Guqin (goo-chin) master

Guqin (goo-chin) master.

Resolutions come & go…

Resolutions come & go….

Difficult Teachers

Difficult Teachers.

Mind Mapping

Shouldn’t love be the one truth? Who knows. That was the ’60s in a place (Paris) that felt particularly cynical, deserving, ahead of her time, bored by anything new, sad over all the old, and yet the story says anything but love is the truth for a girl who falls into a way of making a living she never quite meant to happen.

Vivre Sa Vie – Vivre sa vie on The Auteurs

Vivre Sa Vie – Vivre sa vie on The Auteurs.

From the article:

By Hamid Sirhan on December 19, 2009

back to Vivre sa vie

I have quickly become a fan of Godard’s work in the past week. I had previously enjoyed some of his films as part of my academic study in the past (‘La Chinoise’ in the context of the political atmosphere in 1960s France just before 1968) but the Auteur’s recent film festival (http://www.theauteurs.com/stellaartois (18+)) has given me a chance to experience more of his work for free. ‘Vivre Sa Vie’ is still available to watch today in the UK.

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Prostitution is a theme pervading Godard’s work (eg Yvonne in ‘La Chinoise’) but this is the first time I’ve encountered it as the central narrative force. He tells the story of Nana, played by his wife, a normal housewife who gives up her fantasies of being in the movies to become a prostitute. Through shifting camera work and long takes, Godard shows her working, waiting, smoking (a lot) and then, tragically dying, shot as neither a prime target nor as an innocent bystander by cruel pimps who see no value in her beyond they money they are paying and being paid.

It is a great (if depressing) work that manages to capture ‘60s France (note ’Jules et Jim’ showing at the cinema) and the vagaries of prostitution.Its political commentary never leaves the story floundering and Anna Karina’s performance is subtle and fitting. The film is all about Nana. The other characters merely serve to explain her life (or end it).

4.4 at 4:14 a.m.

Not long ago I wrote about  the earthquake in Chile which was an 8.8. Well, just yesterday we had a 4.4 about 10 miles east of downtown Los Angeles. It woke Billy and I up, which is no mean feat his having been up for days (I can only pull 24-36 hours these days before I just fall over and crash in a heap of depressed madness, wishing I were a Tolstoy short story, Hemingway’s sweater, Picasso’s big boned gal, anything but wide awake and fluttering away at the nothingness that seems to pass through these walls like the dust particles formed of smog).

Ah, but then there was the blissful sleep, I sleep all day, nothing to do, don’t leave, eat what’s here, don’t have to descend in one of the Rosslyn’s funky elevators (either someone has puked in it or left some other such present for their neighbors or a film crew is locking it up all the way from the laundry room — where they always put craft service — to the roof, where pilots like to shoot for some reason) —  I was not as deeply asleep as I had been the whole day before, a decadent Monday or sleep and going to the Post Office and basking in the sun before it got so hot….

And then Tuesday morning, jolted awake, there is nothing like it, the building rattles and you brace yourself, half awake, groggy, knowing within :45 what is happening, just not sure how long it’s going to last or how bad it’s going to be. So you lay in bed, not even awake enough to pray.

And as soon as it starts, or almost, the time that passes is surreal, so it’s hard to say, when you have been woken by your walls shaking around  you while you are sleeping (I can’t remember if I was dreaming about Kaua’i that night or not, but my dreams lately have been of Virginia in some form of memory, Kaua’i as a continually moving entity, breathing almost, certain roads remain unchanged, but in Virginia, it is all about my home where I grew up, all roads lead there, and google maps has frightened me, or more exactly, made me sad) but when you are awoken by the earth moving under you, ripping plates apart, to cause the walls to shake, on the 9th floor of a very old building that has seen many an earthquake in its time, then you know you are apart of that same, although exactly in half, momentum of the 8.8 I wrote about not long ago.

Strange how our earthquake was exactly half of the devastating disaster in Chile, further south, on some fault that wants out of its shell, and is moving away from itself. Aren’t we all? Aren’t we all just moving away or into ourselves, depending on our orientations — self-loathing to narcissism. There is very little in-between anymore.

Perhaps that is what the earth is telling us. It wants to swallow us whole, spit us out clean and start all over again, without the war mongers, the nuclear waste pansies, the opinionated fucks who go around destroying the earth with every breath they take because money rules them, greed rules them, some kind of ‘earth-bound’ human-found status binds them to continual meaningless–and those are the ones who, largely, give us our jobs, tell us what to think, run our countries and dominate most of the powerful positions in the world, so the rest of us schmucks are left to the arts, scientific research, maybe a think tank if we’re lucky. Academics don’t even qualify for the torment we feel — we know but there is nothing we can do about it. Yet.