art

today we recall david foster wallace, a sensational american novelist who was found dead in his los angeles home after apparently commiting suicide.  foster wallace wrote a number of excellent books and short story collections; his 1100 page (and 400 footnote) magnum opus, infinite jest, occupied my summer’s worth of subway rides about 7 years ago.

foster wallace gave a commencement address at kenyon university in may 2005 that is well worth reading.

Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it JC or Allah, bet it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

some notes on suicide, from these two sources:

•  on average, 89 americans commit suicide each day.  the vast majority of suicide victims are white, male, and young.  the american estimate is that, for each completed suicide, 25 attempts are made; 816,000 annual suicide attempts are made in the u.s. (or 1 for every 367 people).
• in canada, 3,765 suicides were reported in 2003 (compared with 2,766 traffic fatalities in that year).  suicide is the leading cause of death for men aged 25 to 29 and 40 to 44, and for women aged 30 to 34.  it is the second leading cause of death among youth aged 15 to 24. For each completed suicide there are 100 attempts, and over 23,000 Canadians are hospitalized each year for a suicide attempt.

most north americans would struggle to understand the importance that film plays in contemporary indian life.  bollywood is omnipresent throughout the world’s most diverse country: bollywood stars grace billboards, splash across newspaper headlines, and own cricket teams.  bollywood itself isn’t merely cinema, but a total business/entertainment experience that inherently includes music videos, ringtones, merchandising as part of the method of expression as opposed to some post-release side effect.  this media is devoured by an imagery (and social activity) hungry public.  while i was in ahmedabad, the public realm debated whether movie theatres should be open 24 hours, in order to sustain the city’s bollywood addiction.

in itself, however, the relationship to film seemed much different for indians than for north americans.  the cinema in india is more of a meeting place, a spot where pre-marriage-aged boys and girls could spend time in relative darkness and anonymity.  the plot is generally not the point - most bollywood movies center on a handful of derivative themes, interrupted only by rich colour dance scenes that bear only a cursory relationship to whatever was going on before and after. india is home to a rich history of filmmakers capable of makin excellent commentary on contemporary indian society, but for the massive majority, pop, colour, sexuality, and music seem to be enough to keep them coming back to the cinema weekend after weekend.  the cinema itself is a sensational experience, filled with talking, ringing cellphones, jeering at the screen, and, of course, singing; pop music is generally disseminated exclusively through current film.  (in that regard, bollywood provides an interesting vision of the future to a north american record industry historically predicated on declining album sales.)

we are so fortunate to live in a society where we can sample the best cinema from around the world.  but for something that isn’t the best, but is definitely lots of fun, check out ‘om shanti om’, ‘dhoom 2′, ‘jannet’, or some of the other hit bollywood flicks from the last few years.  here’s a couple highlights of some of my favourite songs:

the main character in this clip (in the suit with the red collar) is shah rukh khan, the king of bollywood cinema.

cool!

http://www.blogto.com/arts/2008/02/what_does_it_mean_to_be_a_human_being/ 

hope to see you at the show on sunday!

i can’t recommend this movie highly enough.  i saw it tonight and had the opportunity to listen to a very poignant q&a with the director.  the documentary concentrates on employees on a tour boat who have been affected by the three gorges dam project (by the time the project is completed, it will have required the relocation of 2,000,000 people from the newly created reservoir).  the director described the film as concentrating on ‘the people who fall between the cracks of progress’, which i felt was very apt.

www.uptheyangtze.com 

this is a independently released canadian film and, as such, requires a lot of great word of mouth in order to draw some audiences.  go check it out: it’s playing at the cumberland and opening across canada over the next few weeks.

on feb 4, nasa will beam the beatles song ‘across the universe’ directly at polaris, the north star, the american organization announced yesterday.

  “Amazing! Well done, NASA!” McCartney said in a message to the space agency. “Send my love to the aliens. All the best, Paul.”

identifying, once and for all, the ethnicity of the creature that replaced him, after his secret death the late 60s.