skyfall and ideological form

Starting from the premise that the film makers are aware of what they are doing but that still they are tracing a shape whose contours are formed by the ideological sub-strata of our society.  This is the ‘big other’ of Zizek and via his work Lacan, something to which reference is made implicitly in all works, the form of which is accessible not by looking directly at representations but by looking at what those varied forms do, how they relate to the material world in which they have existence.

What is the ideological form of which Skyfall is the clothing or as my sister called it the lichen, morphing lichen?  So if I look at material conditions of the film, those events outside it that allow it to be, give it shape, what are they?  To take one; it is referring to Julian Assange as the baddy saying firstly that the world of real politics and death is the proper subject of a film.  It might be seen as saying that in the end death, war and destruction, torture are possibly also just elements of entertainment.  The work with Assange doesn’t fall into real politics and get dirty.  The baddy is like Assange, sexually ambivalent and potentially dangerous.  He has unresolved issues with mother and is a laugh at therapeutic roles and practice.  His downfall is that set of issues and not the meat of his crimes in themselves for which he is un-attackable,  he only loses through his personal weakness. His crimes stay free of any comment, only existing as the perfect geek’s unaccountable, impersonal actions.  His normal yet extreme complexes are his downfall and the final crime is his resolution of that complex of emotions.  These are the boring old ones of rejection, lack of love and punishment and betrayal.  This followed by torture which leads to bitterness.  So Assange is subsumed into entertainment, a sort of mainstream Woody Allen film where we laugh with the therapist.  So that’s one condition of the film: it takes the real events of war and our proximity to its truth through wikileaks and makes it pure entertainment based around the audience’s awareness of psychological categories.  The ideological shape is that this is what matters perhaps?  The ability to laugh at oneself, to allow the sacred (real death and war) to be turned to the service of an evening out.  This is the form we believe in.

public art

Pubs are closing everywhere and at an astonishing rate.  Their signs are going down and for sale signs going up all over the place.  I was passing this pub near Mosborough and took a photo of the sign.  I wonder where they all go?  There is I assume a collector somewhere with a warehouse full of defunct pub signs.  Anyway – what a collection of paintings that would make wouldn’t it?

Joseph Glover Pub Sign

compassion?

I have a friend who told me about her long term interest in violence, something stoked by a young man who brought those ideas more than somewhat to life.  She proclaims an understanding of the violent, the obscene, the killer, the paedophile and wonders if that makes her bad? Is she in need of help?  I found her intensely compassionate in her telling of her tale and told her so.

Is that true compassion then?  To understand the other to point of being able to experience a lack of evil in even the most extreme behaviours?

amazing cave

This shop has opened up in an old building which backs onto the Don.  The owners are living above the shop with two balconies facing out over the river.  I’ve been driving past often and never had the opportunity to stop and look inside, the spot is well of the beaten track tucked in a corner of an old industrial area which has gentrified in spots but is still both small scale industrial and hosts a fair amount of sex workers.

The owner was sitting inside, his name is Aaron.  He was tired as he’d been down at a market inside the M25 and not slept.  He intends to sell classic guitars and amps as the speciality.  My reason to stop besides pure interest was that S had said ‘Give them that old radio’.  So I carried an old valve radio in and said ‘this is for you’.  ‘I don’t have that taste’ he said, so I explained I didn’t want to sell it but give it to him.  He accepted and we talked a while.

My daughter E wouldn’t come in because she was scared by the stuffed birds in the room, the taxidermy.  The shop has been building up (‘organic’ he called it fairly) for some two months or so.  I drove past early on with an artist friend who said ‘For an amazing cave its not very amazing’.  I thought that mean and born of jealousy.  The place thrilled me partly as its colours and taste took me back to so many places from the past.  Rather like a café in Attercliffe it recalled a site in Venice from the early 80s, by a canal, a dream of a sort, sleeping on a table after the bar closed.  Then maybe an Islington I never knew but Leytonstone High Road in the 60s and an unimagined taste born of class unconsciousness.  You were there M!  Stuffing falling out of the upholstery…

 

I also told Aaron about the design/production fashion company who were to occupy the old factory across the river; that I’d thought he may have taken the shop knowing that this was to come?  But he didn’t know although he was interested in the conversations of the old works locally.  He said many customers or passers by were prostitutes and that he hoped to be able sell guitars to the boys down at the skate park.

 

Good luck to Aaron.  To the Amazing Cave.

practising structure

My daughter E is doing something for the first time and showing me.  She explains that this is the way she usually does it.  She has no way of doing it though, she is just doing it.  I ask her if that is the case, does she have a way to do it or is she inventing one straight away.  Yes she is making it up.  Why?  She doesn’t know.

Structure, my child and others too seek to order the world immediately, to have objective standpoints with which to look at the world, a desire for representation.   What she has learned to do and what she is practising is structuring, that is what she is explaining to me.

wood blewits

I’ve captured some wood blewits freed from the earth.  The year ended here but I’ve yet to finish with them.   The issue is not one of faith but how to avoid it.  Temptation is heaven born, all the more delightful for that.  So, eyes open till the end, violet like leaves on the forest floor the longer year to mark with brief repetition.