Good piece on Nietzsche, and I think that movie list could do more to sell you as middlebrow than anything you wrote last week lol! In all seriousness, I get your qualifications – and I do tend to think a kind of philistine local authoritarianism is too centrally part of American life to get monstrously worked up about library book bans-but I still have to disagree about their being no great shakes for loads of reasons that I won't bore you with. That said I do think that sort of fight is useful in that it reminds left-libs of what they should be: defenders of books and freedom of expression, rather than what they often seemed to want to be over the last decade: petty bureaucrats concerned only with some perceived instrumental purpose of the text.
I was trying to Bourdieu myself, come up with a very precise sociological term for my list, and realized that the literal truth is the best label: it's the list of someone who took an upper-level film class in Fall semester 2001.
Lol fair enough! I should post about mine one of these days, it’s probably similarly middlebrow, just oriented a little differently. Favorite books is coming sooner though.
The only pick that surprised me here is Magnolia but if you see it as the culmination of a certain Altman/Scorsese line of style I can see it. I think about lines from that film a lot. Per Paul Schrader’s little chart, I take it you’re more Mandala than Surveillance Camera; have you ever tried any Weerasethakul? He’s the only modern, strictly highbrow slow movie guy I’ve ever gotten hyped about. (I share your anxiety about having my time wasted on these things, one of my favorite things to say when picking movies is I refuse to watch a movie called “Bicycle Thieves.” “What’s it even about? They just steal bikes?”)
I freely admit Magnolia is on there due to the impressionable age I was when it came out; it might not work the same for anyone even a little older or a little younger than me. Lots of good lines, though, as you say ("It is *not* dangerous to confuse children with angels!"). Just looking at the chart now: the Mandala seems right, and the Art Gallery's good too, but you're right, I have little interest in the Surveillance Camera (probably why I can handle Ozu, Tarkovsky, and Sokurov but not Tarr or Kiarostami—I'm film-philistinish though, so there are plenty of names on that chart I'm not familiar with). Overall, I like for cinema to be visionary. Still photography can manage the inventory of the quotidian. Re: Weerasethakul, I always meant to watch Tropical Malady—it was on my Netflix DVD queue (RIP)—but haven't gotten to it yet.
Good piece on Nietzsche, and I think that movie list could do more to sell you as middlebrow than anything you wrote last week lol! In all seriousness, I get your qualifications – and I do tend to think a kind of philistine local authoritarianism is too centrally part of American life to get monstrously worked up about library book bans-but I still have to disagree about their being no great shakes for loads of reasons that I won't bore you with. That said I do think that sort of fight is useful in that it reminds left-libs of what they should be: defenders of books and freedom of expression, rather than what they often seemed to want to be over the last decade: petty bureaucrats concerned only with some perceived instrumental purpose of the text.
I was trying to Bourdieu myself, come up with a very precise sociological term for my list, and realized that the literal truth is the best label: it's the list of someone who took an upper-level film class in Fall semester 2001.
Lol fair enough! I should post about mine one of these days, it’s probably similarly middlebrow, just oriented a little differently. Favorite books is coming sooner though.
The only pick that surprised me here is Magnolia but if you see it as the culmination of a certain Altman/Scorsese line of style I can see it. I think about lines from that film a lot. Per Paul Schrader’s little chart, I take it you’re more Mandala than Surveillance Camera; have you ever tried any Weerasethakul? He’s the only modern, strictly highbrow slow movie guy I’ve ever gotten hyped about. (I share your anxiety about having my time wasted on these things, one of my favorite things to say when picking movies is I refuse to watch a movie called “Bicycle Thieves.” “What’s it even about? They just steal bikes?”)
I freely admit Magnolia is on there due to the impressionable age I was when it came out; it might not work the same for anyone even a little older or a little younger than me. Lots of good lines, though, as you say ("It is *not* dangerous to confuse children with angels!"). Just looking at the chart now: the Mandala seems right, and the Art Gallery's good too, but you're right, I have little interest in the Surveillance Camera (probably why I can handle Ozu, Tarkovsky, and Sokurov but not Tarr or Kiarostami—I'm film-philistinish though, so there are plenty of names on that chart I'm not familiar with). Overall, I like for cinema to be visionary. Still photography can manage the inventory of the quotidian. Re: Weerasethakul, I always meant to watch Tropical Malady—it was on my Netflix DVD queue (RIP)—but haven't gotten to it yet.