Great Expectations

THE GRAND INQUISITOR SCENE

From: THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV. By Fydor Dostoevsky and translated by Constance Garnett.

http://www.webster.edu/~corbetre/philosophy/existentialism/dostoevsky/grand.html

Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (The Lumière Brothers, 1895)

Suddenly a train appeared. Women cried out with terror. Men threw themselves to one side to avoid being run over. It was panic. And triumph.
George Reyes, `Chez les Lumieáre’

"The brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière created the first publicly shown movies, the first documentaries and, with this one-shot, 50-sec. film shot at a Provence railway station, the first horror picture. It is said that as the Paris spectators watched the train chug toward the screen, they believed it was about to crash out of the frame and into the auditorium, and ran out screaming. True or not, the story indicates the power the medium would wield over its audience."
TIME MAGAZINE
*From Time's top 25 Horror Movies. The Train takes number one, also on the list are Frankenstein and Bambi

The Train Effect

Shark Week at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Last week I was reading the New York Times when I found this. Damien Hirst is one of my favorite artists, but I was a little surprised to see that his work was at the Met, not the MoMA,the Whitney, nor any of the millions of contemporary galleries that call this city home. Maybe they got the Met and the Museum of Natural History, or the Central Park Zoo confused? Either way, I wasn't going to miss it, so, this past weekend I found my way up to the museum. After wandering through the Temple of Dendur, a room filled with shiny silver spoons and asking at least half the guards for directions, I finally found it:



Damien Hirst
The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living
1991
Tiger shark, glass, steel, 5% formaldehyde solution
213 x 518 x 213 cm






On the other wall were these:



Watson and the Shark, John Singleton Copley, 1778
oil on canvas, 182.1 x 229.7 cm (71 3/4 x 90 1/2 in.)
National gallery of Arts, Washington DC












Francis Bacon
Head I, 1949
Oil and tempera on board
103 x 75cm.
Collection of Richard S, Zeisler, New York












The Gulf Stream, 1899
Winslow Homer (American, 1836–1910)
Oil on canvas; 28 1/8 x 49 1/8 in. (71.4 x 124.8 cm)
Catherine Lorillard Wolfe Collection, Wolfe Fund, 1906 (06.1234)









It's like Shark Week at the Met!

Anyways, I couldn't stop thinking about this exhibit during our class discussion today. "The Impossibility to Imagine Physical Death in Life". And then we began talking about Edmund Burke's On the Sublime. Wasn't that the title on the information placard in the exhibit? Wasn't that Burke they quoted? This was not just about the Sharks, this was something much more.

WHATEVER is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.
-Edmund Burke, "On the Sublime and the Beautiful"

In a time when leprechauns and unicorns were believed by the general public and alchemy can turn the most dullest of substances into gold, anything was possible, and thus anything you believed could be true. In Modern times, everything is subjective, and they only things knowable have been experienced. Hence, the impossibility to imagine physical death in life.

I remember being told by my sixth grade science teacher that the difference between living things and and nonliving things is that living things can die. The difference between living things and dead things is Death. So how can I know anything unless I have died? Is Damien's shark a reminder that only when faced with death can we even begin to imagine life? And the other three paintings, all of sharks in the final thralls of death--do they push this point further?

Maybe then, scary movies, roller coasters, driving fast on the freeway, has a draw, because in those moments, we can imagine death, and thus imagine life. We can't take our eyes of car crashes because it's like watching life. Just as Emma gains self knowledge upon the realization that she simultaneously desires Mr. Knightly and fears losing him. Knowing what she doesn't want to lose gives value to what she does want, and vice versa. Imagining death and realizing you want to live gives value to life.

"One man's (or shark's) life or death were but a smallhttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif price to pay for the acquirement of the knowledge which I sought for the dominion I should acquire and transmit over the elemental foes of our race"
-Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

Hirst naturalizes the unnatural in showing us death. And the other three paintings of sharks, not yet dead, make it so much clear how unordinary an ordinary shark may be. Maybe a dead-shark-in-a-tank is more fitting in the Met, an Art Museum chocked full of beds, bowls, and beads, than I had initially thought.

And perhaps Hirst is something of a Modern Frankenstein, and this shark, is his Modern Prometheus.

(Hirst's Shark will be there for three years, check it out.)

nada y pues nada y pues nada

"What may not be expected in a country of eternal light?" -Frankenstein (Letter 1) Mary Shelley

This idea made me think of the importance of light in life. "What is an hour?" And this left me thinking of one of my favorite Hemingway stories: A Clean Well Lighted Place.

The State of Music/The State of Pop Culture

Entertainment Weekly: On Amazon.com, all these user reviews say...

Carrie Underwood: ''She's not country.'' [Makes raspberry noise and sticks her thumbs down] Okay, here's my thing: On Top 40 stations, nobody cares that you'll have Fergie next to 50 Cent. They're different. Why can't you have me next to somebody that's more traditional country? You can call me ''not country'' until your face is blue, but I sing country music."

Another Weegee...

Weegee, Couple in Voodoo Trance, ca. 1956

Weegee- On Human Condition


“Voyeurism and surveillance are strangely and often uncomfortably allied."