| Paradise Lost This article appears in the spring 2008 issue of Petits Propos Culinaires In Carrara it’s easy to forget about the sea. The Mediterranean, which lies just a few kilometres west of this small industrial city, disappears rapidly as you climb from the marina to the base of the Apuan Alps and the largest marble quarry in the world. Likewise, from the water’s
edge, where solitary sunbathers, as dark as bronze, stretch out
on great flat stones, the mountains seem less a reality than an
optical illusion. They arise behind you like a crude etching or
cardboard cutout: a kitsch alpine backdrop (the exposed marble looks
like snow) that offsets the sea. An even row of palm trees that
line the boulevard between the marina, where large blocks of marble
are placed onto shipping containers, and the coastal city of Massa
heighten the sense of displacement. As Eric Scigliano writes in
Michelangelo’s Mountain, the quarries above Carrara form, ‘the greatest
trompe l’oeil ever shaped by human hands.’ |
|
I'm Not a Jukebox
Death Poem by Shisui, 1769
"During his last moments, Shisui's followers requested
that he write a death poem. He grasped his brush, painted a circle, cast
the brush aside, and died."
continued...
The Drifter
Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park
Is Gus Van Sant a great filmmaker? Most of the time,
is he even a good one? Or is he something else—a gentle trickster
whose experiments and digs at mainstream filmmaking are celebrated because
they’re more well-timed than genuinely innovative? Obsessed as it
is with basking in the light and darkness of youth culture, Paranoid Park,
Van Sant’s new film, answers such cranky, legacy and history questions
with a dim, sun-dappled stare. In Van Sant’s world, spacey pontification
is all.
continued...
Tradition of Resistance: End of the Left?
There is no greater fallacy than the intellectual claim
that a once commonly accepted truth or paradigm has at last come to an
end. More often than not it is wishful thinking. To declare the end of
or the death of something was a fashionable twentieth century conceit.
From the death of God to the end of History, with everything from the
Novel, Art, Civilization, Nature, Hip Hop, Cinema, Socialism, and the
Author terminated in between we have witnessed the rhetorical annihilation
of just about everything. Even the intellectual, in an act of self-flagellation,
has declared his own death.
continued...