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more about "American Cantos — RED ONE PRODUCTION…", posted with vodpod
This is a sublime short film by Joe Taylor, with a tip of the blogging hat to Patrick Zimmerman for flagging this up. He shot it with the stunning Red One digital HD camera (if I had a million dollars…). Taylor’s filming style reminds me of some of the atmospheric work of Ron Fricke of Koyaanisqatsi and Baraka fame.
Both cinematographers rely on stunningly framed shots of beautiful landscapes, even if the landscapes are beautiful in subtle, slightly under appreciated ways like the scenes of rusting windmills and half-collapsed barns.
I grew up in rural Illinois, and I still find farm scenes very evocative. They whisper home in my ear. They wrap me, sometimes uncomfortably, in the warmth of nostalgia. When we’re younger, home seems something to escape from, but as we grow older, the burnished memories beckon. The sharp edges are worn smooth with time, and we long for something that probably never was and probably never will be.
That speaks to the tension I find in myself so often. I am a nomad who longs for a sense of being rooted. I love the quiet solitude of the countryside and open spaces but, just like Jack Kerouac, need my noisy bursts of city excitement. I am sure that I am not alone in struggling to balance the tensions of my personality. I expect there are few who stand poised on the fulcrum of their conflicting desires apart from all too fleeting moments. However, I know that too often I fail to savour the moment I’m in and instead long for moments I remember or at least think I remember.
I suppose that all this is part of the human condition rather than a personal failing. Contentment has always been elusive, and the bliss of it is probably – like all positive emotions – twinned with its absence. The tricky bit for me comes in feeling my way through these tensions in my personality. Am I simply suffering yet another bout of the ‘grass is greener’ or are these slight pangs of dissatisfaction something I should pay attention to?
Woody Guthrie from Wikicommons
After watching the inauguration and knowing the challenges that we all face, not just back in home in the United States but here in Britain and all around the world, I still retain my optimism, although some accuse us Americans of allowing that to slip into naïveté. My optimism is tempered by an awareness of the severity of this economic crisis, but I’ve always been realistic and pragmatic. To me, it’s part of the values from my family and from where I grew up, the Midwest in the US.
It’s at times like this I think back to Woody Guthrie and his songs of hope during the dark days of the Great Depression. The next few years aren’t going to be easy, but together, yes, we can. Woody once said:
I have hoped as many hopes and dreamed so many dreams, seen them swept aside by weather, and blown away by men, washed away in my own mistakes, that — I use to wonder if it wouldn’t be better just to haul off and quit hoping. Just protect my own inner brain, my own mind and heart, by drawing it up into a hard knot, and not having any more hopes or dreams at all. Pull in my feelings, and call back all of my sentiments — and not let any earthly event move me in either direction, either cause me to hate, to fear, to love, to care, to take sides, to argue the matter at all — and, yet … there are certain good times, and pleasures that I never can forget, no matter how much I want to, because the pleasures, and the displeasures, the good times and the bad, are really all there is to me.
And these pleasures that you cannot ever forget are the yeast that always starts working in your mind again, and it gets in your thoughts again, and in your eyes again, and then, all at once, no matter what has happened to you, you are building a brand new world again, based and built on the mistakes, the wreck, the hard luck and trouble of the old one.
chess, originally uploaded by malias. Some Rights Reserved.
I grew up with chess although not a serious player. My brother ‘taught’ me chess, although in his eagerness to win, he had his own set of rules. And his rules were not anything that people would recognise but rather something closer to the weird world of quantum physics where the rules changed when they were observed. For instance, the rook would at certain points in the game attain new and special powers that usually overwhelmed me. I only learned later that my brother’s arcane rules of chess were specific to him. But the damage had been done, and I grew up with a chess inferiority complex.
Many of my friends played chess, which isn’t surprising considering that I went to a high school for ‘gifted students’. I’m sure that you can attribute some of this to a chess frenzy in the US after Bobby Fischer won the world championship in 1972, the year I was born.
I read his obituaries with an odd curiosity, and I was struck by the beauty of the language of chess grandmasters about the game and about Bobby Fischer’s creative genius in a New York Times article about his life.
Chess writer and teacher Bruce Pandolfini said:
“After 1972, we lost so many great pieces of art,” said Mr. Pandolfini, the chess teacher, “hundreds of masterpieces he would have created if he had stayed a sane being. We feel the great loss. All chess players do.”
And in recounting a masterful 1964 tournament, there is sublime quote by Robert Bryne:
”It was one of his brilliant counterattacks,” recalled Mr. Byrne, who would go on to become the chess columnist for The New York Times. “He was playing Black, and he made a deep sacrifice, so deep that I did not understand it. It was a very profound combination, very beautiful.”Mr. Byrne ended up resigning the game while he was still materially ahead. The result was so unusual that it confounded grandmasters analyzing the games for spectators.
I was moved by the quiet passion that these chess masters had for their game and the beauty that they saw in it, even in sacrifice and loss. Bobby Fischer’s life was a tragic one, only half lived. His was another beautiful mind lost to madness.
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