaron: After the five year anniversary issue, I may be changing the way I channel the fanzine because it's going to be the best of the last five years. All the small issues that people, like Tim Yohannon, couldn't read are going to be in big print. After summing up those five years, I'm going to move on and I will probably not be doing Cometbus anymore, but I may be collaborating with someone else on something or contributing to a lot of fanzines or something. I still going keep the same mailing address and keep doing projects.
This stuff was printed in Flipside 50. RIP Flipside
Lowest Common Dominator
For all that is going on in the world.
I was taken back by news broadcast showing people fighting
And rioting over the latest playstation 3 video game systems here in the United States.
Is this a huge commentary on the United States people?
In this apathetic country more concerned about huge cars and large wheels.
These are the people that vote. These are the people that don’t understand why they are unemployed. Are these the people that end up in Iraq? Are these the people that believe this country is spreading democracy to the Middle East because they are so uncivilized to understand anything more?
Are these the same people that will riot in the streets for a cause and then forget what the cause is?
Thursday, November 09, 2006
A Passionate, Cheerful, and Troubling Film All Should See
Just one image among others—but this is the image that best symbolizes the stark power of Ten, a film by Abbas Kiarostami: A young Iranian woman is sitting in a car, on the passenger side. Conversing with the woman driving the car, she talks about a man who has left, a man she was thinking of marrying. She weeps. Then she loosens her scarf, suddenly uncovering her shaved head. Between laughter and tears, she admits she feels much better this way.
In a country where people know the force of these symbols—the scarf, hair—the seeming simplicity of the scene takes on a resonance all its own. That is how it is for Ten, which lays down its cards one by one, all the better to capture the full spectrum of Iranian society. Ten cards. Ten sequences. Ten encounters between a driver and her passengers: her son, her sister, a prostitute, an old woman, filmed with alternating stationary shots of each partner in the conversation. (Those familiar with Kiarostami’s universe can use their free time to reflect on the car as both a metaphorical element and one that drives the plot.) No, it is not boring, not for a single second.
Ten is an absolutely fascinating film, both cheerful and troubling. Kiarostami, who is already a master in the art of distillation, pushes his formal process to an extreme degree of systematization—the same types of scenes, the same value given to the shots, the same dramatic art based on a conversation—in order to better uncover the truth of the situations and the feelings that dwell therein. And through this radical stripping down, we manage to read the frustrations and hopes of a society that is both immobile and changing.
Sunday, November 05, 2006
WORDS FROM THE PAST COME BACK TO HAUNT US
Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Iraq. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Iraq. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours.
"Each day the war goes on the hatred increases in the heart of the Iraqi and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instinct. The Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory, do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism."
If we continue, there will be no doubt in my mind and in the mind of the world that we have no honorable intentions in Iraq. It will become clear that our minimal expectation is to occupy it as an American colony. It demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Iraq, that we have been detrimental to the life of the Iraqi people. The situation is one in which we must be ready to turn sharply from our present ways.
We must provide the medical aid that is badly needed, making it available in this country if necessary. Meanwhile we in the churches and synagogues have a continuing task while we urge our government to disengage itself from a disgraceful commitment. We must continue to raise our voices if our nation persists in its perverse ways in Iraq. We must be prepared to match actions with words by seeking out every creative means of protest possible.
As we counsel young men concerning military service we must clarify for them our nation's role in Iraq and challenge them with the alternative of conscientious objection. I am pleased to say that this is the path now being chosen by more than seventy students at my own alma mater, Morehouse College, and I recommend it to all who find the American course in Iraq a dishonorable and unjust one. Moreover I would encourage all ministers of draft age to give up their ministerial exemptions and seek status as conscientious objectors.
There is something seductively tempting about stopping there and sending us all off on what in some circles has become a popular crusade against the war in Iraq. I say we must enter the struggle, but I wish to go on now to say something even more disturbing. The war in Iraq is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality we will find ourselves organizing clergy- and laymen-concerned committees for the next generation. They will be concerned about Katrina. They will be concerned about the Darfur genocide. We will be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies without end unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy. Such thoughts take us beyond Iraq, but not beyond our calling as sons of the living God.
John F. Kennedy comes back to haunt us. "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."
Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken -- the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investment.
I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When oil, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on life's roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Saudi Arabia and say: "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of torturing human beings of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.
Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter -- but beautiful -- struggle for a new world. This is the calling of the sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? Will our message be that the forces of American life militate against their arrival as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be another message, of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings, of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise we must choose in this crucial moment of human history.
A speech delivered by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on April 4, 1967, at a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned at Riverside Church in New York City. This speech was changed to reflect our times now.
Scary how times really have not changed.
All Photos made © by David Leeson in April 2003
Labels:
Election,
Iraq,
Martin Luther King,
Politics,
War
Thursday, November 02, 2006
Thank-You
Just wanted to say thank you to everyone who has been reading my blog. Feel free to comment on anything. Don't be shy.
This week has been going great. For those of you who don't know I'm in the process of getting my first feature film off the ground. Doing a polish on the script right now. I've been getting very good feedback so far on the script. So I'll post as things happen.
I'm also getting married in January.
The wedding is moving forward great. My Fiancé has disigned a great invite card. So great when you have something personal and artistc to share.
Well I'll leave with that for now.
Enjoy the blog.
Best
T.
This week has been going great. For those of you who don't know I'm in the process of getting my first feature film off the ground. Doing a polish on the script right now. I've been getting very good feedback so far on the script. So I'll post as things happen.
I'm also getting married in January.
The wedding is moving forward great. My Fiancé has disigned a great invite card. So great when you have something personal and artistc to share.
Well I'll leave with that for now.
Enjoy the blog.
Best
T.
There is No God (And You Know It) by Sam Harris
Somewhere in the world a man has abducted a little girl. Soon he will rape, torture, and kill her. If an atrocity of this kind not occurring at precisely this moment, it will happen in a few hours, or days at most. Such is the confidence we can draw from the statistical laws that govern the lives of six billion human beings.
The same statistics also suggest that this girl’s parents believe -- at this very moment -- that an all-powerful and all-loving God is watching over them and their family. Are they right to believe this? Is it good that they believe this?
No.
The entirety of atheism is contained in this response. Atheism is not a philosophy; it is not even a view of the world; it is simply a refusal to deny the obvious. Unfortunately, we live in a world in which the obvious is overlooked as a matter of principle. The obvious must be observed and re-observed and argued for. This is a thankless job. It carries with it an aura of petulance and insensitivity. It is, moreover, a job that the atheist does not want.
It is worth noting that no one ever need identify himself as a non-astrologer or a non-alchemist. Consequently, we do not have words for people who deny the validity of these pseudo-disciplines. Likewise, “atheism” is a term that should not even exist. Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make when in the presence of religious dogma. The atheist is merely a person who believes that the 260 million Americans (eighty-seven percent of the population) who claim to “never doubt the existence of God” should be obliged to present evidence for his existence -- and, indeed, for his benevolence, given the relentless destruction of innocent human beings we witness in the world each day. Only the atheist appreciates just how uncanny our situation is: most of us believe in a God that is every bit as specious as the gods of Mount Olympus; no person, whatever his or her qualifications, can seek public office in the United States without pretending to be certain that such a God exists; and much of what passes for public policy in our country conforms to religious taboos and superstitions appropriate to a medieval theocracy. Our circumstance is abject, indefensible, and terrifying. It would be hilarious if the stakes were not so high.
Consider: the city of New Orleans was recently destroyed by hurricane Katrina. At least a thousand people died, tens of thousands lost all their earthly possessions, and over a million have been displaced. It is safe to say that almost every person living in New Orleans at the moment Katrina struck believed in an omnipotent, omniscient, and compassionate God. But what was God doing while a hurricane laid waste to their city? Surely He heard the prayers of those elderly men and women who fled the rising waters for the safety of their attics, only to be slowly drowned there. These were people of faith. These were good men and women who had prayed throughout their lives. Only the atheist has the courage to admit the obvious: these poor people spent their lives in the company of an imaginary friend.
Of course, there had been ample warning that a storm “of biblical proportions” would strike New Orleans, and the human response to the ensuing disaster was tragically inept. But it was inept only by the light of science. Advance warning of Katrina’s path was wrested from mute Nature by meteorological calculations and satellite imagery. God told no one of his plans. Had the residents of New Orleans been content to rely on the beneficence of the Lord, they wouldn’t have known that a killer hurricane was bearing down upon them until they felt the first gusts of wind on their faces. And yet, a poll conducted by The Washington Post found that eighty percent of Katrina’s survivors claim that the event has only strengthened their faith in God.
As hurricane Katrina was devouring New Orleans, nearly a thousand Shiite pilgrims were trampled to death on a bridge in Iraq. There can be no doubt that these pilgrims believed mightily in the God of the Koran. Indeed, their lives were organized around the indisputable fact of his existence: their women walked veiled before him; their men regularly murdered one another over rival interpretations of his word. It would be remarkable if a single survivor of this tragedy lost his faith. More likely, the survivors imagine that they were spared through God’s grace.
Only the atheist recognizes the boundless narcissism and self-deceit of the saved. Only the atheist realizes how morally objectionable it is for survivors of a catastrophe to believe themselves spared by a loving God, while this same God drowned infants in their cribs. Because he refuses to cloak the reality of the world’s suffering in a cloying fantasy of eternal life, the atheist feels in his bones just how precious life is -- and, indeed, how unfortunate it is that millions of human beings suffer the most harrowing abridgements of their happiness for no good reason at all.
Of course, people of faith regularly assure one another that God is not responsible for human suffering. But how else can we understand the claim that God is both omniscient and omnipotent? There is no other way, and it is time for sane human beings to own up to this. This is the age-old problem of theodicy, of course, and we should consider it solved. If God exists, either He can do nothing to stop the most egregious calamities, or He does not care to. God, therefore, is either impotent or evil. Pious readers will now execute the following pirouette: God cannot be judged by merely human standards of morality. But, of course, human standards of morality are precisely what the faithful use to establish God’s goodness in the first place. And any God who could concern himself with something as trivial as gay marriage, or the name by which he is addressed in prayer, is not as inscrutable as all that. If He exists, the God of Abraham is not merely unworthy of the immensity of creation; he is unworthy even of man.
There is another possibility, of course, and it is both the most reasonable and least odious: the biblical God is a fiction. As Richard Dawkins has observed, we are all atheists with respect to Zeus and Thor. Only the atheist has realized that the biblical god is no different. Consequently, only the atheist is compassionate enough to take the profundity of the world’s suffering at face value. It is terrible that we all die and lose everything we love; it is doubly terrible that so many human beings suffer needlessly while alive. That so much of this suffering can be directly attributed to religion -- to religious hatreds, religious wars, religious delusions, and religious diversions of scarce resources -- is what makes atheism a moral and intellectual necessity. It is a necessity, however, that places the atheist at the margins of society. The atheist, by merely being in touch with reality, appears shamefully out of touch with the fantasy life of his neighbors.
This is an excerpt from An Atheist Manifesto, to be published at www.truthdig.com in December.
Copyright 2006 © HuffingtonPost.com,
The same statistics also suggest that this girl’s parents believe -- at this very moment -- that an all-powerful and all-loving God is watching over them and their family. Are they right to believe this? Is it good that they believe this?
No.
The entirety of atheism is contained in this response. Atheism is not a philosophy; it is not even a view of the world; it is simply a refusal to deny the obvious. Unfortunately, we live in a world in which the obvious is overlooked as a matter of principle. The obvious must be observed and re-observed and argued for. This is a thankless job. It carries with it an aura of petulance and insensitivity. It is, moreover, a job that the atheist does not want.
It is worth noting that no one ever need identify himself as a non-astrologer or a non-alchemist. Consequently, we do not have words for people who deny the validity of these pseudo-disciplines. Likewise, “atheism” is a term that should not even exist. Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make when in the presence of religious dogma. The atheist is merely a person who believes that the 260 million Americans (eighty-seven percent of the population) who claim to “never doubt the existence of God” should be obliged to present evidence for his existence -- and, indeed, for his benevolence, given the relentless destruction of innocent human beings we witness in the world each day. Only the atheist appreciates just how uncanny our situation is: most of us believe in a God that is every bit as specious as the gods of Mount Olympus; no person, whatever his or her qualifications, can seek public office in the United States without pretending to be certain that such a God exists; and much of what passes for public policy in our country conforms to religious taboos and superstitions appropriate to a medieval theocracy. Our circumstance is abject, indefensible, and terrifying. It would be hilarious if the stakes were not so high.
Consider: the city of New Orleans was recently destroyed by hurricane Katrina. At least a thousand people died, tens of thousands lost all their earthly possessions, and over a million have been displaced. It is safe to say that almost every person living in New Orleans at the moment Katrina struck believed in an omnipotent, omniscient, and compassionate God. But what was God doing while a hurricane laid waste to their city? Surely He heard the prayers of those elderly men and women who fled the rising waters for the safety of their attics, only to be slowly drowned there. These were people of faith. These were good men and women who had prayed throughout their lives. Only the atheist has the courage to admit the obvious: these poor people spent their lives in the company of an imaginary friend.
Of course, there had been ample warning that a storm “of biblical proportions” would strike New Orleans, and the human response to the ensuing disaster was tragically inept. But it was inept only by the light of science. Advance warning of Katrina’s path was wrested from mute Nature by meteorological calculations and satellite imagery. God told no one of his plans. Had the residents of New Orleans been content to rely on the beneficence of the Lord, they wouldn’t have known that a killer hurricane was bearing down upon them until they felt the first gusts of wind on their faces. And yet, a poll conducted by The Washington Post found that eighty percent of Katrina’s survivors claim that the event has only strengthened their faith in God.
As hurricane Katrina was devouring New Orleans, nearly a thousand Shiite pilgrims were trampled to death on a bridge in Iraq. There can be no doubt that these pilgrims believed mightily in the God of the Koran. Indeed, their lives were organized around the indisputable fact of his existence: their women walked veiled before him; their men regularly murdered one another over rival interpretations of his word. It would be remarkable if a single survivor of this tragedy lost his faith. More likely, the survivors imagine that they were spared through God’s grace.
Only the atheist recognizes the boundless narcissism and self-deceit of the saved. Only the atheist realizes how morally objectionable it is for survivors of a catastrophe to believe themselves spared by a loving God, while this same God drowned infants in their cribs. Because he refuses to cloak the reality of the world’s suffering in a cloying fantasy of eternal life, the atheist feels in his bones just how precious life is -- and, indeed, how unfortunate it is that millions of human beings suffer the most harrowing abridgements of their happiness for no good reason at all.
Of course, people of faith regularly assure one another that God is not responsible for human suffering. But how else can we understand the claim that God is both omniscient and omnipotent? There is no other way, and it is time for sane human beings to own up to this. This is the age-old problem of theodicy, of course, and we should consider it solved. If God exists, either He can do nothing to stop the most egregious calamities, or He does not care to. God, therefore, is either impotent or evil. Pious readers will now execute the following pirouette: God cannot be judged by merely human standards of morality. But, of course, human standards of morality are precisely what the faithful use to establish God’s goodness in the first place. And any God who could concern himself with something as trivial as gay marriage, or the name by which he is addressed in prayer, is not as inscrutable as all that. If He exists, the God of Abraham is not merely unworthy of the immensity of creation; he is unworthy even of man.
There is another possibility, of course, and it is both the most reasonable and least odious: the biblical God is a fiction. As Richard Dawkins has observed, we are all atheists with respect to Zeus and Thor. Only the atheist has realized that the biblical god is no different. Consequently, only the atheist is compassionate enough to take the profundity of the world’s suffering at face value. It is terrible that we all die and lose everything we love; it is doubly terrible that so many human beings suffer needlessly while alive. That so much of this suffering can be directly attributed to religion -- to religious hatreds, religious wars, religious delusions, and religious diversions of scarce resources -- is what makes atheism a moral and intellectual necessity. It is a necessity, however, that places the atheist at the margins of society. The atheist, by merely being in touch with reality, appears shamefully out of touch with the fantasy life of his neighbors.
This is an excerpt from An Atheist Manifesto, to be published at www.truthdig.com in December.
Copyright 2006 © HuffingtonPost.com,
Olbermann’s Special Comment : There is no line this President has not crossed — nor will not cross — to keep one political party, in power.
Tonight we got another one of Keith's special comments and this one was another top-notch job. Olbermann left no stone unturned while going through the exhaustive list of how the Republicans love to manipulate words and turn them into something they are not.
And finally tonight, a Special Comment.
On the 22nd of May, 1856, as the deteriorating American political system veered towards the edge of the cliff, Congressman Preston Brooks of South Carolina, shuffled into the Senate of this nation, his leg stiff from an old dueling injury, supported by a cane. And he looked for the familiar figure of the prominent Senator from Massachusetts, Charles Sumner.
Brooks found Sumner at his desk, mailing out copies of a speech he had delivered three days earlier — a speech against slavery.
The Congressman matter-of-factly raised his walking stick in mid-air, and smashed its metal point, across the Senator's head.
Congressman Brooks hit his victim repeatedly. Senator Sumner somehow got to his feet and tried to flee. Brooks chased him, and delivered untold blows to Sumner's head. Even though Sumner lay unconscious and bleeding, on the Senate floor, Brooks finally stopped beating him, only because his cane finally broke.
Others will cite John Brown's attack on the arsenal at Harper's Ferry as the exact point after which the Civil War became inevitable.
In point of fact, it might have been the moment — not when Brooks broke his cane over the prostrate body of Senator Sumner - but when voters in Brooks's district started sending him new canes.
Tonight, we almost wonder to whom President Bush will send the next new cane.
There is tonight no political division in this country that he and his party will not exploit, nor have not exploited; no anxiety that he and his party will not inflame.
There is no line this President has not crossed — nor will not cross — to keep one political party, in power.
He has spread any and every fear among us, in a desperate effort to avoid that which he most fears — some check, some balance against what has become not an imperial, but a unilateral presidency.
And now it is evident that it no longer matters to him, whether that effort to avoid the judgment of the people, is subtle and nuanced — or laughably transparent.
Senator John Kerry called him out Monday.
He did it two years too late.
He had been too cordial — just as Vice President Gore had been too cordial in 2000 — just as millions of us, have been too cordial ever since.
Senator Kerry, as you well know, spoke at a college in Southern California. With bitter humor, he told the students that he had been in Texas the day before, that President Bush used to live in that state, but that now he lives in the state of denial.
He said the trip had reminded him about the value of education — that quote "if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don't, you can get stuck in Iraq."
The Senator, in essence, called Mr. Bush stupid.
The context was unmistakable: Texas;the state of denial;stuck in Iraq. No interpretation required.
And Mr. Bush and his minions responded, by appearing to be too stupid to realize that they had been called stupid.
They demanded Kerry apologize — to the troops in Iraq.
And so he now has.
That phrase "appearing to be too stupid" is used deliberately, Mr. Bush.
Because there are only three possibilities here:
One, sir, is that you are far more stupid than the worst of your critics have suggested; that you could not follow the construction of a simple sentence; that you could not recognize your own life story when it was deftly summarized; that you could not perceive it was the sad ledger of your presidency that was being recounted.
This, of course, compliments you, Mr. Bush, because even those who do not "make the most of it," who do not "study hard," who do not "do their homework," and who do not "make an effort to be smart" might still just be stupid — but honest.
No; the first option, sir, is, at best, improbable. You are not honest.
The second option is that you and those who work for you deliberately twisted what Senator Kerry said to fit your political template. That you decided to take advantage of it, to once again pretend that the attacks, solely about your own incompetence, were in fact attacks on the troops — or even on the nation itself.
The third possibility is, obviously, the nightmare scenario; that the first two options are in some way conflated.
That it is both politically convenient for you, and personally satisfying to you, to confuse yourself with the country for which, sir, you work.
A brief reminder, Mr. Bush: You are not the United States of America.
You are merely a politician whose entire legacy will have been a willingness to make anything political — to have, in this case, refused to acknowledge that the insult wasn't about the troops, and that the insult was not even truly about you either — that the insult, in fact, is you.
So now John Kerry has apologized to the troops; apologized for the Republicans' deliberate distortions.
Thus the President will now begin the apologies he owes our troops, right?
This President must apologize to the troops — for having suggested, six weeks ago, that the chaos in Iraq, the death and the carnage, the slaughtered Iraqi civilians and the dead American service personnel, will, to history, quote "look like just a comma."
This President must apologize to the troops — because the intelligence he claims led us into Iraq proved to be undeniably and irredeemably wrong.
This President must apologize to the troops — for having laughed about the failure of that intelligence, at a banquet, while our troops were in harm's way.
This President must apologize to the troops — because the streets of Iraq were not strewn with flowers and its residents did not greet them as liberators.
This President must apologize to the troops — because his administration ran out of "plan" after barely two months.
This President must apologize to the troops — for getting 2,815 of them killed.
This President must apologize to the troops — for getting this country into a war without a clue.
And Mr. Bush owes us an apology… for this destructive and omnivorous presidency.
—
We will not receive them, of course.
This President never apologizes.
Not to the troops.
Not to the people.
Nor will those henchmen who have echoed him.
In calling him a "stuffed suit," Senator Kerry was wrong about the Press Secretary.
Mr. Snow's words and conduct — falsely earnest and earnestly false — suggest he is not "stuffed" - he is inflated.
And in leaving him out of the equation, Senator Kerry gave an unwarranted pass to his old friend Senator McCain, who should be ashamed of himself tonight.
He rolled over and pretended Kerry had said what he obviously had not.
Only, the symbolic stick he broke over Kerry's head came in a context, even more disturbing: Mr. McCain demanded the apology, while electioneering for a Republican congressional candidate in Illinois.
He was speaking of how often he had been to Walter Reed Hospital to see the wounded Iraq veterans, of how, quote "many of the have lost limbs." He said all this while demanding that the voters of Illinois reject a candidate who is not only a wounded Iraq veteran, but who lost two limbs there: Tammy Duckworth.
Support some of the wounded veterans. But bad-mouth the Democratic one.
And exploit all the veterans, and all the still-serving personnel, in a cheap and tawdry political trick, to try to bury the truth: that John Kerry said the President had been stupid.
And to continue this slander as late as this morning — as biased, or gullible, or lazy newscasters, nodded in sleep-walking assent.
Senator McCain became a front man in a collective lie to break sticks over the heads of Democrats — one of them his friend; another his fellow veteran, leg-less, for whom he should weep and applaud, or at minimum about whom, he should stay quiet.
That was beneath the Senator from Arizona.
And it was all because of an imaginary insult to the troops that his party cynically manufactured — out of a desperation, and a futility, as deep as that of Congressman Brooks, when he went hunting for Senator Sumner.
This, is our beloved country now, as you have re-defined it, Mr. Bush.
Get a tortured Vietnam veteran to attack a decorated Vietnam veteran, in defense of military personnel, whom that decorated veteran did not insult.
Or, get your henchmen to take advantage of the evil lingering dregs of the fear of miscegenation in Tennessee, in your party's advertisements against Harold Ford.
Or, get the satellites who orbit around you, like Rush Limbaugh, to exploit the illness — and the bi-partisanship — of Michael J. Fox — yes, get someone to make fun of the cripple.
Oh, and sir, don't forget to drag your own wife into it.
"It's always easy," she said of Mr. Fox's commercials — and she used this phrase twice — "to manipulate people's feelings."
Where on earth might the First Lady have gotten that idea, Mr. President?
From your endless manipulation of people's feelings about terrorism?
"How ever they put it," you said Monday of the Democrats, on the subject of Iraq , "their approach comes down to this: the terrorists win and America loses."
No manipulation of feelings there.
No manipulation of the charlatans of your administration into the only truth-tellers.
No shocked outrage at the Kerry insult that wasn't; no subtle smile as the First Lady silently sticks the knife in Michael J. Fox's back; no attempt on the campaign trail to bury the reality that you have already assured that the terrorists are winning.
Winning in Iraq, sir.
Winning in America, sir.
There, we have chaos: joint U.S./Iraqi checkpoints at Sadr City, the base of the radical Shiite militias — and the Americans have been ordered out by the Prime Minister of Iraq… and our Secretary of Defense doesn't even know about it!
And here — we have deliberate, systematic, institutionalized lying and smearing and terrorizing — a code of deceit, that somehow permits a President to say, quote, "If you listen carefully for a Democrat plan for success, they don't have one."
Permits him to say this while his plan in Iraq has amounted to a twisted version of the advice once offered to Lyndon Johnson about his Iraq, called Vietnam.
Instead of "declare victory — and get out"… we now have "declare victory — and stay, indefinitely."
And also here, we have institutionalized the terrorizing of the opposition. True domestic terror:
– Critics of your administration in the media receive letters filled with fake anthrax.
– Braying newspapers applaud, or laugh, or reveal details the FBI wished kept quiet, and thus impede or ruin the investigation.
– A series of reactionary columnists encourages treason charges against a newspaper that published "national security information" — that was openly available on the internet.
– One radio critic receives a letter, threatening the revelation of as much personal information about her as can be obtained — and expressing the hope that someone will then shoot her with an AK-47 machine gun.
– And finally, a critic of an incumbent Republican Senator, a critic armed with nothing but words, is attacked by the Senator's supporters, and thrown to the floor, in full view of television cameras, as if someone really did want to re-enact the intent and the rage of the day Preston Brooks found Senator Charles Sumner.
Of course, Mr. President, you did none of these things.
You instructed no one to mail the fake anthrax. Nor undermine the FBI's case. Nor call for the execution of the editors of the New York Times. Nor threaten to assassinate Stephanie Miller. Nor beat up a man yelling at Senator Allen. Nor have the first lady knife Michael J. Fox. Nor tell John McCain to lie about John Kerry.
No, you did not.
And the genius of the thing, is the same, as in King Henry's rhetorical question about Archbishop Thomas Becket: "Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?"
All you have to do, sir… is hand out enough new canes.
Monday, October 16, 2006
Head-in-the-Sand
Western civilization really is at risk from Muslim extremists.
By Sam Harris
SAM HARRIS is the author of "The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason." His next book, "Letter to a Christian Nation," will be published this week by Knopf. samharris.org.
September 18, 2006
TWO YEARS AGO I published a book highly critical of religion, "The End of Faith." In it, I argued that the world's major religions are genuinely incompatible, inevitably cause conflict and now prevent the emergence of a viable, global civilization. In response, I have received many thousands of letters and e-mails from priests, journalists, scientists, politicians, soldiers, rabbis, actors, aid workers, students — from people young and old who occupy every point on the spectrum of belief and nonbelief.
This has offered me a special opportunity to see how people of all creeds and political persuasions react when religion is criticized. I am here to report that liberals and conservatives respond very differently to the notion that religion can be a direct cause of human conflict.
This difference does not bode well for the future of liberalism.
Perhaps I should establish my liberal bone fides at the outset. I'd like to see taxes raised on the wealthy, drugs decriminalized and homosexuals free to marry. I also think that the Bush administration deserves most of the criticism it has received in the last six years — especially with respect to its waging of the war in Iraq, its scuttling of science and its fiscal irresponsibility.
But my correspondence with liberals has convinced me that liberalism has grown dangerously out of touch with the realities of our world — specifically with what devout Muslims actually believe about the West, about paradise and about the ultimate ascendance of their faith.
On questions of national security, I am now as wary of my fellow liberals as I am of the religious demagogues on the Christian right.
This may seem like frank acquiescence to the charge that "liberals are soft on terrorism." It is, and they are.
A cult of death is forming in the Muslim world — for reasons that are perfectly explicable in terms of the Islamic doctrines of martyrdom and jihad. The truth is that we are not fighting a "war on terror." We are fighting a pestilential theology and a longing for paradise.
This is not to say that we are at war with all Muslims. But we are absolutely at war with those who believe that death in defense of the faith is the highest possible good, that cartoonists should be killed for caricaturing the prophet and that any Muslim who loses his faith should be butchered for apostasy.
Unfortunately, such religious extremism is not as fringe a phenomenon as we might hope. Numerous studies have found that the most radicalized Muslims tend to have better-than-average educations and economic opportunities.
Given the degree to which religious ideas are still sheltered from criticism in every society, it is actually possible for a person to have the economic and intellectual resources to build a nuclear bomb — and to believe that he will get 72 virgins in paradise. And yet, despite abundant evidence to the contrary, liberals continue to imagine that Muslim terrorism springs from economic despair, lack of education and American militarism.
At its most extreme, liberal denial has found expression in a growing subculture of conspiracy theorists who believe that the atrocities of 9/11 were orchestrated by our own government. A nationwide poll conducted by the Scripps Survey Research Center at Ohio University found that more than a third of Americans suspect that the federal government "assisted in the 9/11 terrorist attacks or took no action to stop them so the United States could go to war in the Middle East;" 16% believe that the twin towers collapsed not because fully-fueled passenger jets smashed into them but because agents of the Bush administration had secretly rigged them to explode.
Such an astonishing eruption of masochistic unreason could well mark the decline of liberalism, if not the decline of Western civilization. There are books, films and conferences organized around this phantasmagoria, and they offer an unusually clear view of the debilitating dogma that lurks at the heart of liberalism: Western power is utterly malevolent, while the powerless people of the Earth can be counted on to embrace reason and tolerance, if only given sufficient economic opportunities.
I don't know how many more engineers and architects need to blow themselves up, fly planes into buildings or saw the heads off of journalists before this fantasy will dissipate. The truth is that there is every reason to believe that a terrifying number of the world's Muslims now view all political and moral questions in terms of their affiliation with Islam. This leads them to rally to the cause of other Muslims no matter how sociopathic their behavior. This benighted religious solidarity may be the greatest problem facing civilization and yet it is regularly misconstrued, ignored or obfuscated by liberals.
Given the mendacity and shocking incompetence of the Bush administration — especially its mishandling of the war in Iraq — liberals can find much to lament in the conservative approach to fighting the war on terror. Unfortunately, liberals hate the current administration with such fury that they regularly fail to acknowledge just how dangerous and depraved our enemies in the Muslim world are.
Recent condemnations of the Bush administration's use of the phrase "Islamic fascism" are a case in point. There is no question that the phrase is imprecise — Islamists are not technically fascists, and the term ignores a variety of schisms that exist even among Islamists — but it is by no means an example of wartime propaganda, as has been repeatedly alleged by liberals.
In their analyses of U.S. and Israeli foreign policy, liberals can be relied on to overlook the most basic moral distinctions. For instance, they ignore the fact that Muslims intentionally murder noncombatants, while we and the Israelis (as a rule) seek to avoid doing so. Muslims routinely use human shields, and this accounts for much of the collateral damage we and the Israelis cause; the political discourse throughout much of the Muslim world, especially with respect to Jews, is explicitly and unabashedly genocidal.
Given these distinctions, there is no question that the Israelis now hold the moral high ground in their conflict with Hamas and Hezbollah. And yet liberals in the United States and Europe often speak as though the truth were otherwise.
We are entering an age of unchecked nuclear proliferation and, it seems likely, nuclear terrorism. There is, therefore, no future in which aspiring martyrs will make good neighbors for us. Unless liberals realize that there are tens of millions of people in the Muslim world who are far scarier than Dick Cheney, they will be unable to protect civilization from its genuine enemies.
Increasingly, Americans will come to believe that the only people hard-headed enough to fight the religious lunatics of the Muslim world are the religious lunatics of the West. Indeed, it is telling that the people who speak with the greatest moral clarity about the current wars in the Middle East are members of the Christian right, whose infatuation with biblical prophecy is nearly as troubling as the ideology of our enemies. Religious dogmatism is now playing both sides of the board in a very dangerous game.
While liberals should be the ones pointing the way beyond this Iron Age madness, they are rendering themselves increasingly irrelevant. Being generally reasonable and tolerant of diversity, liberals should be especially sensitive to the dangers of religious literalism. But they aren't.
The same failure of liberalism is evident in Western Europe, where the dogma of multiculturalism has left a secular Europe very slow to address the looming problem of religious extremism among its immigrants. The people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists.
To say that this does not bode well for liberalism is an understatement: It does not bode well for the future of civilization.
Copyright 2006 Los Angeles Times
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