J.
What can be said? Zillions of people talk about environmental sustainability, and then do little about it, partly out of ignorance, partly out willful ignorance, partly out of laziness. The planet’s seriously ill. The ocean’s a cesspool of plastic. Some more plastic containers and utensils with your take-out, sir?
M.
One of the groups I represent, E—, has probably spent millions of dollars and thousands of man hours on passing plastic bag bans in California (plastic bags being a great contributor to the pacific garbage patch). They’ve historically been stymied at the state level by the plastic industry (chiefly, a shady trade group called the American Petroleum Institute), but in recent years have taken the strategy of trying to pass bans at the city level and have been very successful actually (I think they’re up to 45 cities now, including LA just last week). It’s good news but then again it’s outrageous that relatively poor nonprofits should have to fight for years to pass legislation that is so clearly in the public good. Is it that the public and elected officials are tragically myopic? Too zoned out and solipsistic to pay attention? Both, and also something about the rise of the corporate state, plutocracy, etc.
J.
Plastic bags— It seems virtually impossible to wean anyone off them unless the government enforces it (as Bloomberg is doing with corn-syrup based sodas in NY, which I approve of). Even armchair and staunch environmentalists succumb to accumulating them.
The first culprit here is ignorance. Ultra large and powerful corporations and their lobbyists, through marketing, legal machinations, and other more insidious measures, consciously engender ignorance and then further exploit it. So the most marginalized and uneducated communities are the most susceptible to absorbing beliefs and habits grossly against their own (and the planet’s) interests.
There are still many stores in New York— liquor stores, for instance, some groceries— that will force you to take plastic bags, or at least try to.
The other major culprits, I’d wager, are willful ignorance, laziness, and fear— fear of standing out from the consumerist crowd, the legions marching proudly with their disposable coffee cups, plastic bottles, and plastic bags containing newly purchased goods.
The solution is for companies to be responsible for the entire longevity of the products they produce. With 8 billion people in the world, if you produce some tiny plastic nib, that’s potentially billions upon billions of these nibs getting into the environment. Companies must make parts and packaging out of earth-friendly biodegradable materials that quickly decompose after use, or otherwise be wholly responsible for the reclamation, recycling, and earth-friendly destruction of their products (but there is too much room for error and malfeasance in the latter).
–from June 2012
A palliative nurse has recorded the most common regrets of the dying. What would your biggest regret be if this was your last day of life?
How Your Cat Is Making You Crazy – Atlantic Monthly
Jaroslav Flegr is no kook. And yet, for years, he suspected his mind had been taken over by parasites that had invaded his brain. So the prolific biologist took his science-fiction hunch into the lab. What he’s now discovering will startle you. Could tiny organisms carried by house cats. . .
Biggest mistake thus far: ordering a large popcorn at a screening of Béla Tarr’s The Turin Horse at Lincoln Center.
Every experience is an opportunity for enlightenment.
In high school I was voted ‘Most likely to commit suicide.’
A grizzled carriage horse, a grizzled father, a grizzled daughter, a dilapidated cottage, an endless windstorm, toil and bleakness, impending doom. Shot in Tarr’s trademark black and white: hyperrealistic close and medium shots, increasingly so with each new film, slightly blurry long shots. Is it a metaphor for the truly bathetic, even absurd reality of human decline and death (spotted with Beckettesque touches, sans almost any humor)? For the impending self-inflicted apocalypse brought on by the noxious bacteria that is the majority of the human species (shown as a reverse Genesis, the world deconstructing)? Is it an affirmation of some of Nietzsche’s metaphysical postulates and most pessimistic sociocultural prophesies? Is it, more simply, an unremitting real-time immersion in the harsh marginalized uneducated rural life that has predominated much of human history, mingled with expressionistic representations of a carriage driver’s worries about the looming death of the ill-treated horse that precariously sustains his and his daughter’s livelihood?
Whatever it is, it’s a spectacular debacle— bordering on unintentional parody of some of the most misguided and cliched avant-garde cinematic pretensions, and almost a parody of itself. Here Tarr extends many of his most trying and torturous qualities, and elides some of his best. (It’s unclear what qualities co-director and partner Ágnes Hranitzky brings to the film, as it seems largely Tarr-esque.) Sátántangó, at 7.5 hours, feels less plodding and wearisome somehow. When the father character takes the extra dram of liquor towards the end of the film, one feels it is in sympathy with the audience’s having already suffered through 2.5 hours of this grueling, tortuous moil. If creativity is indeed the opposite of cynicism, one wonders why, at least consciously, Tarr and Hranitzky felt compelled to make this film: the only conscious glimmer of hope seems to be an implicit respect for sentient dignity. And if there is a cinematic prize for ‘bleakest director,’ Tarr indisputably secures it with this self-professed swansong.
That written, The Turin Horse, a product of remarkable talents, does manage to offer some fine and redeeming qualities. Some striking insights through cinematography, mannerism, and pathos are eked out. As in Tarr’s other later films, the everyday and rote— walking, sitting, eating, looking, sleeping— take on the gravity of the monumental, and however intentional or unintentional on the directors’ parts here, seem to reveal a metaphysics: in what is not said, in what they are not, in what one doesn’t perceive, in what is between the lines, in blankness and silence. The film defies categorization, and is one of the most unique ever made. Is it art? Yes. Is it good art? Sort of. Is it a masterpiece? No. It’s too myopic, incoherent. Is it an indelible and overall profitable life experience? Yes. Should one see it? See Sátántangó and Werckmeister Harmonies over it— they are broader, more insightful and rewarding. This is a film that in particular one must go into, even more than Tarr’s others, entirely openmindedly, taking the experience uncritically for whatever it’s worth, its eccentricities and excesses and whatever effects they bode to have on one in the future, or otherwise one will find oneself squirming and laughing inwardly overmuch— sometimes justifiably, sometimes to palliate the fear of the void. For my part, I would rather watch a film of this fidelity to reality and detail, however onesided, trying, and flawed, over the standard unelightening and sometimes detrimental Hollywood fare any day.
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