Her

Today one thing we are all drawn to think about is this sense of loneliness that pervades with social media. With growing melancholy, each of us, meandering slowly into a state of self-conformed isolation. When working long hours by yourself, stuck behind a computer in a room in a house, or perhaps during unfilled evenings, you may find yourself drawn to Facebook or checking emails etc: This is a lust for social interaction. It's a lust born from atavistic desires, the longing and necessity for community that is twice-trodden into the wellbeing of all humans and other beings. However, clicking through status updates, messaging long-lost friends - a solemn coldness is born of it all, and rather than fulfilling our lust we are left a little cold underneath.

'Her' comes to grips with this sense and shakes it in a not-too-distant future setting. It's not a fantastic film, a little unformed round the edges, but it does provoke questions in the way it envisions a plausible near-future. 

One thing that has concerned me recently regarding all this push towards a strange & detached future we're building for ourselves, is virtual reality headsets. I think right now they personify our vision and where we are headed. VR headsets will raise even more questions (and hopefully answer a few) about us and our needs. For example with a VR headset we will be able to lunch in East-side Manhattan, take an evening stroll along the Rialto and sleep in the comfort of our own beds; or perhaps have a dinner-date with a pal half way across the world, look around the restaurant, interact with other virtual-real people - imagine a virtual world populated with real people all walking around and interacting from the comfort of their own front room.  

 I have contradictory feelings towards it, on the one hand the teenage boy inside of me rears his head and shouts 'Wow! Amazing'  It's the same way I feel about cloning; it's messed up, the wrong path to tread for what we truly desire (contentment, peace), however its bloody marvelous and a testament to the genius of humans; we have gone so far down this path why not push it as far as we can and see what happens, perhaps that will be the footnote of the human lifespan of this Earth.

On the otherhand though I feel it'll only raise more questions about what humans really need. VR Headsets will further the question Facebook proposes & the lust for social interaction. Despite all this interaction and lottery of possibilities, will we too, when we remove the helmet and feel the real world, really be left cold and detached? In social interaction, is there something tangible in 'feeling' the other person, their energy & subconscious bonds? & if so will all this technology really offer any solutions or just further the chasm?

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Anywho, one other thing that's raised is the thought (which I hadn't considered before) but if each of us had a device in our pocket that was so alive, so interested in us, new us personally & hung on every word, would that be of some beneficiary to our way of being? A personal PA that is unintrusive and dedicated to pushing us, caring about us etc. Would that make us all better? And if so who has the right sensibility and wisdom to design the psyche of such a tool? What virtues would be placated as THE virtues?

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With visions of the future, utopian or otherwise, I am always drawn to recall Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. The wearing of VR headsets, the fulfilling our time with distraction, is just another version of his Soma. It's just another way we can come home from work and distract ourselves until the next day. Or is it? Who knows.

Some wise words from the Dalai Lama:

"Man surprised me most about humanity. Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money.
Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived.”

Big Sur

Just got through watching Big Sur. (you can watch it online here). No comments like 'it was good' or 'i didnt like it' because its not one of them things you can just yes or no to like that. I enjoyed sitting through it most of all for my interest in Kerouac & the Beats, whether its a good film to the uninterested eye, probably not.

I read Big Sur 5 years ago & I don't recall it too well. All's I remember is the colour of death that gets thicker & thicker as the book goes on. This is Kerouac at the end of his days, sick of it all, grown old (in mind) and just a general wearyness that suffocates everything. They got that feeling in the film & it's very true.

Big Sur is like the bookend to On The Road. What began in youthful excitement & freshness & was alive, grew old, got drunk  bloated (because what else was there to do?) & ready to die.

What I love with Kerouac is his ability to repose his statements, actions, from a later more thoughtful position, and to do this honestly, to look at the root of it (& to find the humanity embedded in each wrong action, right action, misaction, any action etc).

It's interesting that cinema (& culture) are turning towards the beats. When On The Road came out I was really skeptical, worried they'd kill it by making it this grandiose, Happy Meal Toy & teenage hoody-wearing thing. Making everyone know but know one really know if you get what I mean. However, now i'm looking at it out of pure intrigue. When contemporary culture reaches back into the past, after something specific, there's a reason for that reaching. You get this clever amalgamation of past & present. Like with Apocalypse Now, why did Coppola choose to reappropriate Konrad's Heart of Darkness in the Vietnam setting? What was he saying about his contemporary surroundings in doing so? 'The Horror, the Horror'..

I see the same now with James Bond. Compare it to the films further down the line & we get this sequential step through modern history. How they shoot the cameras, how they pace the shots, how the unravel the plot. All these metathings are the imprint of our time.

& that's the same with these directors working from Kerouac's novels. They are interpretations, expressions of our time. Big Sur is full of very arty, wandering shots, looking at birds in the sky, the sun through the trees, but all in that contemporary gaize, like it coulda been lifted straight off Vimeo.

I'd like to see the whole Duoloz legend spelled out. Each one taken up by a different director, different actors, a lottery of appearances, each actor, each film a different perspective on the same man. Because eventually, we'll see between them all, the blurry vague truth of his character(much like anybody's), all the shades & succincticity.

Summer trip vid // I want to be a bandit can't you understand it??!

Finally knocked together the video for our summer trip. It was a fun trip, definetly a case of following the wind, we only booked our bus up to Romford, the rest was drawn on circumstance. It's always nice to see a map of how far you been, and how illogical your route often is, this one was quite sensible. Check it out:



I say knocked accurately. My computers getting so old and dusty now it won't let me preview in After Effects, so it was a case of exporting, writing down a long list of things to put right, then going through them. Like editing with a potato. I don't care though, it is what it is. Not the most exciting thing on earth but a document, that no doubt will be looked back upon through the ages as a work of pre-nihilist-age enlightenment. What.

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Also, reskinned the website. Don't really like it but I spent the time doin' it so i'm keeping it. Aint that the truth, ha.

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The painting are coming along fine but haven't advanced for three days as i've been very ill and not been able to get my hands on (or over) a certain thing (or hurdle). Read as you wish.

That's all for now, folks.

PS Check out my mate Todd's blog. Him and another pal have just got back from hitchiking from Budapest to Azerbaijan. Why I hear you ask? Two reasons; One, the Eurovision song contest, Two, for the Gurkha's.

http://toddthornback.wordpress.com/
http://toddthornback.wordpress.com/
http://toddthornback.wordpress.com/
http://toddthornback.wordpress.com/

Year of the beats

Wow, just discovered another Beat generation film in the works. This really is turning into something of a troupe invasion on the mainstream. I gotta say i'm not all to discouraged - On the Road was the big one, that coulda been a travesty, and it wasn't. Therefore this just makes me excited, hopefully that people will be turned on to the Beat generation and what they had to say. Am also excited too as its what I love and it seems to be invading the mainstream and all I can do is smile on and hope it turns out mature.

In the last few years we've had Howl, On The Road, now there's..

Big Sur


Kill Your Darlings


On top of this you got Mad Men on the TV, which instantly struck me as 'If J.Kerouac went straight'.

All these are essentially a blotting-paper-tapestry of that 50's counter-cultural turning point, told out through the hazy veil of post modernist subjectivity. Nevertheless, I am excited for people to be turned on to these men that had a real lust for truth in life.

I first got into Kerouac when I realised he was the bedrock beneath the music I loved, Bob Dylan who's 'catalyst' moment was reading On the Road (made him get up and head to NYC). Jim Morrison too, Kerouac being one of his favorite authors. It all roots back to something. For that matter too, the film Im Not There could be considered part of this Beat-thought-tapestry, so could the documentary When You're Strange

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Finally, fitting to check out the original Beat flick, over-dubbed, stream of concious by Kerouac, Pull My Daisy

tree of life

Watched tree of life tonight for the 2nd or3rd time in the last six months. If you haven't seen it, I  wouldn't read on, not because of spoilers, but because I think its usually a negative, rather than a positive, to go into a film already with a slant.

Also, try as you can to watch it in the highest quality. Its a very beautiful film and I think that's partially important to the understanding of it.


Its a film that you come away each time with a new impression, however, I personally find this film to be the most like visual poetry than any other I have seen, and this is certainly my lasting impression. The shots and scenes are delicately strung together, succinct, full of ideas. I think the camera style too aligns it with poetry - its an always wondering eye, looking after something or towards something, trying to understand. It bows down to children's height so's we can understand the world from there perspective.

Most individual shots in this film are of the quality of a photography exhibition, the themes and motives too remind me allot of contemporary photography's themes and motives (despair, teenage angst, family closeness or distance, isolation). Seeing the shots in this manner reminded me of something learnt playing guitar. Each shot is like a seperate chord. Played by itself, (let's stick to just the seven major chords for this analogy), it offers something, some beauty,  but is an isolated voice. When you put another chord behind it tho - thats when we begin to feel some emotional incling - I think - not because of the notes themselves, but because of the correlation (or reaction) between them. The shots in this film (beautiful, like isolated photographs), strung together have this same  emotional effect - (much like animation too) its not what happens in the shots or the frames, its what happens between them.

Watching it this time, I really linked it to V Woolf. It reminded me very much of her autobiographical text "a sketch of the past" (from Moments of Being). It is here that she describes her idea of 'moments of being', those moments in life where we truly be, and experience burns into us, scolding us and sculpting us. These moments can be few and far between, but they are the times we shape ourselves by. Where we learn to cope with new experience, + where we realise ourselves.

The film feels very much like a series of these. Rather than the viewer, assertively searching for any overarching plot, I think the audience is to pay-witness to these series of moments, of relationships building & turning, and emotions thickening & stirring.

It also too has imprints of To The Lighthouse. Especially the sense of experiencing the scene through various subjective points of view (the child, the mother, the father). And what's beautiful, like TTL, these subjective points combine, and together, paint us an objective view of the family.

Also, to mention the scenes of time passing, all the way back in time. These I feel are so important to the film, you are shown time as being so long, the universe so vast(and all as one), and life so short but on such a long and beautiful chain (each ancestor a link). This; then, we are cast again to the family - zoomed right in on a link in the chain - and we feel all that strife and emotion, and all that life, kicking to and through that is so minute but yet such an explosion.


Overall I think its a very beautiful film that I will return to each year of my life. I wouldnt dare claim to so assertively hold an opinion of what this film is about, or what it says, but I hope to look at it, every now and then, and notice what I didn't see before. Its certainly one of those.

One final tie I found this had with V Woolf; I remember seeing on a book TV show sometime last year, a lady speaking of Virginia, and her skill - to alleviate the vocabulary of the reader, not to merely summarise with the hot and cold taps - (that was good, that was bad) or to paint in black and white; but instead, she gives you all the colours, so you can get to the root of something, and try and put words to what our minds instantly habe already described so fortuitously

This film too shows us all the colours - especially in a world so overloaded with forgetful-Holywood films. However, ask me of what I thought of the film in a few weeks or a few months, when the inflated pantheon of the mere mortals has shriveled and wimpered, and I'll only, boldly be able to claim 'its good'. Unfortunately those colours go grey and the taps dry up.