Unimaginable

I have read that the collapse of the soviet union may have been possible because it was unimaginable. Had it been seriously possible six months earlier, repression could have been stepped up, and the iron curtain maintained.

I know (and like) someone in whom the desire to demand more from people by pushing them is less restrained than it should be. I think it's because, as a small merry woman, she can't imagine pressure from her becoming overwhelming for anyone. Because she can't imagine it, she pushes as hard as she likes, and I've seen it be too much.

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Feeling compromised

Several times in the last week, I've looked at where I stand at odds with many people, and realised that it comes down to feeling that they and I are compromised, committed to something which is inconsistent with who we want to be.  The first example was Australia - putting a high value on the well-being of an imagined community defined by geopolitical borders. To quote William Shatner - I can't get behind that.  A nation is just some people's excuse for treating other people worse, often much worse, than themselves.  But this problem doesn't stop with nations.  Being of a species is an embarassment.  Being a temporary living being is frustrating and demoralising.  Don't get me started on material existence.  Conversely, my friendships, projects and even this blog are unexceptionable.

It seems like the larger and more universal the commitment, the more the contingency of it rankles.  The smaller, more local things I enjoy spontaneously and naturally.  It is something to do with recognizing my finiteness and what Heidegger calls 'thrown-ness' - part of which is feelings of guilt which mask this ontological guilt, this compromisedness.

'Perfect Manhattan'

'Perfect' Manhattan @ Hairy Canary - half sweet half dry vermouth. Very nice - sweet, aromatic, smooth, liquorous. A little cherry in each taste.

Note to self: must try giving veronica corningstone's manhattan order ('kick the vermouth in the side with a pair of steel toed boots')

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Singularity University

Futurist Ray Kurzweil has founded an institution dedicated to the exponential tendencies of growing human knowledge  which is known as Singularity University - at present it offers a few short courses and some grad student programs, aiming to prepare business people to remain functional five minutes longer than the rest of us - just long enough to be well ahead when its all over.

Somehow, whenever I hear that name it makes me think of Bovine University from Troy McClure's short film on why its OK to eat meat.  The abbatoir is Bovine University.  I guess in my mind, the Singularity shows up we walking meatbags and confronts us with what else we might be.

Boat arrivals

Ted Lapkin has taken a stand in an article headlined 'How many more must drown, Julia?'


Ted's point seems to be that people flows occur because of a gradient between their expectations of fair treatment as someone in a politically dangerous situation in (for example) Afghanistan and their expectations in Australia. 

The solution offered by John Howard (and loved by Ted) is to ensure that Australia offers treatment that is about as unfair as being dragged from your home in the middle of the night and shot: for example, year after year of mandatory detention with a succession of DIMIA show trials in which no one makes any effort to understand your story as your mental health (perhaps already injured by oppresion and war in your homelad) spirals down the toilet. As long you can expect that unfair treatment regardless of your claim, the boats have no reason to come.

Even if this explanation for boat numbers is true (and plenty of knowledgable people believe it is not), it is amazing to think we could accept it and stand the sight of ourselves.

Australian Film

Jim Schembri has written in the Age about three recent releases in Australia - 'The Reef', 'Griff the Invisible' and 'A Heartbeat Away', which seem likely to throw away most of the millions spent generating them.  The Reef sounds like horror/drama, which I would not normally go to see.  'A Heatbeat Away' seems like warmed over dead heartwarming underdog story. 'Griff the Invisible' though, seems interesting and new, and I'd like to see it.   I will try to persuade the blog wife on that idea.

The interesting question is 'why does this ever happen?'  Not just in Australia, but everywhere, creative people of considerable talent tell horror stories of being unable to produce their great idea, and of ideas that seemed great but turned out to be terrible, and of ideas that started out terrible, were pushed and sank without trace. Why would something so financially horrific persist?  How can we do better at making good films?

I think the only people who I would trust to answer that are Pixar and maybe the Coen brothers, and the only difference I can see is that the people in charge take pains.  Their commitment to a story with a human problem, a real, earned resolution of it, is not just lip-service.  But although commitment means you can fight through difficulty, you have to be finding fairly elevated things difficult. That means you have to be very good, to know it when you have it. But it's hard to hold on to that in a world that will break all records seeing Avatar.

(I didn't like Avatar, but in fairness, it hit all its story marks. It was predictable and trite, characters were reduced to instruments (poor Michelle Rodriguez), the world was foolish, the resolution didn't resolve anything deeply, but it setup and paid off, it had a balance of humour and so on.)

Australian film production is greatly constrained by scale.  You can't get much money, so you can't do spectacle. You can't have many locations, many actors, many cameras, many microphones, long and careful editing. You could make Primer, The Magician, Paranormal Activity and similar - stories where ordinariness is exploited and subverted. My idea would be a RomCom set at a Uni, in which the big human experience is failure to communicate - the experience of floundering in a bewildering contre temps when you try to communicate with another human living in another background. But that needs crowd scenes. The whole bewildering contre temps thing is probably what goes wrong when creative people deeply love a film that bombs. So maybe a film school project.

Under 40 minutes

For the rides to and from work today.  That's about 16km.  It can take me that long to drive the 5km using the big bridge that bikes aren't allowed to use.  Fairly pleased with that.