Discussing cultural things...
Nov. 1st, 2022 08:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkatAmazon's Kindle Daily Deals included some sci-fantasy writers that I'd been waiting to buy for dirt cheap...and a gothic horror writer.
1. The Poppy War
2. A Witness for the Dead by Katherine Addison
3. Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Like I need more books. I keep going to sleep while reading Project Hail Mary on the train. It's interesting - it's kind of a problem solving space adventure between a sentient alien bug and a human. Has lots of hard biological science, astro-physics, and engineering data. I'd put it in the category of "hard science fiction". I've read pretty much all the sub-genres of sci-fi. My preferences are space opera, hard sci-fi, and mystery/sci-fi hybrid. I also like sci-fantasy. Sci-romance tends to be on the silly side and badly written - also very pulpy, so I avoid. Military sci-fi gets on my nerves, and tends to fall into war sci-fi, which I can do without.
****
Talked to Chidi about the flick TAR, he'd also seen "Barbarian", which he thought was fun but didn't like as well - and it reminded him a lot of X.
I'd agree - the descriptions were similar in some respects. In X, Chidi told me, an old woman was killing people - when all she really wanted was sex with her husband. In this one, an old crazy woman was killing people when all she really wanted was a baby to care for.
TAR - he thought was all things. It just haunts you afterwards. Or sticks with you. He'd not thought much of it when he left the theater, but then he couldn't stop thinking about it. He agreed with me that it is in some respects a sly indictment of "cancel culture", also the Jewish element is definitely there - in how Jewish artists got sidelined or cancelled during the Holocaust, or if Nazi sympathizers - cancelled out. Cancel culture is controversial - and makes folks on social media from both ends of the spectrum twitchy.
It also brings up the cognitive dissonance involved in regards to someone who treats people in their personal and professional lives despicably, but is an amazing artist who creates beautiful and stunning art. Do we cancel their art to punish them for despicable acts? And ourselves as well for loving their art? And how do we handle that cognitive dissonance of a person being more than one thing, often contradictory things at the same time?
The film makes the audience uncomfortable - because at the end, the audience finds itself relating to the isolated artist - TAR, and angry at the social media critics who have cancelled her - forcing her to practice her art on the absolute fringes of society. We find ourselves making excuses for her behavior and angry at those who persecuted her - even though we know it was with cause. Feld takes the audience inside the perspective of the perpetuator and the victim. For people are often both.
I told Chidi that when I was working at Kansas Defender Project - I ran across a man who was in solitary confinement. Our group was trying to get him out of it - but he was a pure sociopath, a psycho. Except, he created beautiful poetry, and beautiful drawings. And it begged the question how could someone capable of such despicable acts of violence, at the same time be an artist of such beauty?
People are complicated - or more than one thing. We cannot pigeon hole. We can't categorize. And we really can't define people by one action or one group of actions.
Woody Allen probably molested his adopted kids, but that doesn't mean he didn't create some brilliant films - that took us inside another point of view and at times a very relatable one. Same with Roman Polanski - he probably raped more than one girl - but that doesn't mean he's not a brilliant film maker worth studying. Joss Whedon may be an abusive boss, who most likely sexually harassed and bullied many people working for him, but that doesn't change the fact that he wrote and directed some episodes of television that continue to resonate universally and are brilliant in their own right.
I've never really known how I feel about cancel culture. For the most part? I ignore it. Donald Trump is the only person I want to be cancelled and no one has managed to do that, which irritates me to no end. Instead they cancel liberal media folks who actually have created some cool things over the years, many of which I really like. Can you cancel the evil people who haven't created anything worth looking at or viewing? (Quite a few are politicians.) It makes me suspicious that they haven't managed that - and makes me question the veracity of some of these claims. At the end of the day it is all hearsay, anyway - which is what Feld kind of points out, or is it?
But I realize the world isn't quite as clear cut as we would ike to make it. And it's not something I can safely discuss online without being beaten to death with word bullets.
1. The Poppy War
2. A Witness for the Dead by Katherine Addison
3. Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Like I need more books. I keep going to sleep while reading Project Hail Mary on the train. It's interesting - it's kind of a problem solving space adventure between a sentient alien bug and a human. Has lots of hard biological science, astro-physics, and engineering data. I'd put it in the category of "hard science fiction". I've read pretty much all the sub-genres of sci-fi. My preferences are space opera, hard sci-fi, and mystery/sci-fi hybrid. I also like sci-fantasy. Sci-romance tends to be on the silly side and badly written - also very pulpy, so I avoid. Military sci-fi gets on my nerves, and tends to fall into war sci-fi, which I can do without.
****
Talked to Chidi about the flick TAR, he'd also seen "Barbarian", which he thought was fun but didn't like as well - and it reminded him a lot of X.
I'd agree - the descriptions were similar in some respects. In X, Chidi told me, an old woman was killing people - when all she really wanted was sex with her husband. In this one, an old crazy woman was killing people when all she really wanted was a baby to care for.
TAR - he thought was all things. It just haunts you afterwards. Or sticks with you. He'd not thought much of it when he left the theater, but then he couldn't stop thinking about it. He agreed with me that it is in some respects a sly indictment of "cancel culture", also the Jewish element is definitely there - in how Jewish artists got sidelined or cancelled during the Holocaust, or if Nazi sympathizers - cancelled out. Cancel culture is controversial - and makes folks on social media from both ends of the spectrum twitchy.
It also brings up the cognitive dissonance involved in regards to someone who treats people in their personal and professional lives despicably, but is an amazing artist who creates beautiful and stunning art. Do we cancel their art to punish them for despicable acts? And ourselves as well for loving their art? And how do we handle that cognitive dissonance of a person being more than one thing, often contradictory things at the same time?
The film makes the audience uncomfortable - because at the end, the audience finds itself relating to the isolated artist - TAR, and angry at the social media critics who have cancelled her - forcing her to practice her art on the absolute fringes of society. We find ourselves making excuses for her behavior and angry at those who persecuted her - even though we know it was with cause. Feld takes the audience inside the perspective of the perpetuator and the victim. For people are often both.
I told Chidi that when I was working at Kansas Defender Project - I ran across a man who was in solitary confinement. Our group was trying to get him out of it - but he was a pure sociopath, a psycho. Except, he created beautiful poetry, and beautiful drawings. And it begged the question how could someone capable of such despicable acts of violence, at the same time be an artist of such beauty?
People are complicated - or more than one thing. We cannot pigeon hole. We can't categorize. And we really can't define people by one action or one group of actions.
Woody Allen probably molested his adopted kids, but that doesn't mean he didn't create some brilliant films - that took us inside another point of view and at times a very relatable one. Same with Roman Polanski - he probably raped more than one girl - but that doesn't mean he's not a brilliant film maker worth studying. Joss Whedon may be an abusive boss, who most likely sexually harassed and bullied many people working for him, but that doesn't change the fact that he wrote and directed some episodes of television that continue to resonate universally and are brilliant in their own right.
I've never really known how I feel about cancel culture. For the most part? I ignore it. Donald Trump is the only person I want to be cancelled and no one has managed to do that, which irritates me to no end. Instead they cancel liberal media folks who actually have created some cool things over the years, many of which I really like. Can you cancel the evil people who haven't created anything worth looking at or viewing? (Quite a few are politicians.) It makes me suspicious that they haven't managed that - and makes me question the veracity of some of these claims. At the end of the day it is all hearsay, anyway - which is what Feld kind of points out, or is it?
But I realize the world isn't quite as clear cut as we would ike to make it. And it's not something I can safely discuss online without being beaten to death with word bullets.