Demon Seed

The sound of summer so far...

Of Man's First Disobedience and the Fruit of that Forbidden Tree...

Currently re-reading Milton's Paradise Lost, in preperation for the coming term. I forgot how mindblowing some of the description is. So disorientating, and so epic.
This section - Satan persuades Sin to open the doors of hell, in order for him to corrupt mankind.

With impetuous recoil and jarring sound
Th’ infernal doors, and on their hinges grate
Harsh thunder, that the lowest bottom shook
Of Erebus. She opened, but to shut
Excelled her power; the gates wide open stood

Amazing. I'm not going to deny that much of the poem is rather dull. It can be difficult to get through. But Milton's Satan, and the frequent bouts of frankly amazing description completely make up for it. This is one to re-read. His prose works . . . maybe not so much. The ridiculous names, like Areopagitica, Tetrachordon and Colasterion sound like Mars Volta song titles . . . if only they were as interesting.
-Farewell for now.
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THIS IS NOT AN EXIT

Quiet Please - No Mobile Phones

Sitting in Derwent computer room, no natural light, two other ill looking men, and the mechanical chatter of keyboards. My essay grinds to a halt . . . seven hundred words in and . . . nothing. On the plus side, this summer is shaping up to be a good one. I have (about . . . well, you could say exactly 3 minutes ago) sent off my application to the Study China Programme. A course which consists of three weeks of intensive Mandarin lessons in Shanghai over summer. Everything is paid for, except for the flights. If all goes well I will be travelling to three continents this year. Pretty impressive, seeing as I've only been to two in my whole life. Those being Europe (pretty inescapable really), and North America - having travelled through Canada two years ago. Hopefully I can save up enough money to afford it all.

In other news I have my final (possibly ever) shift at blockbuster tomorrow, which will no doubt consist of an eight hour shift boxing various things up, and packing things away. Although I moan about it, I will miss that place. A customer even wrote me a letter yesterday. Here it is :

To whom it may concern,

Please note, I would like to express my utmost disappointment at the closure of this store. Gareth has always been so friendly, it's a shame.

Sonia 17/04/10

Fairly harmless and to the point, but charming and sweet nonetheless. It is nice to know you'll be missed. Anyway, I must leave now. This room is too claustrophobic, especially on a sunday. Farewell for now
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Enter the Void

Gaspar Noé's Enter the Void theatrical trailer

You have no idea how excited I am about this...

Back to York

And so I find myself back in . . . York, in an unreasonably busy and noisy library. For real, there are men with drills and everything, and a strange kind of outside lift thing which makes a siren noise every time it moves. Granted, that is pretty cool, but it's so damn loud! This blog post is my attempt to stray away from trauling through pretensive books about J.M.Coetzee, and the 'South African Problem' - not that I'm implying that there isn't a problem, but I just can't get into it. I am coming to realise that Disgrace, by Coetzee, is probably one of the most complex novels I've read. It masquerades under this subtle clarity of style, as something straightforward and plain to see. But it raises all these different questions about the characters, questions which contradict each other but have to be considered simultaneously. And the sentences are so simple that you feel inclined to question them. I'm sure there is still a lot going on beneath the text that I simply can't see. Blerugh. I seriously can't wait until this essay is out of the way... you have no idea, this book is frying my brain. Anyway, I will be spending the next week living in the house alone (maybe not something you should admit on the internet?) Already I am convinced that there are many ghosts in my house and that someone must be turning lights on when I'm asleep. Well, hopefully I'll survive. More concerning is the fact of having little human contact. I'll see how it goes.
But for now, back to work.
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Lost Highway and Subjective Identity

Ed -Do you own a video camera?
Renee Mason - No. Fred hates them.
Fred - I like to remember things my on way.
Ed - What do you mean by that?
Fred -How I remembered them. Not necessarily the way they happened.

It would be fair to say that I am a fairly long-standing fan of the work of David Lynch, a man who might be named by some, the king of American surrealism. Having watched all of Lynch's works except the infamous Lost Highway numerous times (mainly in order to grasp an understanding of them) one begins to notice a trend within his work toward making movies about making movies. A stance which actively encourages viewers of his films to read the film's message against itself. For example, in Inland Empire we have the idea of the cursed Polish production being told through the medium of film itself. Alongside this we have the suffocatingly disorienting confusion between what we believe to be the actual movie script, with the script of the fictional movie, which is being filmed within the film. However, to take a step back, we realise that there is no confusion at all, because Lynch has intended for the script to act in this way. What I'm trying to say is, to gain meaning we must take a step back, out of the layers of film. Mulholland Drive also demonstrated this layering effect with Naomi Watts' character (Betty/Diane) playing the role of an aspiring actor, Justin Theroux's character as a director, and a whole host of peripheral characters working on film sets, where the mark at which we place reality becomes lost. I was, then, fairly unsurprised to find Lost Highway addressing similar issues. After a single viewing I cannot claim to have come anywhere near unravelling the many mysteries and layers of the movie, but one thing I have taken away stems from the quote above. Relatively near to the beginning of the film Fred admits to a police detective that he does not like video cameras, he prefers to "remember things [his] own way" explaining that his own memory of things would therefore not, neccessarily, be synonymous with the general consensus of 'history', and past events - the objective history. Throughout the movie there is a confusion of identities. Our protagonist Fred, somehow transforms into another person, Al, who then acts out what we could (feasibly) assume to be a warped account of his past. Similarly Fred's wife Renee seems to shift her identity, becoming Alice Wakefield, the fancy woman of a kingpin. This masking and switching of identity seems to be linked to the idea of subjective, or personal memory, and the idea that history is not completely unchangeable, but, rather, amorphous and impressionable. Once this transformation of identity takes place, we enter into an unpredictable internal world, where objectivity becomes an obselete and, in fact, impossible stance. Instead characters become for themselves, and for others, who they want them to be. Our own faith in the objectivity of film clashes violently with the subjectivity of the characters, who attempt to sabotage what we would perhaps label the 'rational' in favour of the irrational and internal rule of the mind. We are presented with a clash between the subjectivity of human life, and the objective classification enacted by machine. We find, then, that only when the movie's disconcertingly creepy "Mystery Man" comes along with his camera, does Al, Fred's alter-ego, or adpoted identity begin to falter, the subjective construction of 'reality' crumbles, and objectivity 'history' prevails. Through the medium of the camera Al transforms back into Fred. For me, this moment where through the lens of the video camera things become 'real', presents the only genuine exit from the internal, fictional, world of subjectivity - and promises a re-immersion in a world of the camera, which is once again objective. I guess the movie taught me to perhaps see people through a kind of metaphysical video camera. Where feelings, wishes, desires and the warping and distorting power of the mind is sidelined in favour of an all objective frame of view. Perhaps, by evaluating human relationships through this lense of objectivity one can have a clearer view of things, instead of evaluating things according to subconscious and unplaceable desires which are, perhaps, at work without us realising. Lynch seeks to question us further than this though, about the nature of reality, and the idea that a physical manifestation of a personality may be radically different to the body they inhabit. Similarly we pose ourselves the question of whether there can ever be an objective meaning of objectivity itself, and in essence, whether we can even be sure that there is a shared, and objective view of 'history', and not just a web of subjective realities? But I think I'll leave those big questions for another day, to be answered after another viewing. Nevertheless it cannot be denied that Lynch poses these questions very carefully, encouraging us to think about not just our human relationships, but the trust we put in our own perceptions, and our own constructions of 'reality'. I'm sure that on successive viewings more will be illuminated, and the layers of film will reveal themselves. But for now, adieu!_________________________________________________________
THIS IS NOT AN EXIT.

Fragments

The warbling sounds of King Crimson’s "21st Century Schizoid Man" sliced through the tainted air, the distorted chords and piercing saxophone searching out and probing even the darkest corners of the room. Sitting on my bed life seemed to resemble this song more than ever, the distorted guitar a musical representation of a peculiar strand of confusion, lingering inside my head like an impertinent smog, clouding rational thought. Only last week my life exploded, entering a new phase of disorder, I had become the 21st century schizoid man. My hands incessently trembled, and I couldn't sleep. The nights were now spent staring at the ceiling puzzling out what made all this happen. Any attempts to sit still were in vain, my legs always on edge, tapping, tapping, tapping, my body infused with some restless weakness which was wholly insurmountable. An incense stick burned in the corner of the room a tail of ash dropping off the end, the mesmerising smoke clouding the air, rising, forming, flowering, kaleidoscopic intricate patterns engulfing themselves, perfuming the room. Everything felt warm, numb, everything tingling and fuzzy, yet still unable to sleep, still tapping, dreaming, and dying, all over again; following that reptilian, screaming saxophone noise through the air with a single grubby index finger. I decided to get up, rolled off my bed, the disorientation extreme, yet, on my feet. Pull the curtains away from each other to reveal a darkness, sprinkled with illuminated windows of the neighbouring houses. I don't know what time it is. I sit for a while, watch a man walk from room to room, pacing, thinking. Another elderly woman battles with her small, almost rodent-like dog before closing the door on it. The small animal's slender whine reaches my ears through the double glazing and background music, it is somehow melodic. Walking to the door in the warm light of the room, I grip the handle, and pull, slowly. The door is heavier than usual, but relents. I languidly wander downstairs and sit down on the sofa. I begin to think this whole situation over. Only fragments of memory remain. The alluring sound of heels on cobbles, muffled laughter and the insatiable scent of dusk.

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