I saw Trash Humpers by Hamony Korine on Friday in a packed, adoring theater at the Nuart. It is a film shot on VHS with no plot that involves, among other things, characters in old-people masks fellating trees and humping garbage cans. It was wonderful and completely esoteric film that most of the moviegoing public would hate. That public was not there.

Quality work will find an audience; that audience’s size will generally be determined by the universality and quality of the piece, as well as the volume and effectiveness of its marketing and distribution. Korine has a small but dedicated following; Spielberg’s audience is larger and less-dedicated. People make decisions on what to see based primarily on their own taste (and wallets), and the taste of those they trust in such matters, then the marketing.

Wanting to see Avatar instead of a ten hour polish movie doesn’t make you a bad person, it just makes you a different kind of person. Less people want to eat bull testicles than chicken; this doesn’t make chicken worse than testicles. Many people would question our choice of doctor, food or religion based on knowledge, values and specializations they have that we don’t.

What’s important is to do the work, then honestly evaluate that work’s quality and potential audience. There’s no conspiracy against art, we just happen to live in a country whose cinema depends on audiences buying tickets. Fortunately for Von Trier, Haneke and Korine, the economics of european cinema is based on taxpayers instead of moviegoers, most of whom seem to prefer Avatar to Antichrist.

Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep

Jason

He keeps the valley like this with his heart.

By paying attention, being capable, remembering.

Otherwise, there would be flies as big as dogs

in the vineyard, cows made entirely of maggots,

cruelty with machinery and canvas, sniggering

among the olive trees and the sea grossly cast.

He struggles to hold it right, the eight feet

of heaven by the well with geraniums and basil.

He will rejoice even if the shepherd girl

does not pass anymore at evening. And whether

or not she ate her lamb at Easter. He knows

that loneliness is our craft, that death

is God’s vigorish. He does not keep it fine

by innocence or leaving things out.

Vigorish

noun informal
1 [in sing. ] an excessive rate of interest on a loan, typically one from an illegal moneylender.
2 the percentage deducted from a gambler’s winnings by the organizers of a game.

Miller discusses two conflicting impulses in early colonial America, represented by the cities of Jamestown and Salem. He describes this difference in one of his brilliant asides in the play:

They (Salem) believed, in short, that they held in their steady hands the candle that would light the world. We have inherited this belief, and it has helped and hurt us. It helped them with the discipline it gave them. They were a dedicated folk, by and large, and they had to be to survive the life they had chosen or been born into in this country.

The proof of their belief’s calue to them may be taken from the opposite character of the first Jamestown settlement, farther south, in Virginia. The Englishmen who landed there were motivated mainly by a hunt for profit. They had to pick off the wealth of the new country and then return rich to England. They were a band of individualists, and a much more ingratiating group than the Massachusets men.

From Miller’s account of the colonial world we can trace two impulses throughout American history: the capitalistic, individualistic, at times rapacious Jamestown and the disciplined, religious, and stringent Salem.

Much of American history can be seen as the ebb and flow of one of these two impulses. Miller was writing in the time of McCarthyism, but consider Tammany Hall or the Bush Administration as times where the Jamestown ethic surged to the fore.

P.T. Anderson’s There Will Be Blood dramatizes this struggle. His main characters are a preacher and an oil man. In the end the oil man kills the preacher.

With the apparent omnipotence of corporate culture and politics in America, it would seem that the Jamestown mentality has triumphed. But in this economy, where people have to turn to something else than wealth, the face of Salem is always ready to resurface.

The sun is out today.

Sidelong shadows on

the frozen Spree.

Last week I didn’t get

the job, or the girl.

This week the river

is covered in children.

These things tend to balance out.

I have restructured the permalinks on my site to make them more user and search engine friendly. This may result (I have done some work to prevent this) in your search saying a post is not found. Things will redirect themselves soon, but until then please use the search bar that might appear if the post isn’t redirected. Sorry for the difficulties.

Jason

I was dating this drug dealer and after we broke up I took too much PCP and wandered around the city (New York) in a daze for a week and a half. After that I went to visit a friend in New York and we decided to go to Berlin.

They then proceeded to spill their marijuana and spend 45 minutes picking it out of the grass.

I thought of them yesterday while reading a Guardian article a friend had sent me. The article, titled “Make Yourself at Home in Berlin” and has some advice for tourists visitng the city;

Renting rooms, for short periods, is largely unheard of in the UK, outside the college campus circuit, and probably in most of Europe, too. In Germany, it is possible. In Berlin it’s encouraged. Berlin’s army of hard-up freelancers, artists and students rent rooms to strangers on a daily or weekly basis to claw cash back while they’re away from home, via sites and agencies such as exberliner, easywg.de, wg-gesucht.de, or studenten-wg.de.

I was in Berlin for a few weeks, and I wanted to live with real Berliners, see the real Berlin and experience the kiez (manor) – I didn’t want a hotel room (too expensive, too impersonal), nor a hostel (too young, too backpacker), or an apartment (too expensive for a week, and quite lonely).

While gentrification and tourism are inevitable in any major city, articles like this contribute to a growing phenomenon in Berlin.

Berlin has already been called the Mallorca of the East by Spiegel Online, a major German publication. Mallorca is the German equivalent of Tijuana Mexico or Panama City Florida in the United States, spring break capitals of drunken hedonism. The video in the article (which is in German) is in English and captures this mentality which is now sweeping parts of Berlin.

People ask me what I will miss in Europe. I have had too much to do recently to really reflect on the question. Berlin is still a wonderful city and I will especially miss my friends there, as well as living and working in a foreign language.

But yesterday I found something really exemplary of what I will miss.

I am in Klosterneuburg with my grandmother, outside of Vienna. A tradition here is to visit my grandfather’s grave in the 19th district. While we were at the cemetery my grandmother and I were talking. She mentioned Alma Mahler and also that her grave was in the same cematery. I asked her if Gustav Mahler was also buried there and she assented. A few hundred meters from my grandfather’s grave lay the great composer. I stood and paid my tribute, thankful for the happy European accident.

There was a lot of lederhosen (which I also wore), bavarian German which I can’t understand, and drinking from one-liter glasses of beer. It was an appropriately American goodbye to Germany. For a little while I thought she was holding a piece of chicken in her hand, which was also ubiquitous, but then I realized it was the ferris wheel. I’m in Vienna now for a few days until my return to America on Thursday.

Thank you for reading!

Jason