I heart New York
Mar. 4th, 2004 09:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sanpaku_backupThis is my third trip through the greater New York area in the last three weeks... and I have another in two weeks, and another a week and a half after that.
It is not that bad -- kind of a three hour long subway ride, with the Acela -- but every time I need a couple of days to recover from things I couldn't accomplish because I was traveling.
I am getting quite familiar with life at the Hudson, where I am now. For example, two weeks ago I discovered that there was awful static electricity here. I had to touch all the doorknobs as I walked down the hall. ("Hey, looks like you have OCD," said D.) Now I figured out that I just need to roll my suitcase down the hall every time I go out, and there's much less pain at the end of things.
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For no apparent reason, some notes on televised culture that I've been thinking about:
- MST3K is finally off the air. This is depressing, but for the past year or so I have been busy Saturday mornings at 9 anyway. Still, it felt good that somewhere, people were watching the show. One thing that's good is that "Touch of Satan" will finally come out on DVD.
- Big blowout on The Wire tomorrow -- last two episodes. They are making another season, apparently, so I have that to look forward to. Another show that's coming out on DVD. (The Wire is so much better than The Sopranos, it's amazing. Especially the last couple years of the Sopranos, which have stunk, imho.)
- AbFab seems to be done as well, though we should consider ourselves lucky that they made another season after all this time, and miraculously, it is still as good as ever
- For no apparent reason we now get the Boomerang channel on the cable modem package. This is a network entirely devoted to old Hanna-Barbera cartoons. Not the Flintstones and the Jetsons, but the really awful cartoons, like Josie and the Pussycats. The stuff that an entire generation has learned to mock via late Sunday nights on the Cartoon Network. Why there's a huge demand for it, I don't know. Josie and the Pussycats makes Scooby-Doo look like Moliere.
It was bad enough when people started reliving 1980s music. Now this. Complete infantile regression underway. And you know it has to aimed at my generation. The kids today wouldn't watch shit like that for ten seconds.
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One of the students in my class is a woman in her 70s. She is very talkative and opinionated and is interested in asking my impression of things beyond the class. During the break she asked me about a remark I had made about The Passion Fruit, about Mel's wacky pre-Vatican II theology.
It was true. The movie doesn't exactly have pre-Vatican II theology. But Mel has plenty of it. She just flatly denied that the movie was anti-Semitic. I told her that when you decide to focus on the aspects of the story that he did, and make Pontius Pilate the hero and so forth, you're making creative decisions about what's important in that story. And it's not as though we need to wonder what people make of presenting the story that way. She asked me, "oh, so we should sanitize it?" Well, that wasn't going anywhere.
But it made me think again how, deep down, I am a believer in repression. Self-repression, to be responsible. I mean, you don't have to think that everyone who sees Birth of a Nation will kill black people to be wary of that movie. All that matters is that some people will feel that way. Josef Goebbels would have understood this movie instantly. But no, let's pretend otherwise. What a pretty picture! How aesthetically interesting! And so on.
You cannot tell me that someone watching a person turned into a plate of human spaghetti for two hours won't leave without being profoundly pissed off. And with this particular story, it's not as though we need to speculate. Easter time was always the time when "love" for the Jews of Russia was expressed in its greatest degree. And we have the whole of the twentieth century to tell us what happens when bad ideas meet mass culture.
The quotation from my mother in law: "You leave without any question that it was the Jews." Remains to be determined whether that is something that bothered her.
It is not that bad -- kind of a three hour long subway ride, with the Acela -- but every time I need a couple of days to recover from things I couldn't accomplish because I was traveling.
I am getting quite familiar with life at the Hudson, where I am now. For example, two weeks ago I discovered that there was awful static electricity here. I had to touch all the doorknobs as I walked down the hall. ("Hey, looks like you have OCD," said D.) Now I figured out that I just need to roll my suitcase down the hall every time I go out, and there's much less pain at the end of things.
-----------------
For no apparent reason, some notes on televised culture that I've been thinking about:
- MST3K is finally off the air. This is depressing, but for the past year or so I have been busy Saturday mornings at 9 anyway. Still, it felt good that somewhere, people were watching the show. One thing that's good is that "Touch of Satan" will finally come out on DVD.
- Big blowout on The Wire tomorrow -- last two episodes. They are making another season, apparently, so I have that to look forward to. Another show that's coming out on DVD. (The Wire is so much better than The Sopranos, it's amazing. Especially the last couple years of the Sopranos, which have stunk, imho.)
- AbFab seems to be done as well, though we should consider ourselves lucky that they made another season after all this time, and miraculously, it is still as good as ever
- For no apparent reason we now get the Boomerang channel on the cable modem package. This is a network entirely devoted to old Hanna-Barbera cartoons. Not the Flintstones and the Jetsons, but the really awful cartoons, like Josie and the Pussycats. The stuff that an entire generation has learned to mock via late Sunday nights on the Cartoon Network. Why there's a huge demand for it, I don't know. Josie and the Pussycats makes Scooby-Doo look like Moliere.
It was bad enough when people started reliving 1980s music. Now this. Complete infantile regression underway. And you know it has to aimed at my generation. The kids today wouldn't watch shit like that for ten seconds.
-----------------
One of the students in my class is a woman in her 70s. She is very talkative and opinionated and is interested in asking my impression of things beyond the class. During the break she asked me about a remark I had made about The Passion Fruit, about Mel's wacky pre-Vatican II theology.
It was true. The movie doesn't exactly have pre-Vatican II theology. But Mel has plenty of it. She just flatly denied that the movie was anti-Semitic. I told her that when you decide to focus on the aspects of the story that he did, and make Pontius Pilate the hero and so forth, you're making creative decisions about what's important in that story. And it's not as though we need to wonder what people make of presenting the story that way. She asked me, "oh, so we should sanitize it?" Well, that wasn't going anywhere.
But it made me think again how, deep down, I am a believer in repression. Self-repression, to be responsible. I mean, you don't have to think that everyone who sees Birth of a Nation will kill black people to be wary of that movie. All that matters is that some people will feel that way. Josef Goebbels would have understood this movie instantly. But no, let's pretend otherwise. What a pretty picture! How aesthetically interesting! And so on.
You cannot tell me that someone watching a person turned into a plate of human spaghetti for two hours won't leave without being profoundly pissed off. And with this particular story, it's not as though we need to speculate. Easter time was always the time when "love" for the Jews of Russia was expressed in its greatest degree. And we have the whole of the twentieth century to tell us what happens when bad ideas meet mass culture.
The quotation from my mother in law: "You leave without any question that it was the Jews." Remains to be determined whether that is something that bothered her.
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no subject
Date: 2004-03-04 07:25 pm (UTC)Just some food for thought :-)
It was true. The movie doesn't exactly have pre-Vatican II theology. But Mel has plenty of it. She just flatly denied that the movie was anti-Semitic. I told her that when you decide to focus on the aspects of the story that he did, and make Pontius Pilate the hero and so forth, you're making creative decisions about what's important in that story. And it's not as though we need to wonder what people make of presenting the story that way. She asked me, "oh, so we should sanitize it?" Well, that wasn't going anywhere.
no subject
Date: 2004-03-05 11:14 am (UTC)The whole Gospel story is extremely suspect and was almost certainly altered over time to be more anti-Jewish, once it was clear that Jews were not going over to the new faith. Mohammed and Luther had similar reactions over time.
But this woman was not going to discuss the reality of what she called "the simple, historical truth" with me, and it's true, I'm not going to get into it with a True Believer.
no subject
Date: 2004-03-05 09:21 am (UTC)I haven't seen the movie--have you?--and I don't really plan to unless it comes on TV or something. But one of my professors (a Christian ethics scholar) saw it and discussed it with a group of students last week, though, and he said that while he didn't find the movie intentionally antisemitic, he did see how it could easily feed existing antisemitic feelings that viewers might have. This is one of the lines of thought I've heard from others too--maybe NYT op-ed writers or something. He also said that he thought the movie wasn't trying to spread any kind of peace or harmony--that people were meant to leave the movie angry about what had happened to Jesus. And the violence of the movie was apparently hard to believe in-- that "Jesus" could remain conscious after the severity of the beatings he's subjected to. And then Satan appears in there--where in the gospels is Satan present in the Passion story? Nowhere. It really irritates me that this movie is being promoted as historically and textually true and realistic when this is in NO WAY the case. Argh.
That's all I have to say about it. Really. :)
no subject
Date: 2004-03-05 11:17 am (UTC)It has been so much discussed all over the place. But the people I trust on movies have described it as excruciating, really almost pornographic. I don't need to see that, and I don't need to spend my money to benefit Holocaust-denying hatemongers, either.
no subject
Date: 2004-03-05 08:26 pm (UTC)