Apparently, being appealing to children puts you on a beeline for homosexuality

From the Washington Post today:

Poland’s conservative government took its drive to curb what it sees as homosexual propaganda to the small screen on Monday, taking aim at Tinky Winky and the other Teletubbies.

Ewa Sowinska, government-appointed children rights watchdog, told a local magazine published on Monday she was concerned the popular BBC children’s show promoted homosexuality.

I remember this ‘concern’ being around when I was a kid- when the Teletubbies first came onto our screens. Right-wing paternalists have flaunted their rage at various homosexuals including Noddy, Spongebob Squarepants, Winnie the Pooh, and, oh, why not pounce on every childrens show for promoting a homosexual lifestyle as favourable, happy, and fun.

I wonder if they’ve ever thought…actually, let’s try that again, I’m sure they haven’t…

It seems to me that maybe the problem that these conservatives have lies amongst their own preconceptions of what children like in the first place…if they conceive childrens’ interests as being happy, jovial, and yes, even camp characters, and characters that fit such a mould are created in order to keep these kids happy, then of course they are going to then find fault with the sexual orientation of characters.

So, those concerned with ‘children’s rights’, as they claim to be, either need to stop endorsing the ideas in the first place that kids are going to be entertained by campiness and find something else to entertain them (perhaps a lethargic, grumpy, aggressive shoe or something), or else decide that, yes, kids find happy characters amusing and, maybe, will learn from Tinky-Winky that they too can use a bag to carry stuff around in (alas! childrens’ entertainment as educational?!).

But something tells me that they won’t. These retentive groups will always need something that they can drive their stick at; their only survival method is to continually find liberals who they can crush and grind into dust.

Maybe…slightly angry…slightly left-wing…

License to touch

I have been thinking a lot about touch. Touch amongst people, how we respond to it, how it affects our lives, how it makes us feel. Just having a regular conversation with a friend, you may touch them on the arm, kiss them on the cheek, or just brush against them as you walk together. This is a vehicle for comfort; a sign we are comfortable around people, that they make us comfortable when near.

All of this relates to friendly touch, which is a form of public touch. Public touch also comes into other forms of contact; the romantic relationship being the most predominant, and perhaps the most important contact that a person may have. In a relationship with someone, you is license to touch them in public, around others, not only as a continuation of the mould with which you may normally be with them, but as a public signal of your feelings. Touching in certain ways, say, holding hands, placing a hand on someone’s back, on someone’s knee, all signify the romantic relationship, all suggest to the people around that you have a license to touch this person, however you may want or need to. As it is something that you do in private, then doing so whenever you are with the person builds up a constant blanket of comfort. Feeling sad about one thing, perhaps having contact with this person will indulge your comfort levels in another way, making things feel okay.

What happens when this license to touch is restricted? When you can touch someone only in privacy, for whatever reason, the license to touch them no longer has freedom. Behaviour must change, and the body must be held back from contact you may otherwise have with a person. If you only have license to touch a person in private, then being around them in public can be painful; not only emotionally, perhaps, but physically. It is uncomfortable to restrain yourself from acting in a particular way. As touch is so important to us, so imperative to us feeling wanted, liked, appreciated, then when the desires of our body cannot be satiated we feel loss. Discomfort and loss, especially if perpetuated by non-contact with an other, can make everything seem bad.

This is why having a license to touch a friend, say, is so important to humans. If one relationship becomes restricted, then at least we can take refuge in the comfort of contact with someone else, whose touch lets us know that they care, and if we’re lucky, lets us know that they need our touch just as much as we need theirs.

Free time…um, what’s that?

Today is the first day that I have not had work and/or class in longer than I can even bother to think. So the problem I have is, what do I do with this day?

So far I have read the paper, had tea, done some exercises, listened to beautiful/depressing music to suit my mood, and moped around for quite some time. I need to take some clothing to the dry cleaners at some stage. I might do some cooking. Tonight I am going to see a friend in a show at uni, but that’s eight hours away.

And of course I need to spend hours on my uni work. Have progressed only slightly on my surrealism essay and much, much less on the other two, but I think that I can get quite a bit done today and then be well on the way to getting it finished. Although, as I am realising, because I have so much time at my disposal today, making a start is going to be the hard part.

Shakespeare knew how things worked, though. Venus and Adonis

Make use of time; let not advantage slip;

Beauty within itself should not be wasted.

Fair flowers that are not gathered in their prime

Rot and consume themselves in little time.

At that, maybe I should take advantage of this time and actually do something with it. But even though it’s only nine days until I have two essays due (at once!), the illogical measurements of time that are working through my head suggest that I don’t need to spend eight hours doing things anyway.

Actually, yes I do. Enough blogging…more tomorrow…along with going to work! Structure!

A Japanese kind of Surrealism

Bara no soretsu/Funeral Parade of Roses (Toshio Matsumoto, 1969)

‘Although I found the freedom of avant-garde’s uninhibited, imaginative world extremely attractive, it had the tendency to get stuck in a closed world. Documentaries, on the other hand, while intesely related to reality, would not really thoroughly address internal mental states and were so dependent upon their temporal contexts they would look old-fashioned if their temporal context changed. i wondered whether the point of collision between the limitations and strong points of the two forms could not pose a new set of topics for cinema.’

- Matsumoto, 1996.

Eternal surrealism

My lecuture for Surrealism and Film has asked us for the final week to bring in a television commercial with surrealist influences and/or one that would appeal to the surrealists in aesthetics or content. Because I don’t have a television, this is a hard task to undertake.

However, I found on a blog Michel Gondry’s ad for HP Intel computer, and the last line struck me as something the surrealists might love. I certainly love it- as Gondry is lying in bed with eyes closed, he says in voiceover, “I dream a lot.” Then he opens his eyes and tells us directly “…but I’m not a very good sleeper.”

He dreams, and this computer helps him to imagine his reality in a more marvellous way. Throughout the commercial, Gondry’s cutting away at the screen to reveal, and exist alongside, his animated and digital alter egos, suggests an embrace of the surreal imagination, the aesthetic whereby our dreams enter our waking life and make the mundane state of being awake much more fantastical.

Que Sera

Two amazing things brought together as one.

Perverse misogyny (but when is it not perverse?)

Why am I posting this? In the wise words of Wax Tailor, I Don’t Know.

From Marquis de Sade’s One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom :

‘The libertine requires a dozen women [...] He pumps out their cunts, asses, and mouths; when applying his lips to the cunt, he want copious urine; when at the mouth, much saliva; when at the ass abundant farts.’

Well, the surrealists loved it.

I Heart Celluloid

From journalist article ‘The Reel Thing’, The Age, Thursday May 10 2007:

I’m surprised at how slowly digital has been embraced by exhibition and distribution. A cinema film print is worth $2000,” [ACMI head of film programs Richard Sowada] says.

An equivalent digital version of a feature film costs about $190.

In the US, the average big feature requires 3000 film prints for global distribution. According to Dodona’s forecasts, distributors can expect to save more than $US3.4 million ($A4.1 million) a film when they no longer have to produce 35mm prints.

This is a scary fact, because while celluloid still currently retains domination over the production of cinema, I don’t imagine a benefit such as this will stay ignored for much longer. Even though I am sure many filmmakers love film, I just don’t have enough faith in the world to assume they will stick with it forever.

I seem to be adopting a purist tack here where I do not in all other areas of culture, but the magnificent sense of presence within a film that is derived from watching 35mm just cannot be captured with digital. If use of celluloid is worked out of the film industry, an essential aspect of film’s materiality will be lost. The most recognisable signifiers of the cinema, a movie camera and a reel of film, will become nullified, its tangibility disrupted.

Nonetheless, I cannot dispute the significance of digital cinema for certain things, such as the expansion of the cinematic sphere to more parts of the globe – see, for example, Ten (Abbas Kiarostami, 2002) – bringing into the public issues, spaces and cultures that have previously been less able to project themselves. But for industries like Hollywood that have a huge (ridiculous) amount of capital and growth to fund their projects, and even ‘arthouse’ films that want to claim ‘authenticity’, celluloid should not be rejected.

Things I want to go to that geographical locations prevent

So it seems that I am going to be in North America several months too late- at the moment their featured exhibition is Tragic Kingdon: The Art of Camille Rose Garcia.

Black Kraken Hijack, 2004. Acrylic and glitter on wood, 48×48 inches.

From the gallery’s website:

Garcia’s most recent series, the artist states, searches for “beauty and hope in a doomed world, with ice caves, mountains, and deep seas all forming a landscape of the subconscious in which characters forage for elusive and fragile moments of optimism.”

That sounds beautiful, and so encapsulating. Being surrounded by rooms of her paintings is just what I need right now.

I have also missed an amazing Andy Warhol focus (screenings of Edie Sedgwick’s oeuvre) in the last few weeks, and am currently missing out on Rare ‘Spider-Man Screenings’ at New York’s Museum of the Moving Image.

Is green power just about money?

From The New York Times, May 6 2007.

The Age of Dissonance: Global Yawning