By Their Works You Will Know Them

The modern history of Conversion Therapy,
from homosexuality to a Christianity,
as bought by American money that fears
modern phrases like 'hetero-normativity'
and other probing social-scientific phrases
seems to be recent. But like so many ideas,
it is a thin respray, a shoddy paint job,
over a once honestly flawed, diverse and genuine,
Christian culture that now draws new skin-deep adherents
whose real love is of some shiny new prosperity theology
devised to influence people who don't recognise propaganda
when they are fed it, and don't realise they are being bought,
sold, and repackaged as proof that political lobbying,
and the distant peddling of malign influence still works.

 

Revew - 'Alice', Jan Svankmajer

   I grew up without many things, that many that I simply did not know I was doing without. A cimena which normalised a communal audience for sharing intelligent films was one of them. Sometimes, many times, I could have thought that intelligence itself was rationed. But that was then. I now feel like it is some sort of badge of honour to have seen my first Jan Svanmajer film in a cinema, the place to see films with other people, long after seeing many of his other films at home, or online.

  To say Jan Svankmajer is a special film maker is to put it lightly. His commitment to editing shows through every frame of every film that bears his name. As a surrealist film maker he has been involved in film making since his first film 'The Last Trick' made in 1964, 21 years after being given his first puppet theatre as a child. I will not go through here the journey from that first puppet theatre to his present retired status as a film maker, theatre designer, surrealist film maker and every other category of creative activity, aged over 90. I am going to leave that to Wikipedia-they do that sort of thing rather well, even though some folk dispute their pages.

  'Alice' is not my favourite Svankmajer film, that would be 'Conspirators of Pleasure' which as a satire on how people consume and divide one another by certain activities also works well as a rather convoluted shaggy dog story that is not meant to be taken too literally. But 'Alice' is as near normal feature length cinema as Svankmajer gets. His version of Lewis Caroll's story is quite violent and uncomfortable, with a lot of images of nails in food, and of bones of unknown aniimals in cabinets  of ossuaries, stop-motion animated stuffed animals, particularly the rabbit who is always late to meet the queen who is rarely present. But as dream/nightmare violence goes it is of a very different quality to, say, the violence of a news report of a bombing complete with distressing visuals, or a Tom and Jerry cartoon.

  Yes, Alice and the rabbit get on badly, and to watch a stuffed animal leak sawdust after being kicked, and then sow up the hole where the sawdust leaked with a needle and thread it had found and eat up the sawdust with a tarnished spoon does stretch the imagination. The red queen and her court are reduced to playing cards that move by themselves across a stage set in what could perhaps be seen as a critique of human political/power structures - they are two dimentional at best. The number of iterations of Alice, and the number of times she is too big/too small and is presented with a situation that I read as an intellience test was quite notable. I was not going to count them, that went against the collective cinema experience. Though the literal minded could count the number of times Alice changes size and form if they had enough repeated viewings of the film. Then there was the device of getting from one scene to the next by diving into draws in desks where there were often sharp objects of different types-scissors, square sets, safety pins etc piled up in the draws, who knows what that was about? I am leaving that point here....   .....a lot more was going on with this film which remains open to interpretation where we can all have our own, and different reinterpretation when we come back to the film again. 

  I was pleased that the young people that run the LUMI programme at the QFT in Belfast are able to get these films that before an audience now, when in the past I was in the wrong place to find them when they were made and had their original cinema run. Back then I mostly heard about these films via reports and showings of them on television.

 

  

How Deep Is Your Breath?

The harder blowhards blow
the shorter their breath gets,
and the emptier their threats become,
until all their listeners come to trust
is in the greater mess that follows.... 

On This Mothering Sunday

I reflect on those mothers
who reflect on the world they live in
and refracted on possible worlds to come,
as they seek to create the place they feel safe,
and see as safe for their children.

When what the children need is their mother
as part of the corner team in their heads
as they face the aggression of school and life,
well beyond the front door of their parents house.

The mothers who are best prepared will recognise
worlds well beyond what they have lived through
on which ther children will have the choice:
Refuse? Or accept? Negotiate? The child will be able to choose
becauase they can 'read' the world, the room, the scene, they are in.

Without being there, their mothers read it before them,
and the child has the vision, like their mothers,
to see beyond where they have never been before
and feel confident as they guide themselves beyond it all.

My prayers will be for the children of mothers
who, without thnking, bind their children to themseves
as if the mother were the centre of the universe
where the father of the universe is made out to be
a distant figure who is seen to be the cause of all conflict. 

Whatever Happened To 'Being Book Learned'?

A phrase I was raised on was 'book learned',
a phrase that less educated, working class, families
used to distance themselves from, and describe
somebody who spent a significant length of time
with writng and reading whilst the working classes
had little time for people who sat on their asses
and looked like they could afford the time
the working classes could not, being lost in books
that had no obvious, direct, application of knowledge
that would return the book reader to being more engaged
with eraning enough to pay the bills and keep food on the table.

The working classes mistrusted those who were not as attached
to the treadmill of the hand to mouth existence as much they were.
Which was why they mistrusted the aim of collective redistribution
as written about as classical socialist theory, if not with The Gospels,.
They preferred the individual Darwinist struggle, man against nature,
and the covert imitation of the underhand, the powerful, and the mighty.   

The Belicose And The Technocratic

Governments vary in character
from the technocratic to the belicose
where the latter hides in the plain sight,
through the volume at which it declares itself,
that many governments have no vision
of the future beyond their enlightened
self interest in seeking to be the whole
of any future that there is for anyone.

This makes the task for the citizen
seeking to renew the idea of citizenship
a more uphill battle than you might think.
Because when the same old faces repeat
their claim as to being the only legitemacy
of choice peoplel can point toward, where
the eponymous Tina tells us There Is No Alternative,
like the one time M. Thatcher, who was always right.

Technocratic governements are happier
are being exchanged, one for another,
they know that politics is a roundabout
and we all get off to make room for others
before we are inevitably be let back on
the roundabout of government, again. 

Picture Of The Day : A Rough-crested Makoha

A Rough-crested Malkoha starts the day hunting for insects.

Tagaytay City, Philippines Photo: Robby Villabona