SPLAT

 Posted by at 4:38 pm  Anti-Gravity Surgery  Comments Off
Feb 282013
 

photo

Not everybody gets to to vomit violently at 37,000 feet even when propelled by watching Lincoln and Daniel Day-Lewis as the man himself. He wasn’t playing the part; he was  Lincoln. I don’t know what photographs you were looking at but when I opened the  Wikipedia page on Lincoln there was DDL aka Lincoln staring out at me. Perhaps I’m easily persuaded but I certainly was persuaded and it was interesting that DDL got best actor but Argo got best film. Perhaps DDL was so good the rest of the film didn’t look so good. By the way I felt a concern for your fellow passengers; did they receive the dubious blessings of your vomit or were you able to get to the toilet in time. It’s the bits you miss out which might be the most important. Do you know your censor or does that all happen out of sight in some back office you know nothing about.

And there is another film to see back to back with Lincoln and that is Django Unchained. I didn’t quite see them back to back, that would have been six hours of movie so as it turned out there was a couple of weeks between the two. Meanwhile I had seen the Pina Bausch company at Sadlers Wells and they, as usual, had jumped straight into direct communication with what I might call my (my!?) unconscious mind, so I was more than ready to enjoy Quentin Tarantino’s latest offering. We are told the story is set in 1858, two years prior to the outbreak of the Civil War and it covers the same territory of slavery but this time without the same level of well meaning all powerful white guy, though there is a Dr Schulz, a dentist turned bounty hunter, who provided the means for Django to be unchained and to wreak bloody revenge on quite a number of the Southern White slave owning class and their sadistic hired hands. The power of language and the language of power.

Both great movies in their very different ways.

In what way, I could ask myself, do I (or might I) wish to wield power or even touch it. There must be a way of looking at my life in which I have mostly done my best to avoid, walk away from, the dreaded P word. So I suppose the power of language is an attractive idea, an option to the actual wielding of power. The way it might frame views, ideas, feelings and touch others, make possible certain sorts of connections. The pen might be mightier than the sword BUT what if I antagonise somebody who may have a sword hidden about their person.

Paying attention as I was to to the Italian elections I became increasingly interested in what Beppe Grillo had achieved and how he had achieved it – although perhaps one should be cautious about the use of the word achieve. We will have to see how he and his movement can make use of the seats gained in the two houses. But I did download the app for Beppe Grillo and so look forward to seeing how it works and at the same time it gives me some extra practise at Italian which is . . . well, how can I put it, proceeding slowly. No evidence of undue haste there.