I was listening to this song today on my new Bob Dylan album. Take a moment with the lyrics. I think they’re fascinating.

I just went on a Quentin Tarantino kick, catching up on his most recent films: Jackie Brown (1997), Kill Bill Vol. 1 (2003), and Kill Bill Vol. 2 (2004).

Before I saw these three films I was convinced that I hated QT. His overstylized strut, and clever, snappy dialog always seemed so vapid and meaningless. It always seemed to me that he was more intent on being cool than he was on being honest. I always compared him to what I hated most about cinema’s French New Wave, and noted that unlike the French New Wave, QT had no historical importance.

I’ll make a few amendments to my stance. There is no doubt that Tarantino’s cinematic approach finds it’s thickest roots in the FNW. Without the work of Jean Luc Godard and Francois Traffaut there would be no Quentin Tarantino. Tarantino makes no denial. His production company, called “A Band Apart”, is a literal translation of the title to one of Godard’s best known films “Bande à part” (Band of Outsiders, 1964). But here’s the difference, and this I can respect him for: while the French New Wave was so interested in cool for the sake of cool, style over content, and form over function (all of which crippled the movement from saying anything of value) Tarantino has co-opted the style and spirit of exploration of the movement and dropped its existentialist baggage.

Tarantino’s characters may talk on and on, endlessly trying to convince either themselves or others that they’re cool by the sharpness of their wit, but the bottom line is that Quentin Tarantino’s characters have definite hopes, dreams and concerns. Where theexistentialismm of the French New Wave turned each of its characters into voids whose only desires were for sex, food, or sleep and then gave some hint to their present unhappiness, Tarantino’s characters are fighters–they’re real people.

Recent examples that come to mind:

In Jackie Brown the title character is an agingstewardesss who struggles with getting old and feelings of constantly starting over without ever gaining headway. Jackie Brown is a character who desires to find a small piece of the world she can call her own, and she uses her intelligence to get there.

In Kill Bill (I’ll consider V.1 and V.2 as the same film) Uma Thurman’s “Bride” character wants to be a mother–she wants to live the simple life and get away from all the killing she’s surrounded by. She does all she can to attain that goal and when other’s take it from her, she gets her revenge. In the end, (SPOILERS) it is not revenge that is the sweetest, but the unexpected turn that brings the daughter she once thought dead back to her. It is sweetest that Beatrix Kiddo gets to be a mother.

After a bit of revision, Tarantino may not be my favorite filmmaker, but he is at least interesting. I don’t think we’d be hard pressed to see Tarantino as the American answer to the French New Wave. He takes on much of their style and their strut but his taste for meaningful characters and redeeming plot belies the earlier movement’s cultural roots.

I propose this: America is a nation fundamentally rooted in morality and meaning. I don’t know much of Tarantino’s history, but I wager that his being born in the heartland of America (Knoxville, Tennesseee), where christian morals are woven into the fabric of society, has had a great deal of influence on his cinematic vision– perhaps more of an influence than even the films of Godard and Traffaut.

About the French New Wave
About Quentin Tarantino

Everyone creates. So everyone must (or should) care how to create well. From writing, to making images by photography or painting or drawing, to speaking, to planning one’s day, we are all MAKING. How do we create well? It seems that complexity is less beautiful than simplicity. Messiness is ugly, orderliness is beautiful, and unstructured messes are usually complex (like a child’s playroom) whereas structures perfectly ordered are usually simple (like squares or circles). For instance, a clear cylindrical glass vase, with a white flower in it, resting on a clean white tablecloth is an image simple and nice; a dirty broken bottle, shards lying on a dusty crumpled old rag, on top of a dirty, stained wooden table is complex and distasteful.

So it seems that complexity (10 parts or more) is less beautiful than simplicity (4 parts or less). Now, how is it that people create large, complex structures that are beautiful? How is it that the we come by aesthetically pleasing leather sofas, functional construction equipment, beautiful photos of people’s faces? Looking at divine creations, how is it that ants are neat and trees beautiful?

Conversely, how is it that people create simple structures that are ugly? How is it that we come by punk rock songs wherein the same chord is played for the entire painful duration of a 2 minute song, or that people would prefer to live in a house that is a sprawling system of multiple rooms and bathrooms and closets rather than a square shack or a warehouse? Again, looking at God’s creatures, why is it that snakes, simple creatures (for bones they have a spine and ribs, and thats it) are considered by most people to be utterly repulsive?

The answer struck me yesterday. Beautiful things that are complex are still orderly, it is just that the complexity is subordinate to simplicity. These creations display a strict hierarchical order of simplicity at “the top” and subordinate complexity at “the bottem”. The perfect image is the tree. What is a tree? An average oak tree visibly consists of one trunk, two or three major branches, extending out and eventually branching into several (more than 4) smaller branches, those each extend into several twigs, and each twig will usually display an array of leaves (and even those display veins within). The conglomeration of branches, twigs, leaves, and trunk is complex; but the system of trunk-branch-smaller branch-twig-leaf is simple… exactly 4 parts! (There are, of course, things such as roots, bark, and the innards of leaves, but as these do not appear to us, I ignore them. I am only dealing with the tree as an immediately visible object)

If this is so, one may evaluate complex ugly images (such as the cover of a PennySaver magazine) by pointing out that the “leaves” are larger than the “trunk”, and that there is no discernable and consistant order of relation between parts. One may evaluate complex beautiful images (such as a Rembrandt painting) by observing that there is a distinct and unimpeached hierarchy displayed throughout.

One may, and should, even evaluate this post. It is a creation. Is it orderly, or haphazard and unbalanced? I only said I realized a truth, I didn’t say I had yet implemented it in my own creations.

I was listening to the radio as I drove up to work yesterday when I heard a brilliant radio advertisement for Denzel Washington’s new movie, Man On Fire. It was your typical over-enthusiastic over-statement of an ad, complete with over-excited critic reviews and drum-laden explosive music. Critics in the ad hailed the movie saying “This is a movie experience unlike audiences have ever experienced!” and “Denzel Washington literally sets the screen on fire!”.

“Denzel Washington literally sets the screen on fire”?

I was all alone in my car, but I still laughed myself to tears.
Maybe we should be a little more careful about what words we use and where.

Man On Fire official web site
(the movie isn’t actually supposed to be that good, but I’ll probably see it anyway)

Jim Caviezel is up for an MTV movie award for “Best Male Performance” for his role as Jesus in The Passion. Take a moment and appreciate how incredibly rare that is–a hyper-violent movie about a suffering savior makes over $350 million in the box office and is embraced (at least in part) by the heartbeat of cool youth culture.

Best Male Performance was The Passion’s only MTV movie nom., but when you consider the audience, that is a pretty impressive feat itself.

Caviezel shares the category with Bill Murray (Lost in Translation), Tom Cruise (The Last Samurai), Johnny Depp (Pirates), and Adam Sandler (50 First Dates). Depp will win, but I’m happy to see Caviezel up there anyway. It is, in fact, more meaningful to me that Caveziel was nominated for the MTV award than if I had heard that he was nominated for an Oscar. If the Academy gives the nomination it will seem like they’re just making an obligatory recognition of the highest grossing independent feature ever made. They would appear hopelessly behind in their meaningless honor– but the MTV award is a sort of “people’s choice” award. It’s not about stuffy industry professionals. It’s about what mass quantities of real, everyday youth culture respects.

I can honestly say as I grew up attending public high school that I never thought Jesus would appear on that list.

You can follow this link to vote for Jim Caviezel here:
MTV Movie Awards

Keith, are you equating the use of hallucinatory drugs with the mystical experience that occurs with hard meditation? I’ve never experienced either high, so I don’t know what to say.

When I was doing my research on Rock n’ Roll and the occult I came across a book by Alduous Huxley called The Doors of Perception. The book is a carefully written, first person study of the effects of mescaline. Huxley used the drug himself and then wrote about his mystical experiences. He describes transcending the mind and matter to see “suchness” in everything. The end result to my ears sounds very similar to the idea of transcending to “the one” (was it the Platonist who wrote about that?). Huxley hypothesized that the hallucinatory drug was opening his “doors of perception”– which is, incidentally, where Jim Morrison derived the name for his band.

I’m not recommending this book. In fact, when I read it myself I had a sort of uneasy feeling about the whole thing, but the idea is interesting and, I think, worth some discussion.

Your idea about giving a high to people who are not mature enough to handle it is interesting, though I wonder what (if any) are the inherent differences, regardless of the person experiencing the high or connection to the spiritual, or however you want to most fairly describe the experience.

I recommend Ralph McInerny’s very short Rhyme and Reason: St. Thomas and Modes of Discourse. It’s the Marquette University Aquinas Lecture for 1981.

I’m thinking about it today in relation to literary criticism (a field in which I am less than a novice). But a sub-point of McInerny’s, and one that I’d like to raise in discussion with contemporary theorists and their disciples, is that distinctions of literary genre are difficult to make. Consider the following spectrum: Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura, Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Eliot’s Four Quartets, and Dickens’ Hard Times. Which are philosophy and which are literature? In my opinion, the line is hard to draw. Aristotle and Dickens probably have the largest disparity here, but my selections are fairly graded examples of more and less philosophy mixed with more and less poetry/fiction.

Now, if we can’t clearly make these distinctions, then our literary theory ought to be applied perhaps to more explicitly philosophical works. And if interpretation is merely a matter of the values of a community or an individual, then the discipline of philosophy is caput. Even philosophical relativists or non-realists depend for the propagation of their ideas on the ability to analyze arguments and make their own. Indeed, if genres are undefined, than the writing of critical theory itself (and this is where McInerny is helpful) should be subject to its own standards. But this is an example of what Chesterton calls a “suicide of thought” and what Thomas Reid calls a philosophical “coalpit.”

A few thoughts:

Remember that a large percent of college students are at public institutions. (Does anyone know whether a majority are?) Although these schoos still have tuition, costs are highly subsidized by the government. Furthermore, for many students, college is an arena of more sophisticated partying and pranking than high school. Since public secondary education is designed to socialize young citizens, one cannot say that only in college does work toward contribution to society begin. In other words, I don’t see how college is any more praxis oriented than high school, given that both are preparation for praxis.

For some, the last two years of high school are idle because they could be doing bigger and better things (at college). For others, an eleventh and twelfth year of education are wasteful because they lack the ability to comprehend the subjects, etc. Personally, I would have liked high school to be more challenging, but I also learned a lot. I think that Honors and AP courses address some of these problems. I remember that for many of my senior class, their last two years were filled with fun and often vocational elective courses. We even had “short days” for students with enough credits. So the bifurcation of student-types that Selby made is accomodated in public education.

Wow. I just defended public education.

I spent some time in Germany a few years ago, and learned that students take tests in the early to middle teenage years. These aptitude tests determine the students remaining course of secondary education. For many, training becomes primarily vocational at this point, while others remain on a more academic track for professional, political, and academic vocations. A system like this seeks to make education as worthwhile as possible for all kinds of students. But I doubt that German schools give “Most Improved Student” awards like my schools did. In other words, one’s public education so locks one into his vocation, that there is little flexibility for a student to improve himself to the point of changing educational strata. To defend American education again, its democracy provides opportunity for students to succeed in spite of themselves or their backgrounds. For instance, the author was always a bright, though lazy, student who practically flunked the sixth grade before getting whipped into shape by his parents and teachers.

Wow. I just did it again.

Praises aside, I think the public educational system encourages mediocrity and reads all the wrong books. I still can’t understand why we read House on Mango Street and Of Mice and Men (two books I really like) at the expense of reading Paradise Lost or King Lear. I still don’t understand why WWI was taught to me as this skirmish that happened after a duke was assassinated. And I still don’t understand why Eurpoean History was substituted out of the tenth grade curriculum in favor a trilogy of classes on Health, Careers, and Driver’s Ed. I think that curriculum changes are more important to make than drastic structural changes. I think many of my educational deficiencies could have been avoided if I’d been assigned more and better work to do. The consequence of this is that ideological battles take primacy over practical ones (with which Selby is most concerned in his post).

This is just what this man of theoria likes to hear.

First off, Don, commendations on a brilliantly timed post.

Second off, it seems to me pot is so popular and so well-sung because of the joyous rapture experienced by its puffers. Now, regardless of the medical dangers of pot and the societal drain of its loyal users, there is one argument against it (and against all easy trip drugs) which I would like to proffer.
Smoking pot is a cheap payoff; junkies should work for their highs. The “high”, the ecstasy, the mind-blowing experience that junkies live for is a poor imitation,quickly and dangerously achieved, of something good. I talked recently to a well-respectable man who admitted to regularly having mystical experiences the likes of St. John of the Cross, Francis of Assisi, and others. How? In meditation. From what I heard, it seems he was experiencing much the same kind of “fun” and pleasurable union with the “other world” sung about it Zepplin’s Stairway to Heaven, but he did so without breaking the law. He claimed that sitting quietly and silencing your mind for 60 minutes simply will result in mystical experiences. But, he said, it takes a year or two of practice. The fruits of experience are the result of disciplined, consistant, committed behavior the likes of which only mature (or maturing) adults are capable. I think to hand out these experiences to the mentally and emotional childish (by their own choice) is not beneficial. I propose that we preach to addicts all the highs of pot with none of the medical or legal side effects. It will just them take a year or two.