Thursday, March 29, 2012

First as tragedy, part 2

Page 88, "if you really do not know what to do, then nobody can tell you".
Page 94, "There are at least four different versions of apocalyptism today: Christian fundamentalism, New AGe spirituality, techno-digital post humanism, and secular ecolgism".
Page 103, the 80% 4ule, that in many patterns, 20% is responsible for 80% (ownership, work on a committee, good peas in pea pods, decisions versus time in meeting).
Page 110, "New words will change the way we think and act"
Page 114, "politically correct self-flagellation an inverted form of clinging to one's superiority. Whenever the west is attacked, its first reaction is not aggressive defense but self probing.".
Page 117, post-post-colonialism, namely a mature independence: to admit the positive effect of colonization, one has to be really free and be able to leave behind its stigma". ie; no longer blame the event of the past but accept them as a possibly positive force that made you who  you are today.
Page 139, "Far from being invisible, social relationality in its very fluidity is directly the object of marketing and exchange in "cultural capitalism", one no longer sells (and buys) objects which 'bring' cultural or emotional experiences, one directly sells (and buys) such experiences".
Page 140, "according to the Negrian perspective with today's global interactive media, creative inventiveness is no longer individual, it is immediately collectivized, part of the 'commons,' so that any attempt to privatize it through copy-righting becomes problematic 0 more and more literally, 'property is theft' here.".
Page 144, relationships are commodity, ie: pay psychiatrist instead of talking with a friend, hire a daycare instead of staying home or using family.
Page 147, "The proletariat is thus divided into three, each part being played off against the others: intellectual laborers full of cultural prejudices against 'redneck' workers; workers who display a populist hatred of intellectuals and outcasts; outcasts who are antagonistic to society as such."
Page 151, "This is how Dupuy proposed to confront the disaster: we should first perceive it as our fate, as unavoidable, and then, projecting ourselves into it, adopting its standpoint, we should retroactively insert ourselves into its past (the past of the future) ... We have to accept that, at the level of possibilities, our future is doomed, that the catastrophe will take place, that it is our destiny -- and then, against the background of this acceptance, ..... insert a new possibility into the past. Paradoxically, the only way to prevent the disaster is to accept it as inevitable.".
Page 152, "keep knowledge and the function of the Master as far apart as possible. Even the liberal notion of electing the people most 'qualified' to lead is not sufficient here. ... This is why Kojin Karatani's proposal of combing elections with lotteries is determining who will rule is more traditional than it may at first appear .. 'if universal suffrage by secret ballot, namely, parliamentary democracy, is the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, the introduction of lottery should be deemed the dictatorship of the proletariat".
Page 154, "We are the ones we are waiting for" (old Hopi saying).
 Page 157, suggestion that, just as old Christians return to their faith when they get close to death, that old communists return to communism when they are old.


Saturday, March 24, 2012

First as Tragedy, Then as Farce part 1

Over past few days I've been reading "First as Tragedy, Then as Farce" by Slavoj Zizek (Verso Books, NY, 2009). It was lent to me by Christina Stojanova.
Notes: page 6: "Truth is partial, accessible only when one takes sides"
Page 13: "in a supreme irony, 'socializing' the banking system is acceptable when it serves to save capitalism. Socialism is bad - except when it serve3s to stabilize capitalism".
Page 20, "the danger is thus that the predominent narrative of the meltdown will be the one which, instead of awakening us from a dream, will enable us to continue dreaming".
Page 21, Marx wrote that bourgeois ideology loves to historicize: every social, religious, an cultural form is historical, contingent, relative -- every form except its own." (reference for Mr. Saul)
Page 25, "Capitalism ... needs no ideological justification because its success is itself sufficient justification. In this regard, capitalism "is the opposite of socialism, which as a manual": "Capitalism is a system which has no philosophical pretensions, which is not in search of happiness". .
"Sorman claims ... that people always need to entertain dreams of impossible perfection"
Page 37, "The contemporary era constantly proclaims itself as post-ideological, but this denial of ideology only provides the ultimate proof that we are more than every embedded in ideology.
Page 44, "... the problematic of false 'humanization' to the very basic collective form of 'telling stories about ourselves' to the symbolic texture which provides the foundation of a community.... identity politics ... the ultimate horizon is that the tolerance and intermingling of such identities  ... cuts across the entire field, is rejected as oppressive.
Page 52, "postmodern age defined by post 1968 economic/capitalism
Page 53-54, Starbucks sells you its lifestyle, environmental concerns etc along with its coffee.
Page 54, "happiness studies"
Page 59, "permissions masked as rights, they do not change the distribution of power".
Page 61, "populism is ... re-active ... aversion of the politics of fear".


Friday, March 16, 2012

Hollywood Flatland last chapter

Hollywood Flatland, last chapter:
Page 290, origin of UPA
Page 292, "inconsistency has no logic, indeed is in itself an offense against logic."
Page 296, "middlebrow culture, pleasure without pain".
Page 299, "in 1939, Greenberg had defined kitsch as yesterday's avant-garde diluted. But this was not yesterday's avant-garde. Cartooning was the place where research into flatness and illusion and abstraction was most conscientiously carried out."

Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Hollywood Flatlands 3 chapters

Page 201, "For Kracauer ... the usual order is trivialized and the apparently trivial is pushed centre-stage"
Page 202 (also Kracauer) "The function of cartoons is to mock photographic reality. .... [Dumbo] is the rationalization of the irrational".
Page 204, "Kracauer notes how colour ... in fact intensifies the bad artifice of film".
Page 206, "Familiar everyday images need to be exploded so that images can be montages from their fragments. It is in the fragments that meaning resides."
"Montage .. is the opposite of an ... imitation of nature".
Page 215, "Like Chaplin, Disney avoids bringing fairy tales into alignment with the conventional everyday, electing instead to reveal everyday stories as fairy-tales".
Page 223, Vertov manifesto.
 page 224, "Cinemas that show full length films are the most conservative" (Vertov)
Page 227, "The Post Office" film by Mikhail Tsekharsovsky, 1929
Page 230, Eisenstein vs Adorno regarding Disney and nostalgia.
Page 234, "Freedom from logic's fetters and political subjugation can be secured only after having united with the fantastic the alogical, the sensuous order".
Page 242, Berger on pets.
Page 246, Eisenstein lectured the film students on how to make colour break free from the task of representation, in order to express meaning, independent emotional values in connection with precise ideas"
Page 250, The trouble with fantasia and Bambi ... begins when they attempt to be mature, serious, worthy.".
Page 252, Edwin Land (Polaroid) on colour and Goethe colour theory (page 252-257, perhaps have Geremy Logue test this?).
Page 257, "Goethe's science called for a critique of the senses. It was an aesthetic science".
Page 267-8, "Green against red is a fundamental colour pairing ... red is the real ... green the fantastic ... together they evoke desire."
Page 268, "Green and red-polarites of colour, are the colours of myth, memory and desire revamped in modern guise."
Page 271, Goethe:"We must think of science as art".
Page 272, mimisis; I yawn,  you yawn.
Page 275-6, rubbing eyes, drug visions, and synaesthesia.
Page 282, Ruttmann; "it seems that for [Ruttmann] nature is unaesthetic, its colours random. The colours in film need to be ordered. They need Gestaultung.
Page 283-4, various colour inventions.
Page 285, Technicolor code/motto or naturalism and keeping colour subordinate to narrative.

Saturday, March 10, 2012

Hollywood Flatlands Eye Candy chapter

Hollywood Flatlands, Chapter "Eye Candy"
Page 159; Disney art school and comments about Fantasia.
Page 161, Disney "quintessentially middlebrow"
Page 166, "Bold, brash, colourful and affirmative, modernism had become spectacle, its critical edge blunted."
Page 169, "Free to own, which means free to owe, and certainly not free to think, for popular judgement is directed from above"
Page 171, "all [cartoons] do today is to confirm the victory of technological reason over truth".
"Cartoons teach ... the inevitability of violence if the subject acquiesces too slowly to submission"
page 173-174, Adorno quote regarding his preferences for Betty Boop over Mickey Mouse and how people follow restrictive rules willingly "they insist on the very ideology which enslaves them. The misplaced love of the common people for the wrong which is done them is a greater force than the cunning of the authorities."
Page 177, "To insist that film linger in the supernatural so that it may bcome art, is a double crime, fetishizing the ..."
Page 178, Adorno against laughter, "worst bourgeois sadism".
Page 180, "Hollywood film sound had brought about vulgarization and enchantment through sound. Music was the vanguard of this process of making audiences immature and dependent".
"Through mass music's technique of the 'hook', its lulling into deconcentated listening, and its ubiquity, because of an extensive machinery of distribution, listeners are remoulded as acquiescent purchasers, and kept retarded as children. The vicious circle spins, like a long-playing record. These easy listeners demand again and again the same dish, the one they have forgotten might be exertable. In Composing for the Films, Adorno and Eisler suggest that this effect is redoubled in film music soundtracks. The recording procedures 'neutralize' the music, flattening it out, losing its colour intensity and spacial depth.. ... and even the most advanced music is 'divested' of its aggressiveness".
Page 181, notes to discuss with Eric Hill regarding wasteful nature of cultural products. "in this advance industrial age the masses are compelled to seek relaxation and rest, in order to restore the labor power that has been spent inthe alienated process of labor; and this need is the mass basis of mass culture. On it there has arisen the powerful amusement industry, whichconstantly produces, satisfies, and reproduces new needs"
"All art, as a means of filling out leisure time, has become entertainment, although it absorbs materials and forms of traditional autonomous art as part of the so-called 'cultural heritage'".
Page 182, "music is a transmission belt of standardization"
Page 184, re synaesthetics (matching picture and sound), Eisenstein writes "even if they exist in nature, that does not make them in themselves worthy elements of 'art'"
Page 187-192, Fischinger's history from Germany to the USA.
Page 194, Adorno on silliness, "Silliness in art is set against organized fun".
Page 195-196, Chaplin and Hitler compared.

Monday, March 5, 2012

Hollywood Flatlands chapter 4

Page 132-133, Clement Greenberg on kitsch, especially "Snow White", Nazis, and Soviets.
Page 133, "monopoly turns culture into industry"
 quoting Adorno/Horkheimer "Under monopoly all mass culture is identical ... The people at the top are no longer so interested in concealing monopoly: as its violence becomes more open, so its power grows. Movies and radio need no longer pretend to be art ... They call themselves industries..."
Page 136, Disney and Riefenstahl ... "not development of technology but is progression in technique".
Page 137, "Manipulated emotion is the currency in Hollywood and at the Reichsfilmkammer alike".
Page 138, Adorno on sports.
Page 139, "the battle over beauty in the 1930s was a battle between the surreal and the ideal"
Page 140, "The cult of the perfect body is a cult of death".
Page 143, "once political dissatisfaction develops, the common man feels able to criticize culture, because he resents it."
page 145, "At the core of revived classicism is the cult of the body.
"Riefenstahl refuses the avant-garde term 'montage' in favour of the seemingly organic term 'forming' (Formung). Film was formed as a total work of art for a totalitarian society."
Page 153, Trying to find Aryan origin for Walt Disney.
German animation to look at: Kurt Stordel.
page 155, "Der Arme Hansi" by Leberecht

Friday, March 2, 2012

Hollywood Flatlands chapter 3

In Hollywood Flatlands, finished chapter 3.
Notes:
Page 97, discussed caricature as art, the discussed Mickey Mouse as caricature.
Page 103: "Fetishized 'collective consciousness' ... specifically dreams about technological and social utopias, is cracked open and grasped only by the proletariat with its distinct relationship to technology and techniques"
Page 106: Benjamin: "Those who are awake share the world, while those asleep each possess a world for themselves".
Page 108, "Despite (Trotsky's) suspicion that photography was a non-dialectical form, a form that stripped things from their interrelationship".
Page 112, Benjamin: "What film needs is a tendency".
Page 114, Disney distribution with the Nazis and changes to the credits.
Page 117, "(Adorno) cautioned Benjamin against using concepts like the collective dream or collective unconscious, which he perceived to be derived from the irrationalist, and fascist-tinged, world of Carl Jung".
Page 118, "Adorno distrusts the laughter of the funnies' audience, finding in it elements of the worst sadism and brutalism."
Page 120, Benjamin removes Mickey Mouse from his 3rd edition of book.
Page 122, re: the evolution of animation into features such as Snow White, "If the narrative drama was a pathetic outcome for filmic possibility, then the drawn version of the same was an even more ridiculous concoction."