Violent Dance

When you pare life down to the essentials — removing the incessant distractions that assail modern man (internet, television, books, games etc) and prevent him from ever being bored — you come to really notice the psychological effects of what you see and do.

It sometimes seems as if the onslaught of modern culture is primarily a means to dilute the impact of any experience you might have. Even if you happened to see something of unparalleled beauty (e.g. Bergman’s sublime Winter Light), its impression fades fast when you turn immediately to a barrage of daily news.

On Saturday we went to see contemporary dance* at Tramway that attempted to translate Nietzsche, Sade, and Sacher-Masoch into dance. It started with a perverse representation of the sadistic intent in Nancy Sinatra’s These Boots Are Made for Walking and then one of the male dancers delivered a frenetic monologue listing “suicide, cunnilingus, pain, orgasm, fucking, fellatio, masturbation, torture”. The effect of this on audience was for them to break out in nervous laughter. I’m not sure what the alternative was.

The rest of the performance used more conventioanl contemporary dance tropes — lots of jerking movements, entangled limbs, and passionate stretching — all of which makes this viewer’s spirits soar and his body feel lighter. However violent the dance became, there was always something fragile about the dancers that kept you engaged. The only slightly disappointment was the lack of contrast between violence and silence*: it was all violent.

* CAS Public, a French-Canadian dance group, performing Helene Blackburn’s Suite Cruelles as part of New Moves International’s annual New Territories festival of dance and performance.

* The first contemporary dance I ever saw was Saburo Teshigawara’s Absolute Zero in 2000, where the contrast between the tiniest movement of a finger tip and a sweeping gesture of the whole body was sublime.

Pappy’s Fun Club

At first glance, you’d think Pappy’s Fun Club are going to be awful. Four studenty comedians who put on a series of ramshackle skits about wacky subjects like which is a better source of information, an owl or the internet, I can’t think of anything worse. Yet, for some reason, it works very well. In lieu of an intelligent review, I thought I might list some reasons as to why this could be.

All the members of Pappy’s Fun Club are endearingly geeky. There is nothing threatening or confrontational about them. It is nice to have comedy with a bit of humility, if only to negate the arrogance of people like Ricky Gervais and Jimmy Carr.

The skits and sketches are really lo-fi and kooky, which means that they are “cool” and independent.

The adlibs are as funny as the scripted material.

There is great dynamic between the four of them — they are like Hot Chip or the Spice Girls, with each Pappy fulfilling a different role.

Like Flight of the Conchords, they make great use of amusing rhymes in their musical numbers.

Recurring motifs don’t feel crowbarred in.

Matthew Crosby looks a lot like a young Woody Allen — his devious little grin is funny in itself.

Hopefully if they go to Edinburgh this year they will find a way of expanding the scope of their show. A musical would be nice.

The Book of Tea

Alerted to its existence by Alan Fletcher’s The Art of Looking Sideways, I have been reading Okakura Kakuzo’s The Book of Tea, a book devoted to explaining Teaism to Occidental minds.

I have a good deal of sympathy for Taoism and love tea, so it was a perfect fit. Here are some choice quotes:

[Tea] has not the arrogance of wine, the self-consciousness of coffee, nor the simpering innocence of cocoa.

The world is groping in the shadow of egotism and vulgarity. [. . .] Let us dream of evanescence, and linger in the beautiful foolishness of things.

The observance of communal traditions involves a constant sacrifice of the individual to the state. Education, in order to keep up the mighty delusion, encourages a species of ignorance. People are not taught to be really virtuous, but to behave properly. We are wicked because we are frightfully self-conscious. We nurse a conscience because we are afraid to tell the truth to others; we take refuge in pride because we are afraid to tell the truth to ourselves. How can one be serious with the world when the world itself is so ridiculous!

The nineteenth century, pregnant with the theory of evolution, has moreover created in us the habit of losing sight of the individual in the species. A collector is anxious to acquire specimens to illustrate a period or a school, and forgets that a single masterpiece can teach us more than any number of the mediocre products of a given period or school. We classify too much and enjoy too little. The sacrifice of the aesthetic to the so-called scientific method of exhibition has been the bane of many museums.

The primeval man in offering the first garland to his maiden thereby transcended the brute. He became human in thus rising above the crude necessities of nature. He entered the realm of art when he perceived the subtle use of the useless.

It has been said that a man at ten is an animal, at twenty a lunatic, at thirty a failure, at forty a fraud, and at fifty a criminal. Perhaps he becomes a criminal because he has never ceased to be an animal. Nothing is real to us but hunger, nothing sacred except our own desires.

Thus they sought to regulate their daily life by the high standard of refinement which obtained in the tea-room. In all circumstances serenity of mind should be maintained, and conversation should be conducted as never to mar the
harmony of the surroundings. The cut and color of the dress, the poise of the body, and the manner of walking could all be made expressions of artistic personality. These were matters not to be lightly ignored, for until one has made himself beautiful he has no right to approach beauty. Thus the tea-master strove to be something more than the artist,– art itself.

The Senses

In meditation you don’t close yourself off from your surroundings, rather you accept and become indifferent to them in order to fully focus on your breathing. One method of accepting your surroundings — so that you don’t become irritated by an errant noise or a distracting sight — is to address the senses one by one. By doing so, you can acknowledge the sense input and either make a change to stop it happening or say that it doesn’t matter. For instance, sitting here . . .

I can smell the slightly fruity musty odour of my jumper. A jumper that lives, for the most part, amongst the raisins, teas and oatcakes in my drawer at work.

I hear the continual whirr of the servers, the occasional beep of a computer or a phone, a patter of voices, people talking quietly about work and lives, outside there is a rumble of HGVs.

I touch the keys of the keyboard, my back and bottom sit in the chair comfortably, I’m not slouching or crossing my legs. My wrists rest on the laptop.

I see the electric lights, the computer screen, Monday morning faces, the dirty rain lashing against the windows.

I taste death, a claggy feeling. I am dehydrated, my Iron Buddha tea hasn’t satiated my thirst.

My sense of balance is wayward due to tiredness.

The temperature is slightly cold, but only slightly — a tiny chill across my back.

I am not hungry but will eat an apple in ten minutes to get a sugar boost.

You’ll notice that I included other senses beyond the usual five, because the usual five seem quite restrictive and don’t acknowledge all of the sensual irritants we have to face. Once I have done this, I can then focus — that is the idea, anyway. In reality, it is Monday morning and my brain is all over the place.

The Watchmen

The Watchmen is often noted as the first intelligent, thoughtful, adult comic. In it, the mythology and psychopathology of superheroes is analysed and the implications of such power being aligned to dubious politicians is dissected. With every compelling frame of the comic you are drawn to think and reflect on what it all means. It is a piece of serious art, the Dark Side of the Moon of the graphic novel genre.

So, as you can imagine, turning it into a film was always going to be difficult. From the start it was clear that the brilliance of The Watchmen was so interwoven with its form that a movie was always going to be difficult. All that space for thought that you get from a book, the ability to put it down and imagine what it all means, this is lost with juggernaut of the cinema. It goes on for a long time, but there is never any time to stop and take it all in — it is just grotesquely detailed, aesthetically enhanced action or slow, ponderous philosophical conversation — the rhythm of cinema is wrong for story.

Director Zack Snyder’s previous movie, 300, was a brainless war movie about the battle of Thermopylae. It was exotic, hyperrealist, and quite dull — three attributes that he inevitably brought along to The Watchmen. The Watchmen opens with an incredible set-piece fight; you can see every splinter of glass move when it smashes, every punch that lands is depicted in high detail, blood drips with amazing viscosity . . . so why does it all feel so sterile. Partly it is the hyperreal computer enhanced aesthetic — which you can admire, but never be affected by — but mainly, I think, it is because the characters themselves are so flat and 2-dimensional. For, whilst this may be an exact shot-for-frame remake of Dave Gibbons’ artwork, Snyder seems incapable of eliciting the same level of emotion from his actors.

Ultimately, one is left sympathising with Alan Moore, the original author of The Watchmen, who refuses to have his name attached to any adaptation of his work, refusing even to collect any of the millions of pounds that they want to pay him. For Moore, who is disciplined enough to avoid even watching the films, the principle of being faithful to the form is absolute. Not because cinema is inferior but because it is not possible to do in it what he wants to do. The Watchmen doesn’t — and couldn’t — change that.

Ambition

I appear to have lost all ambition. If you told me that I would exist and live more or less as I am now for the rest of my life then I would be fine with that. At the moment. None of my desires are “burning”, I don’t need to impress, there is no mission that I feel impelled to complete. I am happy being, content to live whilst enjoying conversation, love, friendship, etc. Of course, you might argue that if I was more ambitious and achieved more in life I might be able to have better conversation, love, and friendship but I doubt it is worth the aggravation.

I like the taoist phrase, wu wei, meaning ‘to act without doing’. It implies a wonderful effortlessness, when there is no barrier between yourself and what you are doing. Ambition is a barrier, it gets in the way. It is far better to be contented than full of strife and strivings.

Goals are a contract with the future, without them we worry that we will end up disappointed at having wasted time. Goals help us to to focus our energies towards things that we consider more worthy than others. Everyone has goals, even if they are not consciously stated. What do those people who say they want nothing want? Are they conservatives who want everything to remain the same? Or do they really aspire towards having a mind like water, reacting appropriately to every stone or rock dropped in, then reverting to placid stillness.

There have been quietists in the past. People who have taken an attitude of non-intervention in all things. I sympathise with them, but wonder if is it responsible to do nothing when the possibility of global ecological collapse seems so close?