In Search of Lost Time

I have read the beginning of Proust's book about five times and really enjoyed it although I think it would be fair to say that it is slow moving. The normal translation of the title in English is: Remembrance of Things Past. This, it turns out, is a pretty inaccurate translation but is rather beautiful. The translation I now have has given a more faithful version of the title: In Search of Lost Time. I actually prefer this title. It suits the theme of the book much better, it's nearer my own heart as a concern, and it has it's own beauty.

I have done two strands of autobiography before on this blog: (a) Mum's records, and (b) Dance. It's sort of my thing really. If I were to start a third I think I would start it here, with this photo of my Gran.

Further paper folding

On my last post I described a couple of frames from a movie called Hiroshima Mon Amour. I won't describe them again because all you have to do is scroll down slightly. While I was looking for these scenes on the internet so I could put them on my blog I came across another blog called 1000 of things. I rather liked it because of the post about things that make life worth living, and because I liked a lot of the books and movies listed on the author's profile (I think there are two authors, but Holly is the one I'm talking about).

Anyway, a few hours passed, I did some vacuuming and some dusting and then I went back to read 1000 of things again. There it was on the post from 8 June, 2008. The exact images I had described. And loathing, and misanthropy, and the joy of dance.

Shit life can be depressing. Hang in there Holly.

Folding paper

Here's an old trick that story tellers like to do. You draw a line across a piece of paper. On one end you write "born" and on the other end you write "died". Then you fold the paper in half and... voila! Birth and death touch each other and are handily (tear-jerkingly) juxtaposed. Countless movies start with a death scene and then jump backwards.








For me though, it's how this trick can work in day to day life that is startling and moving. Proust talked about it at the start of his enormous book I've read the start of five times: he takes a little tea with a biscuit and this particular taste vividly and suddenly brings back his childhood at Combray.

The best movie I have seen that catches this way the mind can suddenly fold time is Hiroshima Mon Amour.

A woman is standing by the side of a bed looking down at her lover. Her lover is lying face down, asleep, with one arm outstretched across the sheets. His hand twitches, we see her seeing this movement, and there is suddenly a jump cut to another man's hand, giving the same twitch, but lying on some cobbles. As fast as it has flashed before us the film returns to the woman looking down at the bed.

Richard's last comment reminded me of something my mother said a couple of weeks ago. She came into the bathroom while I was bathing Eleanor and said how much Eleanor looked like me when I had been her age.

Soon I am going back to Japan. I have not been there for five years and a lot of me is tied up in that place. I think it will be a very intense experience, and time and memory will be very fragile things.

The Years Passed Swiftly

Skylarks trilled over the quiet town of Simbirsk on the Volga, where the river makes a sharp bend. The river had just cleared of ice. The streets and gardens were filled with the chirping of birds and the birches swayed in the wind. There was the joy of spring in the air. There was great rejoicing in the Ulyanov home that day. The sun poured in through the windows, and the whistles of the river boats were clearly heard, for the house overlooked the Volga. As the mother bent over her newborn son’s cradle she wondered, “What will you be when you grow up? What does life hold in store for you?”

This was on April 22, 1870. Vladimir Ulyanov, the child who was born in the town of Simbirsk on the Volga that day, grew up to be the great Lenin.

The years passed swiftly. Volodya was now eight.

V.I. Lenin - The Story of His Life

Maria Prilezhayeva

First published in Russian in 1973

The years passed swiftly? No kidding. If we carry on at this rate Lenin will be dead by the end of page two.

Let's try me:

John-Paul was born. The years passed swiftly. He was now almost four. He was standing around thinking:

Run, run, the house is dark and cool, here is the outside, the sun, the heat, the sound of the sea over the dunes. Wheelbarrow. Put the ball in the barrow. Put the blocks in the barrow. Put the - run, run. There is a bird wheeling in the sky, there is a cloud. He says my name. There he is standing by the bush with the red flowers that look like toffee apple lips, there he is with the camera. He smiles and puts the camera to his eye, the bird calls out somewhere above the waves. That might be the click and squirk of mum cleaning the dishes through the white window, that shadow is my dad pushing the button on the camera.

Run, run.

An Unfinished Autobiography

In view of the fact that there is much friction over Lenin among the soldiers of the battery, please let us have the earliest possible reply. What is his origin? Where had he been? If he had been in exile, what for? How did he return to Russia and what is he doing at present, that is, are his acts doing us good or harm?

Letter of the soldiers’ committee of the 8th Horse Artillery Battery (army in the field) sent to the Petrograd Soviet. April 24 (May 7), 1917.

Lenin began a reply:

I reply to all these questions, except the last one, because it is for you to judge whether or not my activity is doing you any good. My name is Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov. I was born in Simbirsk on April 10, 1870. In the spring of 1887, my elder brother Alexander was executed by Alexander III for an attempt on his life (March 1, 1887). In December 1887, I was arrested for the first time and expelled from Kazan University for students’ disturbances; I was then banished from Kazan. In December 1895, I was arrested for the second time for Social-Democratic propaganda among the workers of St. Petersburg....

So, key dates: 1870, 1887, 1895. Following the same principles my own autobiography would read:

My name is John-Paul Marshall Powley. I was born in Paraparaumu on 9 March, 1973. In the Spring of 1990 I had glandular fever and wasn't going to school for my last term in seventh form. In December 1998 I was spending Christmas in London after teaching in Japan for seven months.

Pretty good. I don't think you need to add to this in any way.

Lenin

I looked at these two pictures for awhile today. I like them both, although the one in the wheelchair is my favourite.

Who was he? What was it like to spend an hour with Lenin?

The picture of him in full flight is inspiring, but it is a public photo. Even if he wasn't aware that he was being photographed he was in front of an audience and "on". The second photo seems quite candid although it is part of a series of photos that show he was aware of being photographed. Lenin died soon after this photo in the wheelchair.

What was it like to stand in the streets and hear Lenin speak without any of the cynicism or knowingness we have about Communism today. Trotsky wrote down his impressions:

When I try mentally with fresh eye and fresh ear to see and hear Lenin on the platform, as I did the first time, I see a strong and supple figure of medium height, and hear a smooth, rapid, uninterrupted voice, rather striking, almost without pauses, and at first without special emphasis.

Perhaps the other photo took place around this time:

That evening Nadezhda Konstantinovna read aloud to Vladimir Ilyich. As soon as he had shown improvement she had begun reading aloud each day from the newspaper Pravda. She was now reading him a short story by Jack London. Vladimir Ilyich sat in an armchair gazing out of the window thoughtfully. The old trees of the park stood deep in snow. The windowpanes were frosted over with weird leaves of ice, magical flowers and ferns that brought back memories of his childhood.

I think when we're gone that might be it - the dead can never be known again. Sometimes you read in a biography that someone was handsome or beautiful but when you see an old photo you think: "Beautiful? Her?" Photos strip us of life. Ordinary people stuck and mounted on the pin of photography can be quite dazzling in life when their features are full of animation and charm.

It is the job of the historian to make the dead seem alive. This is magic, this is poetry, this is lies. I would like to walk with Lenin for awhile.

The News

The following things have been annoying me:

• The main thing that pisses me off about John Key's comment ("We're not a country that's come about as a result of civil war or where there's been a lot of fighting internally, we're, we're a country which peacefully came together" ) is that the media have said that it is an insult to Maori. They have therefore interviewed a lot of Maori who have expressed views that show they are insulted. The problem is that I think Pakeha should be insulted too, and reporting it as an insult only to Maori is, well, racist.
• The Governor General recently replaced his old flag (adopted in 1937) with a new one because: "it was considered that the old flag lacked distinctive New Zealand elements and reflected an era before New Zealand became a sovereign and independent nation." Firstly: where the frig is our sense of history? Who cares if the old flag was spack - nobody even knows what the governor general's flag looks like anyway, and it's been around for seventy years. Secondly: to represent modern New Zealand we get - sheep, hay, hammers and some boats. Gee, what an awesome job of taking our identity into the 21st century.
• People whinging about Treaty settlements. This is the only way forward for New Zealand where we can hold our heads up. Affirmative action programmes that give scholarships or benefits to people based on race don't seem particularly effective for whatever reason. Treaty settlements allow past wrongs to be recognised and compensation to take a form that is specific to iwi, focuses on their land and gives them an iwi-wide basis to draw income and invest for the future. In a hundred years these settlements will be the reason New Zealand is a harmonious country.

Notes on Camp

• I also watch Project Runway. Recently I discovered a website called Project Rungay which offers a gay, bitchy, blow-by-blow commentary on each episode. One of the designers on the show likes to dress up in his own creations.

• Which leads me back to Ms. Sontag. I'm reading an essay she wrote called Notes on Camp. It's her greatest hit according to a poll of top 100 pieces of American journalism (I think it's number 74 or something).

• Point One for Sontag: "Camp is a certain mode of aestheticism. It is one way of seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon. That way, the way of Camp, is not in terms of beauty but in terms of the degree of artifice, of stylisation."

• These pictures would be a case in point. They certainly aren't beautiful... artifical and stylised? Just a touch.

• Inevitably there are a lot of Oscar Wilde quotes: To be natural is such a very difficult pose to keep up. That kind of thing. I realised a few years ago that there is a trick to Oscar Wilde aphorisms and they're quite easy to make up. Let's make one for Richard. No wonder Mozart died young. It's such hard work to maintain an air of casual brilliance.

Nice!

Life is grand. Honestly, things like this really cheer me up.

The Ministry of Education is defending printing badges to promote its new Maori education strategy, a move derided by some principals as gimmicky and infantile.
Principals have complained about the badges, which sport phrases such as "I love Maori success" and "Wassup!". The total cost for the information mailout was $230,000, Radio New Zealand reported.

It such an uptight, protestant, New Zealand thing to mention the cost of everything.

Ministry deputy secretary for Maori, Apryll Parata, said she was disappointed in the principals' criticisms. The badges had been designed to prompt discussion and engagement between teachers and students, using language young people used.

I wore my badge all day. It definitely prompted discussion and engagement between teachers and students. Here are some examples:

• You look so gay wearing that badge Mister.
• Are those the dumb badges in the news?
• That's f**king stupid.

"And on the badges it simply says things like I love Maori success. If that's considered gimmicky then I think we've got bigger problems than we may have thought in education," Ms Parata said. She said if students found the language on the badges patronising, that was a discussion worth having in the classroom.

Awesome defence by Ms. Parata: let's slag of education. Always encouraging when members of the Ministry of Education do that. Considered gimicky? Isn't it a gimick? I mean isn't that the purpose of the badges?

As for the discussion about why I'm patronising the students, I think I'll skip it.

Looking forward to phase two badges: "Pakeha success is ok, too", "I love Chinese food", "The MOE is dumb"

A pointless interlude

The biggest selling album of all time.

Whenever I look at the album sleeve I think of a 19 year old boy's bedroom. There is a leopard skin duvet cover, there are pictures on the walls of mysterious women smoking cigarettes, there is some kind of fashion trend hanging over the chair: fedora? trench coat? white suit?

The first track on this album actually features the lyrics: "you're a vegetable/you're a buffet/people dine off you". Nice.

Beat It is great. Billie Jean is fantastic. His best song really, and he did write some good songs. The less said about the duet with Paul McCartney the better.

Michael's ok.

Affirmative Action

Do I believe in things or am I a weather vane? I walk around believing things but when my views are put under the blow torch I find it hard to really state rationally why I think that I am right. Why do I think that the Waitangi Tribunal is doing a good job, and that historical greivances should be settled?

One view of affirmative action is that it perpetuates the very things it is attempting to redress. The usual example is the average brown kid who gets a scholarship to university ahead of the better than average white kid. This is racist.

The opposite view is summarised by Aristotle: "There is nothing so unequal as the equal treatment of unequals." When there are groups in a society that have been disadvantaged through deliberate historical discrimination then it is not fair to suddenly pretend we're all on a level playing field. We might all be able to shoot a goal in theory but Team Whitey is standing on the penalty spot, and Team Brown is down at halfway.

Who the hell are you JY?

I know what I look like. Sometimes I act out what strangers expect from me. They expect me to vote National, to hate the Maori Party, to believe in free trade, work in business, all that right-wing, white guy baloney (what the f**king hell is baloney, anyway?).


Last election I was tempted to vote for the Maori Party. I voted for the Greens instead. You understand that I didn't vote for them because I think they would make a good government all by themselves, but because I think that they are a good pressure group.

I am not involved in business. I am a teacher. Being a teacher where I work is pretty hard work really, but I fundamentally believe that what I do is important for society, and that I should do it as well as I can.

Here some of the things that happened today:

• Two students had a fist fight on the tennis courts at interval. I and another teacher had to physically intervene and try and pull them apart. Because they were large brown guys full of rage and we were skinny white guys we just sort of hung on to them until more big brown guys arrived and helped us pull them apart
• I had to yell at some students who simply refused on any level to do what I had asked them to do about ten times in varying tones of firmness or politeness. I mean really yell at someone. YELL. When was the last time you (who are not teachers) actually absolutely yelled at someone?
• A couple of students in my first class of the day seriously and intelligently debated the merits and drawbacks of affirmative action for Maori in New Zealand. It was a very interesting debate, one of those debates that challenge your views and make you really think about things.

All of these things were challenging for me. I wondered why it bothered me more that I yelled at someone instead of me being in the middle of a brawl, and I wondered about my values. I think this means I am going to talk about affirmative action.

Truth - On Your Face

Congratulations to Danyl and Andrew for making the regional final of the 48 hour Film Festival. Out of hundreds of entries they made it to the top twelve, and were nominated for cinematography and script; meaning they were considered to be top three in the area for two of the more important elements in film. I felt that of the twelve in the final their effort was definitely in the top six.



Apparently some people said unkind things about their film on some forums. I have a thin skin and know how this stuff can really bug you. I wanted to say:

• Your film was funny and memorable and most of the people who saw it on Wednesday had a great time watching it
• You worked really well together over the weekend and afterwards, and you should definitely do another one next year
• Andrew - you probably shouldn't laugh your arse off when your cameraman gets announced as being a nominee for best cinematography
• Danyl - I don't want to be a heartbreaker, but I reckon you have absolutely no future as a Mormon boy band member.

Well done.

Anthropology tutorials

When I took Anthropology at university I was in a tutorial with about fifteen other people. We met once a week to discuss the things we were supposed to have read and the lectures we were supposed to have been to. There was a guy in my tutorial that I wanted to punch in the nose. He was annoying.

I will illustrate his annoying qualities by giving the example of another annoying person I knew at university. This person once told me they believed in complete anarchy and wished the police were all dead. He was a bit of feeble poof so I said: "what would you do if a bunch of psychos raped your girlfriend, killed your family and stole everything you owned?" He looked a bit ill. So would I, if there were no police.

The over-educated white middle class pillock in my Anthropology tutorial said two things that made me want to punch him in the nose:

1. Western society sucks. I'd rather live in a mud hut.


2. You can't judge anything. It's all relative.

In my head I had two reponses to both his points:

1. Why don't you go and do it then?


2. Like Pol Pot and Hitler, they just had a different value systems... dude.

I think point two ("it's all relative") has been a pain in the (metaphorical) arse of Western art for quite some time, but it's sort of what you get if you say that wanky guitar solos, or silly paintings have no inherent quality of beauty.

Isn't it?

How did we get to the last step?

We got to the last step this way:

If you say the vase you put in this box that I have not seen is made of clay I will accept that the vase has the inherent property of being made of clay. A certain, shall we say, clay-i-ness. Unless I'm being annoying there is no reason for me to question your judgement on this matter even though I have not seen the vase.

However, if you say the vase is beautiful I won't accept that it has an inherent property called beauty until I have actually seen it. I might think that you have good taste in vases and give the vase the benefit of the doubt, but I will not 100% accept what you say until I have seen the vase with my own eyes and made my own judgement.

If we follow this logic then nothing is inherently beautiful.

A question for Richard

If I tell you that inside this box is a one foot long piece of grey metal you will accept that the object is a foot long, grey and made of metal.

If I tell you that the object is also beautiful however, you will not accept this until you have seen it with your own eyes.

Does this mean that objects, artworks and wanky bass solos don't have any intrinsic quality which we can call beautiful?

Happy Birthday

Happy birthday, Mum.

Fascinating Fascism - Part Two

[The] fascist aesthetic... flows from a preoccupation with situations of control, submissive behaviour, extravagant effort , and the endurance of pain.

Sounds like a bunch of Spartans with a death wish to me (JY)

Fascist art displays a utopian aesthetics - that of physical perfection.

Oh, the poor old hunchback. Even though he is devoted to the Nazi regime he must be rejected because he is handicapped and will spoil the perfect functioning of the Aryan machine. Let's not even go into the opening scenes where imperfect babies are tossed off cliffs. (JY)

Fascism also stands for ideals that are persistent today under other banners; the ideal of life as art, the cult of beauty, the fetishism of courage, the dissolution of alieanation in ecstatic feelings of community; the repudiation of intellect, the family of man. These ideals are vivid and moving to many people.

I have absolutely no hesitation in calling 300 a movie that promotes fascism. This is probably unsurprising; what was surprising for me was that my students all admired the Spartans in 300, and that many of the ideals that the movie expresses are vey close to ideals that we are taught to admire in our own culture.

Fascinating Fascism - Part One

[The] film... celebrates the rebirth of the body and of community, mediated through the worship of an irresistable leader.

Through Leonidas the 300 become a community, infact the movie title celebrates this (JY)

The... film is an epic of achieved community, in which everyday reality is transcended through ecstatic self-control and submission.

If the warriors follow Leonidas and his beliefs unquestioningly they will achieve greatness (JY)

[This] portrait evokes some of the larger themes of Nazi ideology: the contrast between the clean and the impure, the incorruptible and the defiled, the physical and the mental, the joyful and the critical.

The Persians are consistently portrayed as effeminate, deviant, deformed and untrustworthy in the movie (JY)

[The film] celebrates a society where the exhibition of physical skill and courage and the victory of the stronger man over the weaker are... the unifying symbols of communal courage.

The Spartans are cool because they kill everyone and they are a tight knit group.

All quotes from Sontag on Leni Riefenstahl's book of photography about the Nuba, and they are all quotes that I would apply to the movie 300.

Christ! On!

I'm neither of the people in this photo.

This photo is of two weird men at a restuarant in Osaka called Christon. The man on the right is a waiter. They are not in a church, they are in a restaurant.

I went to this restaurant a few times, once with a friend (M) who enjoyed himself immensely. We ordered a kind of peach champagne that the menu promised would leave a "fizzy reverberation in our behinds", but failed to deliver.

The people who run this chain (they also do Buddha), bought all their authentic Catholic iconography in Spain and shipped it to Japan to be used as decor in restaurants. That's right, it's not even fake, all those Virgin Mary's were once in churches, were once objects of prayer.

It is all peculiarly offensive and laughable at the same time.

Detaching the sacred and associating it with the profane is jarring. Curiously associating evil with the profane is also jarring.

As this blog puts it:

Yet for much of the world, Hitler and the Nazis are no more than an obscure historical reference--a vague association with Germany. So, in far-flung places like Mumbai or South Korea, when you think of beer, you think of Germany, and when you think of Germany, you naturally think of Hitler.

True.

Which leads me back to 300.

Give us a smile, pussycat.

I have found photos of Susan smiling, but she looks so much cooler when she's not.

The earliest experience of art must have been that it was incantatory, magical; art was an instrument of ritual. The earliest theory of art, that of the Greek philosophers, proposed that art was mimesis, imitation of reality.

It is at this point that the peculiar question of the value of art arose. For the mimetic theory, by its very terms, challenges art to justify itself.

- Susan

Was Leni Riefenstahl just copying something human that we don't care to praise? Or is praise of this kind of art actually immoral?

Three things. Firstly, if you google image Sexy Nazi (don't ask), you end up with pictures of Asian women in Nazi uniforms. Secondly, while I was in Japan a restaurant in Korea had to close because it had chosen to go with a Nazi theme for its decor. Thirdly, I went to a restaurant in Osaka a couple of times called Christon (Christ-on).