Cerise Press
>My father’s strong hands
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| Elan Justice @ F-Stop Magazine/ |
Janko Deur remembers his childhood in a Croatian village @Cerise Press.
The best, worst and biggest thing about my father were his strong hands. They were a heavy mass of muscle hardened by construction jobs building stone houses, and by the never-ending farming tasks in Stankovci, our Croatian village. With their own tranquility, the fields complement the village and their seven hills, reminding one of the Eternal City of Rome. Those miles of farming land had been sponsoring a chance for the survival of my forebearers. My father had to take that chance, too. That chance always came with strong hands. My father used those hands to bring us — his family — out of poverty and to make us proud of having the largest and best-looking house in our village. He used them while talking to make a point, to count his hard-earned money, to greet his friends, to scare his enemies, to protect his possessions, to hold his four children. Without them one could never endure the work. My father was aware of it, and would look at his own hands as the most precious possession he had. His fingers, swollen with frightening strength, were intimidating reminders to stay out of trouble in his presence. In hard times, he used those hands to pray when communication with the world around him ceased. With his hardworking and powerful hands he proposed to our mother — the most beautiful girl in the village, according to him — giving her a bouquet of red and white roses. In sickness those hands used to carry us children to our country doctor five miles away from our house. They would also bring us back, cover us, and tuck the woolen blanket under our bodies, hot with fever or sick with flu. Those strong hands would close the door on our bedrooms silently, as if they belonged to a friendly, giant ghost who didn’t want to wake up the inhabitants of the house. The same hands would feel our sweaty foreheads. On a sad occasion when my mother broke her leg and couldn’t walk, those strong hands would carry her every night upstairs to their bedroom. He would bring her down to our country kitchen on snowy winter days and would sit her by the fireplace. Then he would go about his daily chores, cutting the thick air of frustrations with them as if playing golf and not getting an expected result.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Life’s path brought my father to quite a few unusual situations where his strong hands had to live up to their name.
>A perfect film
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Jose-Luis Moctezuma explores the intricate pleasures of Bresson’s A Man Escaped @ Cerise Press.
Pauline Kael’s observation that “great movies are rarely perfect movies” succinctly describes how great cinema attracts the perils of excess in search of immeasurable truths. The greatest movies are those which take the greatest risks — that is, when the truth-content happens to outweigh the formidable risks in attaining it. Citizen Kane strikes us as great because Welles was audacious enough to use baroque literary devices in a medium still coming to grips with photographic realism. Kael gives her thesis another angle: “Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize.” Irresponsibility can be pleasurable in art (it isn’t always so) when the artist has visibly taken little-to-no scruples in obscuring the defects and limitations which characterize the work, when the artist has in fact exaggerated or blown these defects up in proportion to their support of an idea otherwise difficult to express. At such a point the defect becomes charming, idiosyncratic, purposeful; the filmmaker attains a remarkable idiosyncrasy in identifying the essential spirit of the film. The film of “perfection” in contrast bears up a placidity unendurable to the weary cinéaste; its parts are too measured, too calculated, its scenes so limpidly expressed that a ravenous boredom consumes the impatient spectator in search of dangerous, exotic perceptions. The so-called “perfect film” is too frequently one of truism and bloodless platitudes. This is because (in Kael’s words), “Art doesn’t come in measured quantities: it’s got to be too much or it’s not enough.”
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( 1 so far )Wondrous indeed the film which is both perfect and great; rarer still the film whose perfection derives from a deliberate minimalism and severe reduction of expression. Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped (1956) is one of those rare instances of a work whose greatness is directly characterized by its mechanisms of refinement; the film does not so much present a sheen of indisputable perfection as it reveals the hidden engine by which its nature produces a kinema of inward and outer symmetry. The risks taken in A Man Escaped — ordinary in themselves, but extraordinary in conjunction — are the same risks which characterize the whole esprit of Bresson’s œuvre. The risk, namely, of opting for counter-intuitive narrative techniques when more conventional ones present themselves.
>Invisibilized Realities
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| horaciosalinas.net |
In the September issue of the The Believer there is an interview with Robyn Nagle, the athropologist-in-residence for the New York City Sanitation Department. Nagel is trying to build support for a Museum of Trash in the city, but such an idea is not easy to persuade in a city that is often overwhelmed with its trash and simply wishes it to be taken away. Nagle notes that everything we see is eventually trash, and yet we love to ignore this reality–or rather “invisibilize” it–thus making our response to trash a complex cognitive act: “it’s cognitive in that exact way: that it is quite highly visible, and constant, and invisibilized. So from the perspective of an anthropologist, or a psychologist, or someone trying to understand humanness: What is that thing? What is that mental process where we invisibilize something that’s present all the time? Nagle’s ideas prompted me to think about all the ways we might enact this cognitive process in other parts of our lives, and how writers and artists provoke us to see those realities we invisibilize each day.
At Cerise Press, writer Sun Yung Shin goes searching for the word adoptee (that doesn’t exist in English), as she tries to recover memories she never had: “It is a word that refers to a permanent exchange, it refers to the choice of the adopter, it defines the adoptee as an artifact, something created by the will of the adopter. The mother or father or parents do not have any word related to adopt attached to them.”
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| horaciosalinas.net |
Edward Schwarzchild meditates on writing and art at The Rumpus, moving between a number of fragmented memories that each seem to connect to the writer Nick Flynn: “When Nick speaks of what it means to be lost (as he does powerfully in Some Ether, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, and The Ticking Is the Bomb) he occasionally cites a line from D. W. Winnicott: “It is joy to be hidden, but disaster not to be found.””
Spotlighting the influence of Western, liberal philosophies on Iranian intellectuals and activists, and the problems of the Left in Europe and North America to recognize this, is the subject of Danny Postel’s essay in The Liberal: ““There have been more translations of Kant into Persian in the past decade than into any other language”, reports Vali Nasr, “and these have gone into multiple printings”. Abdollah Momeni, the leader of Iran’s most prominent student-activist group (Daftar-e Tahkim-e Vahdat), claims Habermas as his chief inspiration. The speeches and writings of Akbar Ganji, Iran’s leading dissident, are peppered with references to Kant, John Stuart Mill and Albert Camus.”
In exploring the hidden, and not so hidden, sexual pleasures of malls, Molly Young dissects the experience of shopping at Hollister at The Believer: “The employees are selected for their insane good looks and friendliness, which creates the disorienting customer experience of receiving attention from people way out of your league over and over again. You can’t avoid having a sexual experience at Hollister, even if it’s just to stare at a greeter’s bullet-hard nipples. Hollister’s strategy may not be subtle, but it is clever. By literalizing the mall’s sexual promise in actual naked flesh, the brand makes it unnecessary for shoppers to wander elsewhere.”
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| horaciosalinas.net |
Oscar Paul Medina at The Hydra Magazine writes on the influences of Italian Futurist artist Luigi Russolo’s “art of noises” on contemporary music: “For Russolo, noise carries a two-fold meaning: the discordant atonality of machines and also natural non-traditional sounds. Animals, cars, waterfalls, jet engines, trains — the cacophony of coitus and the shrieking of a child crying — all these fall within the rubric of noise.”
Reflecting on the pleasures and limits of walking through nature with his ipod Simmons B. Buntin, editor of terrain.org, considers our current conflicts around listening and experience: “I accepted the digital music player with a mixture of anticipation and regret. As with my adoption of any new technology, I knew it would change my habits and relationship with the wider world. Though I design websites and work on computers all day, I’m always wary of new gadgets. It’s not that I’m old-fashioned; instead, there’s something about losing a connection to the visceral world, an unwillingness to substitute virtual for actual.”
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