time and relative dimension

For me the world is at best clever, and frequently dumb. Just thinking about what I respond to. The world touches my emotional side as lightly as a cobweb but might screw a delighted grin out of me for its novelty. Plenty I see or experience elicits in me sharp feeling, nothing has a lasting counterpart in memory or in the bones of feeling. I find songs, books, films, the arrangement of words to provoke revelation gravid only with echoes. My feelings last seconds, my memories minutes and meaning freights no hardship.

Something in us responds and consistently. It's rarely any deeper than a touch with me. I don't remember words and I can't say how words on a page make me feel because they don't. This is faked up as analysis is required (I have no ability for performance whatever because I can't feel the words I read). This is scarcely any different when listening to music except where genuine and rare genius is in evidence. With drama it's easier; naturalistic acting is like a direct feed into the systems of human interaction. That said I can get completely into a scene while it's playing and have forgotten it by the next one. I make a claim for that consistent response - I know when I have liked a thing and hold on to it in the ledger, but the experience itself has to be renewed each time.

I guess what this means is while everything I've told you about the things I've enjoyed is true, most assumptions you might make about what I carry around in my head are probably wrong. Words and feelings don't mean much to me, if I respond it's at the level of pure reaction, and it is without much temporal component. I am the person who likes a thing while it's happening, and have almost nothing to relate when it's done. Describing anything is like a half-remembered dream and efforts to sew a continuity are an ongoing performance. I'm not very good at it.

I could suggest that there might be a reason why I have no creative urge - this constant push to consume media in order to fill my life with relationships to other people is the most complete and continual creative act I can manage.

(no subject)

Immediately after posting to LJ last I began reading the Picture of Dorian Gray for the first time. Jesus Christ, what a genius that man was.

Psychopaths kill for no reason. I kill for money. It's a job.

Also, listening to the Grosse Pointe Blank soundtrack further belies my claims of soulless lack. Brilliant and memorable soundtrack album, not one bum note. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grosse_point_blank#Soundtrack

dyooor

"[I]f done properly film criticism should maintain a safe distance from film-making because, just as good taste is the enemy of art, so intimacy and cosiness are the enemies of honest criticism. In an ideal world, film critics would have no friends amongst the film-making fraternity. In fact they would probably have no friends, full stop. Nor would they nurture any ambition to become film-makers themselves.

Nope, a good film critic should, by their very nature, be ... an unwanted outsider to whom nothing is owed and from whom nothing is expected by the people who actually make movies. So, when Z-list British 'actor' and 'personality' recently became the latest in a long line of affronted luvvies to threaten to beat me up for mocking his rotten films, I felt a sense of pride that I was still able to provoke such a violent reaction. This is just part of the job: if you're honest about the parlous state of some movies, then you have to be ready for the people who make those movies to start bleating about how they're going to kick your head in for being mean and disrespectful about their craft. In this particular case, said affrontee actually devoted three pages in his newly published autobiography to repeating his widely viewed YouTube promise to 'put something right across [my] faakin canister' for laughing at his risible Dick Van Dire cockney-geezer shtick. It's a threat he continues to repeat ad nauseam; even as I write, I see Dick has once again told the press that he will headbutt me and break my 'faakin nose' because I 'don't take [him] seriously as an actor'.

Luvvies are like this, even the mockney ones. To be fair, this particular drug-snorting Groucho-club habitué was probably upset at having recently torched his career by publicly advising a fan to cut his ex-girlfriend's face (a joke, apparently...) thereby becoming the only person ever to get fired from Zoo magazine for being too sexist."

-- Mark Kermode