Mazurka in A minor

Chopin Mazurka in A minor Op 17 no 4 from GWhiz Arts & Sciences on Vimeo.

Gifts

Chances are you'll come across a piece on the wanton materialism that abounds during the liturgical season of Advent. And it's deserved because people get into a bluster (in the wrong ways/no repentance) about Christmas too early and then, dupes they are, chuck it too early, on Boxing Day, just when it's got started.

If there is anyone willing to give ear to the lambasting of the obsession with gift-giving (and receiving) to the detriment of receiving Jesus the Christ Child into one's heart, it is me. But I get antsy when I hear something like this in the midst of the otherwise good awakening: "...and people spend money they do not have [I agree, tis true] on things that people don't even need..."

It's that last part: "...on things that people don't even need". Then my glitchy puritan-radar kicks in. What are gifts that we give to other people (material ones) but things that, when said and done, are things we don't really 'need'?

Among others, or perhaps others spurred by him, C.S. Lewis makes the "...on things that people don't even need" statement in one of his essays. He is wrong - insofar as the word gift is used in a mistaken way in order to heighten the deflating purpose of his otherwise true overall conclusion. As if gifts are supposed to entail necessity. The argument is hogwash. It is also, as said, puritanical as hell. Gifts are supposed to be things we don't really need. It does not require an explanation as to why.

And by the way, the Christ Child did not need the gold or the frank-incense or the myrrh. I wish otherwise intelligent people worth listening to would take that one little bit and give it the funeral it deserves.

Psalm 51

Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love; according to your abundant mercy blot out my transgressions.

Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin.

For I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me.

Against you, you alone, have I sinned, and done what is evil in your sight, so that you are justified in your sentence and blameless when you pass judgment.

Indeed, I was born guilty, a sinner when my mother conceived me.

You desire truth in the inward being; therefore teach me wisdom in my secret heart.

Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.

Let me hear joy and gladness; let the bones that you have crushed rejoice.

Hide your face from my sins, and blot out all my iniquities.

Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me.

Do not cast me away from your presence, and do not take your holy spirit from me.

Restore to me the joy of your salvation, and sustain in me a willing spirit.

Then I will teach transgressors your ways, and sinners will return to you.

Deliver me from bloodshed, O God, O God of my salvation, and my tongue will sing aloud of your deliverance.

O Lord, open my lips, and my mouth will declare your praise.

For you have no delight in sacrifice; if I were to give a burnt offering, you would not be pleased.

The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.

Do good to Zion in your good pleasure; rebuild the walls of Jerusalem,

then you will delight in right sacrifices, in burnt offerings and whole burnt offerings; then bulls will be offered on your altar.

The Immaculate Conception

17th. century wood polychrome

Museum of the Church of San Paio (St. Pelagius), Santiago de Compostela, Spain

How could Jesus Christ, the divine and sinless one who was to be sacrificed for our redemption, take up sanctuary in the virgin Mary's womb without it sanctifying her?

If so, then how could Jesus Christ's sanctifying her (by His being conceived in her and borne by her physically) have been accomplished without the eternal precedent of that Incarnation already preparing her as a clean receptacle for His conception?

If so, then how could Jesus Christ our God, in His plan from the beginning for the Incarnation, prepare her as a clean receptacle without conceiving her without original sin?

How could Jesus Christ our God not see to this full, unlimited measure of grace be given to this spouse of the Holy Ghost? How could God, who garnered so much building up of time and anticipation through the history of the Old Testament, not see to this moment of the annunciation without a continued, even greater anticipated work of sanctification, focalized in the person of Mary? How could God not do this, who is Himself eternal and existed from before the beginning - who is the Alpha and the Omega?

If God's forerunning witnesses, the prophets, who merely spoke words of His coming, and did not physically bear the One Christ Child within them, were themselves holy after a degree, though born into our original corruption, then how much more holy could be the actual physical bearer of He Himself - and before the moment she became the bearer - made holy by Him who she was to bear?

Swallows

The swallows that nested in the - what, five, six inch? - space above the hydrometer at the front door to my parents' place, under the eaves (click on the photo to enlarge). They built a nest up there once, had their babies, fed them, taught them to fly, and the nest was empty so it was taken down. Then swallows came back the next year and built another nest. I believe one year my parents kept the nest up there and swallows took up residence. The empty nest is still up there even though there were no swallows this year. Aside from the spattering of bird shit, it was really cool having them there. The parent swallows would come with their freewheel food and the fledglings would go nuts with their high chirping. It's amazing how industrious these birds are. If I remember right, they were sitting up there a number of times while me and my friend were smoking stogies and drinking beer on the porch. They didn't seem to mind. Nor we.

Why we need villains

Two more words to complete that title: in stories. As carry-over from this post.

Why do we need villains in stories? Put another way: why can't we have stories proper without villains? What is it that villains do for stories?

The answers are obvious as they are manifold, causing one to wonder why the question even needs to be asked. Let's start simply - even simplistically. First, for standard: we need villains in stories because the hero needs to be pitted against something in order to test him and bring forth his heroism.

Second, for full engagement with our own souls (relevancy): we need villains in stories because we have villains in our own personal stories, interiorly and exteriorly.

Thirdly, for the expansion of the mystery of reality into the dark unreal regions, thus claiming ground for ourselves (groundedness/illumination): we need villains in stories because a story will be disconnected from reality if free will has no play in its world. Since free will is best displayed through manifest and various characters, a story may go ill by denying itself villains, or getting the villain wrong, either through watery caricature or through the near-total subtraction of creature-hood (Hannibal Lector). For what is a villain but a character who makes wicked choices through his own free will? Thereby unintentionally proving the existence of free will?

But wait, does this mean that you absolutely cannot have a good story without a villain? Of course not. Does a Midsummer's Night Dream have any villains? No, not really.

So then, how does this pertain to Pixar - and in general, the disenchantment with...let's call them 'classical villains'; characters whose narratives eventually reveal something of the absolute in the consequences of their choices, the same as the choices of the heroes do. Take for instance the utterly hard-bitten demise of Gollum. As well, the utter enoblement of Frodo. Or, if you will, (not that I'm aligning Disney with Tolkien; God forbid) the likewise demise of the queen/witch and the enoblement of Snow White.

My concern is not with specifics here, but noticed trends in a certain consistent direction: what is happening to us who write our narratives with increasing cleverness and wit and technique, and even with whopping good (and natural, as opposed to propagandistic) messages, but so geared toward the power of that message by dint of the absence of villainy (that is, the absence of starkly-cut, unanalyzed, unapologetic, uncommented-on, yet not-overwhelming villainy and evil) that there is a certain hermetically sealed quality about it? I get this feeling with Pixar's movies. And I do not think it is the computer animation that does it to me.

I can only put the feeling this way: the story is not yours. I do not mean that it is not the same story as yours, but it does not become you; you do not become it; the story does not enweave itself unnoticed into the reflection of your personhood - so that, say, when you watch it again, the propulsion of your own soul seems to be carrying the story along.

It is that which Pixar's stories lack: the magic of the propulsion of your soul seeming to carry the story along. I am certain this lack is there because they have no villains to speak of. Having classical villains (and without subversive undercurrents) causes other things in the story to happen. You cannot really help but see the mystery of sin when the queen in Snow White asks her questions of the mirror. It is vanity as sin, plain as an apple, yet mysterious - the kind of thing a child would ponder after watching it, in that realm so close to daydream, and hopefully adults: this mystery of sin in our own hearts we see depicted in a story.

We begin to see why many films today go to weird lengths to avoid this in the depiction of villains, or to soften it (psychologize it) if they are depicted at all. Because it points in such a compelling way to the good - not the good kept in precious quarantine, but the good in diametric opposition. The good that is so good that though it is opposed to evil, it cannot be ultimately defined as an opposite.

And we today just don't like things that are diametrically opposed. It causes things like finding one's own heart as something on fire in the spatial house of free will; causes it to be inclined to singleness; purity, as by a sword or fire. A choice made as a creature of God.

Sure, we can have subversiveness, but what happens when our enitire diet consists in this? And what may be worse: what happens when that subversiveness grafts with the classic in a way that sort of...neutralizes it? What are we missing?

But of course I'm just stacking up criticisms where they don't belong. Because Pixar is not that league I am speaking of.

Right. More excuses - excuses that pull us further away from the narrative of narrative; further away from the notion that there is something in story so closely bound up with our real direction in life, that our reflection on it should literally haunt us.

Just what I wanted

A thanks to Jeff Miller (The Curt Jester) for the animated advent wreath on my sidebar.

Anyone wanting it for their blog can find it here.

My fluctuating regard for Pixar

There's something about Pixar that vaguely disturbs me. To put my finger on it, I would have to say it is this: of their entire ouvre they have not come up with one palpable, memorable villain.

When I say 'memorable' I mean a villain that is one of those incarnate reminders of the reality of evil; evil showing itself in someone's character - as opposed to just 'the bad guy'. One of those villains whose wickedness jumps out of the lines (or pixels) that forms them in the moving frame. Like the wicked step-mother in Disney's Cinderella. Recall those eyes:

The one exception to this would perhaps be Syndrome in The Incredibles, which is in my personal opinion, Pixar's best flick so far. But even Syndrome is strangely lacking. And Monsters Inc.'s Randall Bogg? Please. Pyromaniac boys, freeloading grasshoppers, sleazy but weak lizards, corporations, sharks and crazy girls with braces, dick-head automobiles, food critics (food critic as main villain? C'mon you guys), midget french chefs, and galactic computer systems that can simply be shut down with the press of a button...these do not make good villains.

So why are Pixar's films completely taken with being cleverly and cutely subversive? The french food critic is the villain! Haha! Isn't that clever? The boy with braces is too! Haha! Clever! The rat does the cooking and he's the best chef in the kitchen! That's so...reversed! Haha!

This gets tiresome after a while. I do not like all this glowing feeling surrounding Pixar, as if their original conceptions were just too wonderful and awe-inspiring to check. As if their imaginative premises automatically equalled their actual stories.

As if they were above the task of coming up with a real palpable villain.

Pixar: your animation is absolutely brilliant, but look, you guys aren't the freaking Shrine of Perpetual Wisdom and Derivers of Life Lessons from the Most Unlikely Contexts (Pixar really wants you to know: FROM THE MOST UNLIKELY CONTEXTS! Aren't we geniuses?) that you pretend to be. Grow up. Step down from your cloud nine. Come up with some real villains.

That way your films will also be more geared toward children as well.

Oh yes, I was going to say something about WALL*E, which I watched last night, and which was the reason for this post. What I wanted to say was...meh.

That's my review. No just kidding. I learned that word from Tim Jones. And apparently we have The Simpsons to thank for it. I won't say feh because I don't hold the movie in contempt, but it is meh. Anyhow, yes, my first complaint you already know. Villains. Totally and utterly lacking. Oh yes, yes, of course; I get it...the REAL villain is waste itself! Or ingratitude for life! Meh.

The character WALL*E (does anyone know how to type in the period so that it shows at mid-height between 'L' and 'E'?) gives one of the best moments in the movie when he discovers a spork - and after some debate places it between his collection of forks and spoons. There's some other stuff too where he gets into outer space going after his robot babe and sees earth and the great, fantastic, Spielbergian wonder of it all is...well, almost as exciting as the part where he discovers the spork.

They board a kind of hermetically sealed planetary space ship. What you discover I'll leave to you. Let's say it's sort of: Down home farm boy with enlightened veggie girl galactic road trip dynamo meets Pigs in Space.

There we come to my other favourite part of the movie: the life of the ones on board the ship. It's quite hilarious, if heavy-handed (pun intended).

Oh yes, I kind of liked the little clean-up robot. These foreign contaminant robots and their crew made me think of...Japan. Even though I've never been to Japan. Strange.

Yeah...it was good I guess. Maybe a little better than Ratatouille. Hard to say. No point in comparing, because I didn't think much of Ratatouille either. Their stories are sorts of flat (if continually clever) expenditures of original premises that gave the artists too much glee in the conception stage, who in the process of their creative euphoria forgot to come up with real villains.

You see, without vivid villains a story doesn't get far past the stage of self-consciousness. The life lessons it has to give, while perhaps endearing in some way, do not get imparted in any visceral level. They sort of remain on cloud nine.

Oh yes. They need real villains.

Phone talk

One day spoke on the phone with a credit card lady;
was impeccably obliging, she.
Yet gradually it dawned
she was rather cold and shady.

One day spoke on the phone with a Métis;
did not like to leave his farm,
said he didn’t like people,
yet he was wonderfully matey.

Throne

If you get lost in the wood’s shades, thrown
from trees the west ebbing sun goes down from,
it is sometimes God wants you to hear
a hidden bird’s trilling more clear
than if you took it in in your own throne.

Tiny big

My eye took in a gnat
while bicycling fast and past
the fields’ ditch’s dusk musk.

Now one may think that that
is no great deal, but stat
and hard the pain it thrust.

A fingertip is too fat
to take out a gnat,
though fingertips may husk

an ear of corn, no spat.
Other pains, in leg or back,
with added pains will bust.

For instance, scratch from cat
would be no great drat,
if you were stabbed after that

with an elephant tusk.
Yet if first you were stabbed
with the tusk, and then the cat

scratched, it would be that
added bit to bring it all back
that would be tor-tu-ous.

Lesson: don't believe every mess
your mind makes out to be is there,
lest you make a bigger mess, and lose your prayer.

I could not remove the gnat,
so settled with the fact
my head has its own digestive tract.

Drink

I drink my coffee far too fast
and with too much automation.
While in my car, I wish it would last
more than three blocks' ambulation.

At times I wonder that maybe
just pouring coffee's what's pleasant.
Then the first tip to mouth gives glee,
and where the mug was, coffee's crescent.

You go about leaving these rings,
these really stupid silly things
on table top, dash and paper;
the stain it never tapers.

Sometimes when busy staining paper
with other things than coffee rings,
such as with words, you forget until later,
forget its been half an hour

since you last took a sip - and then you sip
into your mouth, stark cold coffee
and, hmmm, have to, hmmm, swallow it.

Desecration: the anti-liturgy

Perhaps grave stuff like this going on, seemingly more and more, is one more reason to put an end to the communal opening of the sanctuary to the laity and the receiving of the Eucharist in the hands. Lets bring back the rail and use such horrible instances of theft/desecration as a reason to enforce receiving on the tongue. Not that it would be a guaranteed measure, but it would be something. You know, time to batten down the hatches and get back to the segregation of sanctuary and nave. Or maybe it would cause these juvenile atheists to go to worse measures. I don't know. But I wonder how much the renovations to (de-solemnizing of) the liturgy has helped to invite such things.

Christian filmmakers at work

"Its circuit boards cracked, the camera refused to start up for ten minutes … at least, not until members of the cast and crew gathered around the camera and prayed over it. At that point it fired up, and the shoot was completed.

Tim says that in the whirlwind of post-production he and his brother completely forgot about the incident - until they sent the camera back to the manufacturer. The manufacturer, he relates, said that “all the circuit boards were cracked and there was no way this camera should have been able to work.”

This incident, which the young director posits may be a veritable miracle, is just one of a host of remarkable stories that surround the making of “Volition.” Indeed, the creation of the short film is steeped in coincidences and startling circumstances that hint that “Volition” yet has some definite purpose to serve."" (From Thursday, November 27th. LifeSiteNews)

The Morgan brothers (Tim and Matthew) made this short film Volition, which interweaves three time periods that together, contextualize abortion as a great part of that long line; the constant inclination throughout history "[to] classify other groups of people as less than human, as sub-human, through scientific means or whatever means possible, so as to rationalize the mistreating and the suppressing of the other group.”

LifeSiteNews has the article on the making of the film here.

The film, started as an outline by Tim in a fever one night in Israel, was later funded by Doorpost, an online film competition the brothers had entered some time back and had forgotten about. (Doorpost website found here.) The competition's theme was 'Hope'.

The film (Volition) can be viewed here, among the others.

For the kind of short film that it is I think it works on a number of levels. Typically a film that juxtoposes time periods to give context would make me yawn, but here it has vitality. Interesting is how the very title, Volition, as an objective fact of life, has such bearing on the direction of life. Personal human life is either this great miracle or it is dross, and our choices (non-choices included) either contribute and enrich that miracle or dishonour it, and its Creator. Abortion is the ultimate 'test' of that either/or recognition.

These filmmakers show much promise. And so does the actual fact that such films are getting their ground in high level competitions. Says Tim:

"[The Christian community]...has kind of left the art world on the back burner. My vision would be them treating the art world, the film world, with the same sense of urgency as they’re treating, for instance, an overseas mission.

“This is an emergency for our culture, to be able to influence our film, our arts, the American pop culture in this way.

“I know there’s a lot of Christian investors out there...My vision is kind of having the Church as passionate about the art world and the culture and film, and having people, kind of like in the old days of the Church, where they would sponsor the artist that would influence the modern pop culture. I guess my vision is of seeing that happen again, where the Church sees the urgency of influencing the film and entertainment world.”

More about Tim and Matthew Morgan and their film company can be found at: http://www.rockyfarmstudio.com/

H/T: Spirit Daily

Backyard and Beyond

This is a large piece I did quite a while ago. It made it into an exhibition at a local gallery that is also a theatre and house to many other events. The exhibition was made up only of drawings. Mine did not get any place. I wasn't there at the opening reception but one night I went there to see the drawings and there was this older man on his way out and he stopped at the receptionist's desk to give her a piece of his mind: "Why do you people always have this homo stuff here?" You could hear the salutary anger in his voice. The receptionist gives me one of those smug lifting of the eyebrows look after the man had left, as though we both were supposed to silently agree with one another about how outdated or unenlightened or whatever that man was. I blocked it and simply asked where the exhibit was. She told me, and I went, and sure enough, the picture that got first place was the most unremarkable piece of nothing with the title: "The Hole in August". Not august the month. One of the finest pieces there was small circular piece, with a circle frame, of a complexly woven celtic cross, done ever so delicately in pencil. It was jammed into the most non-prominent corner in the place.

The title of my piece is, "Backyard and Beyond". It depicts the last sliver of my parents' backyard, and obviously beyond it. The width of the backyard was significantly conflated in the drawing. (Click on the first one to enlarge)

Time and things

Last night I watched The Passion of the Christ for the first time - though I have watched it at least twenty times before. Film is like that sometimes. It was the same for when I watched Hitchcock's Rear Window and Psycho, having seen both numerous times before, and then watching them after not viewing them for some time. I think it has to do with more than Chesterton's maxim:

"...if you look at a thing 999 times, you are perfectly safe, but if you look at it the thousandth time, you are in frightful danger of seeing it for the first time."

For we are not simply talking about "a thing" when we talk about a film, but a number of things - images - relaying in sequence before your eyes; relaying mechanically, so that there is, for want of a better word, a voyeuristic element to it. That is to say, your eyes are taking in material before the retrospective brain can catch up. Alfred Hitchcock knew this well about film, and not incidentally many of his films pursue that very theme: the voyeur; and the getting caught up in something that you cannot control and which puts you and others in extreme danger or in a vulnerable spot, very often in part due to the fault of the one who looks where he ought not to look.

This element of film is also one of the reasons that Andrei Tarkovsky was so adamant (in his book Sculpting in Time and elsewhere) on how necessary it was for the filmmaker to recognize how huge a responsibility he had. Tarkovsky stressed the need for this responsibility to what some would call an exaggerated, blowhard, overbearing stance. But Tarkovsky saw. He knew, and said as much, that film was, in itself, a lumbering mechanical beast; and as such it requires heroic, untiring, vigilant measures of continual threshing and taming.

The power of film is evidenced in this 'ever new' phenomenon, whereby one can return to a certain film (one that is well made) and see it again as though for the first time, or even better than the first time. For film is time. Tarkovsky said that is why people go to see movies. To regain lost time.

And we cannot approach and apprehend eternity except through time.