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Wednesday, September 25, 2002
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Kathleen is complaining about certain people’s behavior during the screening of cult movies. When she talks about voice-overs, I think she inadvertently may have started a new artistic trend. My thoughts are presented herewith: I think we are missing a great opportunity for creativity here. The old fashioned bias toward a correspondence between the uttered text and a voice over is a bourgeois bias with faux Aristotelian overtones -- if you think about it, it contradicts the law of identity, how can you have an original AND a translation occupying the same space? I think the issue was resolved masterfully by Woody Allen in "What's up, Tiger Lily?," a highly introspective cinematic masterpiece, reminiscent of Tarkovsky's "Nostalgia." The solution should be to apply the technique for excising sex and violence out of movies to the dialogue itself -- replacing it (especially in all the foreign movies) with something much more palatable and acceptable to the community it is being shown in. As you can see, the possibilities are endless.
2:39:40 PM 
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Pat Berry made a very apt statement regarding his right to have a blog -- it's for him, not for you -- if you don't like it, don't read it, but don't complain about it either. (Some) blogs are a treasure troves of data. How do we turn that data into information? Well, the same way that we turn any data into information -- by imposing a mental grid upon it. I certainly did not come up with the grid business; it appears in the very first chapter of Frank Herbert’s “Dune,” during Paul’s meditation: “…animal pleasures remain close to sensation levels and avoid the perceptual … the human requires a background grid through which to see his universe … focused consciousness by choice, this forms your grid …” (from “Dune” published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 1984, p. 5). In a lecture delivered on in November of 1967 in Turin, entitled “Cybernetics and Ghosts,” Italo Calvino talks about the totality of human activity vis-à-vis language: “The number of words was limited, and, faced with the multiform world and its countless things, men defended themselves by inventing a finite number of sounds combined in various ways.” (From “Cybernetics and Ghosts” the first in a collection of essays called “The Uses of Literature” by Italo Calvino published in 1986 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, p. 3). Both Calvino and Herbert talk of the need to sift the infinite world out there through some kind of filter – be that conscious consciousness or the grammar and vocabulary of a language. In either case we bring our ability to perceive the world around us with… the world around us. Having started this blog almost three weeks ago I recently began venturing into other people’s graphomania. I would chance on a random blog through blogsnob, through a link on a blog that is referring to mine, or through a comment on an entry I would read. While the initial pattern was often random, the ensuing pattern was emphatically not random. Some blogs have appeal and some don’t. Once that is established, the reading of certain blogs becomes part of my routine. Consequently, I am exposed to very specific data, which, due to the nature of the net and the fact that some blogers know each other, is cross-referenced. The exposure to this rather than other data (through my personal interest and inclination) and its structure, provides me with specific content – we scan casually blogs we have little interest in, we read carefully the blogs we subscribe to. The discrimination regarding what data I take in as well as how I take it in provides the grid and the limited structure through which I behold the almost infinite data out there. Consequently, what can be viewed as white noise nonsense in its totality turn out to be coherent, and useful information. This goes back to Pat’s point about the utility of blogs – they can be extremely useful, informative and entertaining, provided we impose a certain structure on how we “take them in.” Anyone who complains about blogs being a waste of space or anything of the sort is probably completely non-discriminating in their approach to reading this vast store of material, or is completely dense, or both.
9:18:46 AM
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© Copyright 2002 Daniel Dolinov.
Last update: 10/1/2002; 12:33:59 PM.
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