Edvard Munch’s Madonna. We carry with us the trauma of birth, the separation from the womb. This wound is a constant reminder of our original Oneness.
Wounds can be found everywhere. The eye is an open wound on the surface of the skin; it receives information from outside, to be processed into concepts by the mind. In philosophy, Plotinus saved art from Plato’s damnation of it as an imitation of an imitation, two steps removed and a bigger lie, by…
The key to the romantic appraisal of the noble savage, of the ancient Hero, is that their poetry was utilised as a means of communicating and memorising their social structures, mythology, and identity. Their memories were stored not just in the brain but in the body, in the legs and throat. They would sing and dance along with the muses, and this would allow them to retain this information deeply. This is why their actions seem so outrageous, they were…
One of the main tenets of Liberalism is that politics, law, religion etc. ought to follow logical and somewhat impersonal methods, based on Enlightenment thinking where abstract thought and quantification are valued over everything else, all of which gets placed into a box labelled something like "irrational" or maybe "dogmatic" (I'm simplifying for the sake of brevity). Juror #2 succinctly displays a situation in which those ambitions and assumptions are questioned and undermined. It is stressed that this lawful procedure…
In 2013, Youtuber Chris Stuckmann made an unfinished short movie named Julia. It is harder to come across now, no doubt because he’s embarrassed, because it is embarrassing, but it’s hilarious and I would recommend everyone see it. It’s a rip-off of Drive among other things, mainly Gosling's character from that movie. In other videos of his he’s also gotten the scorpion jacket on, and he’s dressed up as other characters like Tom Cruise’s character in Collateral. What these have…
It's weird to see a movie that's so outwardly interested in media, also be so disinterested in exploring the question of its effects and formal causes, a sort of Videodrome in reverse where the imagery is borrowed but without really any of the thinking going on in Cronenberg's movie, the thinking is replaced with didactic messaging which I never appreciate even when done well. Here, merging with the screen is the unquestioned solution, going so far as to create an…
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