Sunday, June 30, 2013

 

Sam Dolan is our Gaylord of the filmographic world that informs and imprints our minds.

If you want to have a thrill about the world of plugged-in apps-ed smart phoned communicational networked big-brothered society and how to survive in it, read the book and have a good trip to the other side of the other side of the moon, the one you can only imagine, neither light nor dark, just virtually mental if not psychic.

You have to understand the structure of the book to be able to follow the story. The “main” story, situated in 2011, is told in Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4 under the title of “The Long Weekend” that covers four days of Sam Dolan’s life from Thursday night to Sunday around or just after noon.


The first part deals with Sam Dolan trying to produce his film “Who We Are” as a project within his film and cinema studies on his campus in 2002-2003 with a subsequent transitional flashback to 1969 when that Sam was far from  being born yet. It tells the meeting of Booth Dolan, Sam’s father, and Allie, Sam’s mother. Between Part 2 and Part 3 we have a similar transitional flashback to 1991 when Booth Dolan visited his son’s fifth grade class and then left home for a certain Sandra with whom he will have a daughter. Between part 3 and part 4 another and last transitional flashback goes back to 2000 and brings in Allie’s death of a massive heart attack on the shoulder of a street in their city after retrieving a turtle from the middle of the roadway.

The book is centered on Sam Dolan and the general structure is supposed to bring him to his pre-midlife or adulthood epiphany built on all kinds of dramas dealing with constant conflicts with others that could go as far as murders, at least the intention of murder, to all kinds, types, sorts of aggressive domineering vengeful or plainly gratuitous nasty actions against anyone who is exploited in a way or another, as wife, as concubine, as adulterous affair, as friend, as partner, all of them in many ways slaves. Sam Dolan has inherited this from his father who will only get his epiphany when over 60, whereas Sam will get it just over 30. That’s progress American style, though I should say Western style as opposed to Asian, since in the dominant Buddhist tradition in Asia you are supposed to meditate first and act second when you have reached a level of clarity that may motivate you into an intention, away from a reflexive reaction or a provocative if not trapping, even luring action trying to entangle some other person or people in a maze of disorientation.


That’s what you need to know if you want to follow and understand the book. That will yet not in any way give you any deep empathy with the events, the characters and the situations depicted in the novel. Let me evacuate one approach at once that some are too keen to consider. You cannot compare Owen King’s novel with any piece of literature his father Stephen King has produced. We are dealing here with nothing supernatural; fantastic or referring to horror. We are dealing with normal people in a normal society with normal human events happening in normal lives. In the same way we have to exclude the biographical approach that would consider that the relation between Sam and Booth Dolan is a reincarnation of the relation between Owen and Stephen King. That is absurd and reductive. But some people, even critics are keen on such easy and superficial approaches. Owen King deals here with a fundamental problem: growing up for both a father and his son, along with many people around them, and what’s more in today’s society dominated by communication ever present in the book in the form of cinema, telephone, Internet.

In fact, and that is a central remark, the whole book is constructed around films. Booth Dolan is an actor of B series film that are small budget semi-small-blockbusters that have a constantly renewing audience of people who just want to be told crazy lunatic stories about anything that provide them with fear, fright, terror as well as joy, laughter and pleasure (including the side pleasure of dirty sexual games in the back rows of the cinema) like the Greek philosopher Plato being attacked and devoured by a vampire, or is it a werewolf? That Booth is constantly quoting his own films and some famous films we may recognize by title or director. The one that is most quoted is E.T. by Steven Spielberg. But At times the films are fictional, pure inventions to create this abstract constructed world in which some people can live mentally without ever considering the real world seen as a pure extension of this virtual cinematographic world, or an evanescent reality well hidden from sight by these virtual phantasmagoric mental films. On the last Saturday night of the book, Sam and some others spend their time in the local multiplex and Sam will end up seeing three films: “Fair Share,” a fictitious title and film, “Cheeks,” a fictitious title and film, and “Quel Beau Parleur,” a fictitious title and film, and he watches the first film with his new girl friend Tess and his old fundamental unwavering friend Wesley, the second film alone after he escapes from the first one but is then rejoined by Tess for a blow job, and the last film with his father who turns up more or less accidentally or incidentally, we cannot know which. We have here a common practice in the book. Most films are fictitious. The great actors of B series films are Booth Dolan and Rick Savini, both fictitious, and the constant discourse from Booth Dolan who refers himself to Orson Welles and a fictitious film by him, “Yorick,” that was never brought to the public and yet that was cut by the director and in that cut Booth Dolan had been cut out in spite of Orson Welles’ enthusiasm at the time of the shooting. They even shoot good actors after all.


The cinema becomes a mode of living, a mode of thinking, a mode of being and it is the only way the mind develops for the main characters. They think by building mental films of their own that will never become real. Life is nothing but a mental fictional and fictitious double feature reel.

That’s where we are entering the modern world in a very special way. The book is irritating in his slow and seemingly haphazard crooked telling line, story line and time line, often split in short sequences based on the common ellipse figure of the cinema. If B follows A, then B will be understood as the explanation of A and then A as the cause of B. Owen King does a lot of that all the time. We are obliged to submit to the story the way we would submit to a film but with the major difference that we have to read the text. That disturbs our reading pleasure that is slowed down, made chaotic and constantly we are obliged to stop, to go back, to check a detail or a sequence to understand what is happening. Literature does not like the ellipse at all. And this new style of reading we are obliged to develop seems to be more dictated by the exploded and scattered vision and experience we have in modern life where each moment has little to do with the previous one or the next one except that for the experiencer one item is before, one item is in the middle and one item is after, and hence the three are captured as having a logical generative relation. We are living in a world where we are bombarded with myriads of events, sounds, words, musics, films, videos, TV programs, news items, intercom messages, closed circuit TV adverts, and billions of other things and beings all the time and we are supposed to connect what we can into some coherence. We thence develop blindness and deafness to what does not correspond to the mental pattern that is our intention, motivation or goal and we try to build a jigsaw meaningful image of our life in process by excluding as many pieces as possible and thus avoiding the overloading surge of experiential, existential, circumstantial, situational, phenomenological items that would blur the picture with an accumulation of what is for us at any moment detritus; waste, garbage, rubbles, rejects, exhaust.


The point is that constantly Owen King’s “camera” is moving from the main character to all others. Sam, the main character is the one holding the camera all the time and that holding the camera is revealing his personality and his life. But as soon as the camera reaches someone else it becomes what it fundamentally is, that is a voyeuristic tool in the hands of the cameraman who is both revealing the most secret elements of the person being shot and the most secret and haunting impulses of the cameraman. And this cameraman who is both a voyeur and a projector is nothing but the puppet of the director in him, the mental (or real) impulse to build a vision that will be released to the public and that will inform public minds with the director’s dictatorial conceptions. And the point is then that some people will not accept to be tyrannized by this dictator of a director and the main one is Brooks Hartvig Jr who hijacked Sam’s film and added a tremendous satyr sequences in “Who We Are” in the place of some other sequences and this addition, a clear sign of the refusal of real social dictatorship Brooks is going through then and that will lead him to being institutionalized by his own parents, makes the film a cult film instead of being a simple B series movie. In such a society the only way to be creative is definitely to be crazy enough to hijack the projects of some other people and make them transcend the norms of acceptability, even the norms of social acceptable rebellion and anarchistic carelessness or drug addiction. In other words, Jesus Christ in today’s society would be like Brooks Hartvig Jr and would not be crucified but he would be institutionalized, tranquilized and even lobotomized to be put back in an acceptable box or role, in fact a padded cell cut off from all view or sound coming from the outside world, locking him up in his own mental ranting and raving, free to preach to the desert of the alienated.

But Owen King is no revolutionary, far from it. So he leads all his characters to some kind of epiphany in the last twenty pages, or so. They reach a level of pacified acceptance and integration in a way or another. Booth Dolan accepts being old and hence he goes back to his friend Tom and stop trying to be the actor he cannot be any more, and certainly the self-centered egocentric selfish individual using everyone around him. He has retired from that and is ready to go on the big trip to the other side of life. Sam Dolan finds peace in submitting to a woman, Tess Auerbach (who is probably Jewish, p. 369). The relation is primitive because it is nothing but sexual and physical if not carnal. The rest is purely submission. He drops his weddingography “alimentary hand to mouth career” and moves to maybe making a new film. But the balance sheet of these two characters is a lot more complex. Let’s examine Sam’s connections.


He is connected to six women. Allie Dolan, Sam’s mother who died of a heart attack some years after her divorce from Booth Dolan though she kept his friendship. Mina Dolan is Sam’s half-sister from the second wife of his father, Sandra Dolan, the third woman in Sam’s life, his stepmother. Sandra is institutionalized under the responsibility of Dr Jenks, whose son, Peter Jenks, is Mina’s gay boyfriend. Polly later married under the name of Knecht (quite a handful of meaning in German) is his high school and college girlfriend with whom he enjoyed aerobic sex and telephone masturbation. This went on after her marriage till she carelessly but not unintentionally revealed the affair to her husband. That leads to some spectacular shenanigans. Bea is a younger woman who comes across his way in 2011 and is only characterized as having a spider face tattoo and being pregnant. The last woman is Tess Auerbach who manages to capture him in spite of his first escape and then reluctance at answering her phone calls, etc. She is persistent and she had the same experience as Mina: her first boy friend was gay. She is the one who brilliantly says that women want their boyfriends to be a little bit gay but not all the way. You can wonder what this may mean, but it sure means women are tolerant as for gayness provided it does not deprive them of the men they want, or desire, or are appealed to. If you are such a man you have to submit: so you better not be gay all the way.

In the same way Sam Dolan has six male friends plus a seventh that is an intruder added by one of the six basic ones. Booth Dolan is the father and the epiphany of both Booth and Sam will come when they can finally accept each other and cope with their differences. Tom is Sam’s godfather and unmarried rich friend of Booth Nolan, the latter finally coming to Tom’s “shelter” (or is it a panic room like Kenneth Novey’s in “Secrets Only Dead Men Know” in which Kenneth Novey takes refuge one day and discovers after a while that the exiting pass-code does not work any more: good day, Mister Death) to spend the rest of his no longer creative life, apart from a seminar class in the local college.


Wesley Latsch is the fundamental and inescapable friend Sam needs to have to plainly be able to exist. Sam is Wesley’s roommate. Wesley is the home plate to which Sam can always come back for survival or some balancing act. This life sharing experience is going to be completely transformed by the connection of Sam and Tess, if it works. Johannes Jo-Jo Knecht is Polly’s retired baseball champion of a husband. Sam is obsessed by his muscular thighs and the possibility he may get strangled by them. A phantasm that could not me more gay (or should I say gayer?): that’s the gay dimension of all men in this novel. They all have male friends and they cannot envisage survival – or death – but in the hands of these male friends. Some like Tom or Wesley more or less accept that side of their personality and end up being permanent bachelors. Some only let this side of their personality develop into friendships with some selected males while developing a completely irrational love life with women, including divorcing the only one who is worth loving for Booth, and running away from the only one who is worth welcoming for Sam.

Then we have Brooks Hartvig Jr, a college friend of Sam’s, a young man who will heavily finance Sam’s film “Who we are” and accept all kinds of suffering and obnoxious exploitative actions if not exactions from Sam to be able to fulfill his own objective: to hijack Sam’s film and turn it into his own film, as we have seen. Sam comes to terms with him, in his institutionalized and heavily doped wheel chair, at the end after his own sister Mina, just some days before, assaulted him in the street and Sam on the same occasion exploded one of his testicles with his boot. Brooks does not even seem to remember the attack but he remembers the sword he was bringing back. Here again we have a heavy sexual connection between those two boys, a connection that is brought to a halt and some peace by a symbolical yet partial castration, maybe in the name of defending Mina, the poor sister in her frenzy coming from the fact her boy friend has just been revealed to her as being entirely gay, from cover to cover and even under the covers.


The last of these six men is Rick Savini, a cult B series film actor who is just another non-specifiable man as for his identity, personality or sexuality. He is a sword brandisher, whose sword is stolen for at least eight years by Brooks, salvaged by Sam when Brooks is institutionalized after setting his parents house on fire, and who recuperates his sword from Sam on the day he celebrates with friends the arrival of the Fall, in the very last part and chapter of the book. The sword had been stolen by Brooks as we just said, the man who brought the satyr, Costas Mandell, into Sam’s film, a satyr that is first and foremost known for his erect prick of majestic size, swerving and brandishing it copiously and eloquently all the time in the film, making love to tree trunks and roaming around in the forest in complete nudity. Once more, more gay (or should I say gayer,) than that you die. Definitely penile to avoid the more respectable phallic.

But all these impulses, desires and inclinations are negated by the fact society does not accept such extreme attitudes. This vision would be qualified by Francis Fukuyama as being a typical middle class vision. I disagree with the term middle class that refers to a class society, a concept coming from the 19th century and Karl Marx. The people we have in this book are college graduates or equivalent. They have an education that enables them to quote films, books, authors and the novel contains at the very least one hundred such references, some of them being fictional or, when dealing with films, fictional titles referring to real films thus obscured for the uninitiated reader These people have activities that enable them to be their own masters under the tyranny of clients, other entrepreneurs, agents, etc. In other words they are their own agreeing slaves of outside parties they can reject if they want, though then they kill themselves by starvation. These people are totally dominated by communication and information. Without their telephones, their computers or their Internet they could not exist, the world would disappear, dissolve in some kind of never-land, nether-land, no-man’s-land, in one word waste-land. And if they do not accept these rules, then they are institutionalized, doped, castrated, lobotomized, you name it you have it. Impossible Total Recall is the next stop on that underground line. These people are not a phantasmagoric middle class, but they are the circus personnel of this computerized, digitalized, entirely controlled postindustrial society of ours: the maitre-d’s and the masters of ceremony of the games of the circuses (diversity is essential) that go along with the bread of the Salvation Army for those who go hungry in the street without any shelter for the night..


And to end like Stephen King in the last volume of “Rge Dark Tower”, let’s go back to the beginning. If you want to have a thrill about the world of plugged-in apps-ed smart phoned communicational networked big-brothered society and how to survive in it, read the book and have a good trip to the other side of the other side of the moon, the one you can only imagine, neither light nor dark, just virtually mental if not psychic.


Dr Jacques COULARDEAU



Tuesday, June 25, 2013

 

Le bo bo bling bling féodal qui nous gouverne sans jamais être élu. Mort au CNU!!!

PASCAL BONITZER – CHERCHEZ HORTENSE – 2012

MAIS QUI EST DONC CETTE HORTENSE-LÀ ?

Certains disent bobo, peut-être BOF ! Eh bien quoi ? Il y a aussi des gens comme ça. On doit pouvoir en parler et sans sombrer dans le mélodrame, ce que Bonitzer manque faire deux ou trois fois comme quand Damien et son ami quicidaire sont dans l’escalier l’arme à feu entre eux deux dans le noir avec un soudain éclair et serait-ce une détonation ? Le mélodrame sans lumière, c’est sombre et plutôt glauque, et ça n’a rien d’amusant ou de farcesque. Et ce n’est pas le seul moment.

Et pourtant ce film dit quelque chose sur notre société occidentale en complète décomposition qui ferait frémir une bande de singes macaques affamés confrontés à un chargement de bananes hors d’atteinte dans une cage dorée, pas les singes, mais les bananes. Je ne vais donner que quelques détails sur cette société classe moyenne supérieure des quartiers chics mais sans plus de Paris dont l’épicentre est le Conseil d’Etat au Palais Royal.


D’abord Damien en piteux professeur de civilisation orientale pour chefs d’entreprise sous la coupole du comité central du Parti Communiste Français, Place du Colonel Fabien. Toute une histoire dans un cliché elliptique. J’ai vu dans la vitrine de mon pharmacien Boldolaxine cet après-midi qu’un laxatif efficace s’appelait PC et qu’un PC qui chauffe peut être refroidi avec un laxatif de cheval, une huile minérale vétérinaire. L’ellipse vous donne la courante. Le brillant professeur bafouille, utilise un caractère chinois que le film ne nous donne même pas à voir encore moins à comprendre, sans transcription, un vaque ka’a, peut-être. C’est de la poudre aux yeux. Il quitte son cours avant l’heure sans même s’expliquer ni s’excuser. C’est un goujat pédagogique.

Il y a des coups de pieds au … vous savez quoi… qui se perdent pour ces féodaux autocrates des universités françaises qui font carrière dans une sorte de siphon si bien protégé que rien n’arrive à les expulser ni les remplacer. Nous parlions de constipation juste vant. Ils sont comme des meubles inamovibles, totalement inutiles et vides mais qui ont le titre, la chaire faute de chair, le fauteuil faute du cercueil. Des « gensses » que l’on a oubliés d’enterrer il y a déjà beaucoup d’années. Le portrait de ces profs d’en haut de la Sorbonne et ses quatre universités, ou peut-être Jussieu et sa tour désamiantée est cruel, réaliste et particulièrement mérité. J’en connais tellement de ces personnages d’opérettes universitaires qui ont la musique du savoir mais qui n’auront jamais les paroles car de toute façon ils ne cherchent même pas à les écrire. Alors ils biaisent en biais sans baise-en-ville car cela ne se fait plus dans ce milieu bling bling du préservatif émotionnel et du smartphone spirituel.


Puis il y a son père, piteux Président du Conseil d’Etat qui couche avec qui il veut, y compris des garçons, de café, de restaurant ou simplement de petits années (au-delà de 18 ans quand même car il n’est pas Berlusconi), et qui refuse qu’on l’affuble de quelque étiquette que ce soit : gay d’abord qui sonne aussi faux dans la bouche de Damien que les mots de cinq lettres dans la bouche de son fils Noé, qui n’a que 12 ans lui, puis homosexuel. La liste s’arrête là. Heureusement car on était parti pour tous les genres, orientations sexuelles et même le Saint Frusquin avec elles. C’est d’un minable, et c’est ça qui nous gouverne. Ils veulent avoir le droit de faire n’importe quoi et que personne jamais n’en parle ni s’en offusque car de toute façon tout ce qu’ils font n’a aucune valeur car comme ils diront plus tard ils sont plutôt auto-centrés ou égo-centrés ce qui leur donne la liberté de ne répondre à aucune règle, ne serait-ce que celle de l’amour qui pour eux n’est en définitive qu’une émotion physiologique passagère, transitoire et sans durée, surtout sans permanence ni pertinence.

Puis encore il y a Iva, femme metteuse en scène de théâtre qui peut se permettre de coucher avec les acteurs, de monter n’importe quelle pièce ou adaptation personnelle d’une nouvelle quelconque, surtout russe, se faisant ainsi auteur sur les idées d’un autre qu’elle cannibalise car elle n’a rien à dire d’elle-même, par elle-même, pour elle-même, sinon que puisque c’est du russe on peut faire dans l’esbrouffe du genre baiser les orteils d’une vierge adolescente, ce qui doit enlever toute accusation de pédophilie j’imagine, encore moins de viol : « Monsieur le juge, il m’a violée par les orteils ! »


Mais où va-t-il s’arrêter, notre Bonitzer qui joue le rôle du bonimenteur de foire bon chic bon genre place du Trocadéro ou dans ces environs ? Il n’a pas de limites. Ce pourrait être aussi Place de la Pompe, car c’est le piston qui fait marcher la machine, mais la dite Place de la Pompe était en réfection la dernière fois que j’y suis passé.

Il rutile encore avec son gamin de douze ans, Noé. Rien que l’e nom est une plongée sous-marine dans la culture biblique que certains crétinophiles universitaires considèrent comme en voie de disparition en occident européen. Le pauvre Noé, jeté à la mer, avalé par la baleine de ses parents qui n’ont de parents que le souci du tube de dentifrice bien rebouché après usage, et recraché au sable de je ne sais quel bac à sable pour enfants ayant grandis plus vite que leur âge, un bac à sable qui s’appelle adultère, séparation immédiate, divorce bien sûr, mais le gamin se venge en cachant les cigarettes de la mère, en lui empruntant une montre et en se la faisant braquer à la sortie du collège, en récitant ses conjugaisons latines, qui plus est le verbe aimer, si j’ai bien entendu, comme réponse impertinente à ses parents, ou le quelque chose binaire faisant effet de tels personnages, à la table du petit-déjeuner en catastrophe et à la va-vite tous les matins. Jacques Brel préférait les roses et se moquait des bourgeois et leurs montrait ses parties charnues rebondies arrière. Le Noé sera un fieffé barjot d’ici un an ou deux quand il aura appris à godiller entre les vagues, à surfer sur leur crête.

Si cela ne fait pas un film qui crache du venin, que pourrait-on inventer ? Le film a cependant un flanc fragile car totalement artificiel : la brave Aurore, prétendu immigrée sans papiers des pays de l’ex-Yougoslavie non encore membres de la Communauté Européenne. Elle joue le rôle comme si une chinoise de Shanghai prétendait être une immigrée sans papiers du Tchad ou du Rwanda. Bonjour Georges Fourest et sa Négresse Blonde. On n’a jamais rien inventé.


Si vous voulez vraiment de pas mourir idiot concernant ceux qui nous gouvernent, surtout ceux qui ne sont pas élus mais sont des fonctionnaires féodalement cooptés par les bureaucrates déjà en place, vous devez aller voir ce film. Mangez avant car il est sûr qu’il vous coupera l’appétit, et espérez qu’il ne vous fera pas vomir, car ces singes qui nous gouvernent sont à vomir. Merci Bonitzer.


Dr Jacques COULARDEAU



Friday, June 21, 2013

 

La puissance maximum n'est pas atteinte.!

CHRISTIAN PETZOLD – BARBARA – 2012

1980, Allemagne de l’Est. Une femme chirurgien pédiatre dans un hôpital de Berlin-Est a demandé l’autorisation de sortir du territoire, donc d’émigrer vers l’ouest. Elle est immédiatement envoyée en province pour éviter qu’elle fuie. C’est le premier élément qui sonne faux. Si c’est vraiment le désir d’empêcher de fuir et de tenir sous surveillance qui est derrière le déplacement dans la région de Rostock, c’est une fieffée erreur. Il était plus simple de surveiller les gens à Berlin du fait du mur que dans les provinces, raison de plus Rostock et la Baltique.

Mais passons sur ce détail. La visite de l’amant de l’ouest avec sa Mercedes Benz et son chauffeur est elle aussi assez cocasse et surtout marquée de clichés un peu faciles comme Mercedes Benz contre Trabant, ou bien l’hôtel pour touristes « étrangers » dotés de devise (on n’insiste pas trop sur ce détail) qui ne cherchent qu’à passer la nuit avec la première femme venue contre un petit cadeau de rien du tout et la promesse de mariage et le rêve de partir vers l’ouest, promesse et rêves tous les deux en l’air.


Heureusement que ce film va un peu plus loin que cela. Barbara est médecin et à ce titre elle a une éthique et le film  va montrer comment cette éthique est plus forte que le désir de fuir, un désir qu’elle sacrifiera en ce qui la concerne pour assurer à une autre qui ne survivrait pas longtemps en camp de rééducation par le travail la chance de sortir. C’est cela qui noue le film en un vrai drame.

C’est la révélation que dans ces pays du socialisme réel comme aimait à dire Georges Marchais, le bonheur était dans l’acceptation d’une délégation totale d’autorité et de décision à une élite politique servie par une élite bureaucratique et défendue, maintenue au pouvoir par une élite policière. Cela voulait aussi dire que chacun devait faire ce que on leur disait de faire. Plus donc qu’une délégation de pouvoir, c’était une soumission au pouvoir de  cette élite. Quand ces deux éléments étaient acceptés il pouvait y avoir un certain bonheur, mais certainement pas un bonheur certain.


Certes, et loin de moi de le nier, les services sociaux étaient particulièrement efficaces : éducation, santé, mais aussi formation continue et promotion sociale et la seule condition était d’accepter le leadership de l’élite, car dans ce socialisme réel une véritable élite s’était constituée. J’avais la chance d’avoir un insigne du SED, le parti communiste dominant de la RDA (un cadeau d’un ami mineur de Borna). Je parlais et comprenais l’allemand couramment en ce temps là. Un jour dans un tram de Dresde une vieille dame se leva et voulut me céder sa place alors que j’avais à peine plus de vingt ans. Je refusai bien sûr mais le « geste » montrait la puissance, ou le prestige, de cette élite. On entendait aussi des choses étranges. J’écrivais un jour dans la brasserie de la gare de Meissen. Deux jeunes dirent à très haute voix : « C’est tout ce qu’ils font, ils écrivent ! »

Je pourrais multiplier les cas. Mais en 1968 ce fut la Tchécoslovaquie et là tout changea. Walter Ulbricht prit sa retraite et fut remplacé par Erich Honecker. Les gens attendaient vraiment un changement et  c’est l’inverse qui se produit. Le régime se raidit, se durcit et tourna au cauchemar. En 1969 je faillis être expulsé sur demande des jeunes loups du SED et de la FDJ, la jeunesse communiste, et je fus défendu par les plus anciens qui avaient fait la guerre. Je désapprouvais l’intervention à Prague et la réponse fut, de la part de ces jeunes loups : « Si nos dirigeants ont pris cette décision c’est qu’ils ont des raisons et leurs raisons sont bonnes. » Plus casuiste que cela je veux bien mourir.


Le film montre merveilleusement comment les dés sont jetés en 1980 : le régime a passé le pas d’une discipline démocratique à une dictature de la discipline, d’un Saint Nicolas sévère mais bienveillant à un Père Fouettard intraitable. Le film cependant se termine sur une situation intenable. Barbara ne pouvait pas reprendre sa place à sa clinique après avoir fait ce qu’elle avait fait, faire fuir une victime qui plus est incarcérée dans un camp de travail. Pour elle cela ne pouvait être que l’arrestation, la détention après l’interrogatoire et qui sait quoi en plus. Cette absence de même le début du commencement de cette déchéance enlève énormément de force au sacrifice que Barbara vient de faire. Pourquoi le réalisateur a-t-il écarté cette fin inéluctable ? Et la déclaration de l’officier de la STASI dans son appartement vide n’est pas même une ébauche de cette fin car à ce moment-là, même cet officier considère qu’elle a réussi à fuir.


Dr Jacques COULARDEAU



 

L'Opéra de Pékin est un monument tout neuf par Paul Andreu

L’OPERA DE PEKIN – XU CHENGBEI – PEKING OPERA, THE PERFORMANCE BEHIND THE PAINTED FACES – 2010

Le sujet est fascinant mais le fait qu’il soit traduit en français à partir de la traduction en anglais et non à partir du texte original en chinois, fait que des tournures anglaises se glissent ici et là, voire même des erreurs de traduction. Et pourtant c’est un petit livre introductif capital pour cet art mal connu en Occident, mais les orthographes variables des mots chinois, jamais donnés dans leur caractères chinois eux-mêmes, fait que l’on a quelque difficulté à suivre le propos, par exemple le personnage générique masculin est-il « shen » ou « sheng » ?

Le livre insiste sur la tradition. Forme théâtrale qui s’est développée en premier dans les provinces et qui ensuite est montée à Pékin et s’y est installée, le livre cependant n’est pas assez clair sur une tradition qui a nécessairement plus de deux siècles d’existence car elle plonge ses racines dans des pratiques théâtrales beaucoup plus anciennes et pratiquées dans les foires, les marchés et les temples (que l’on imagine bouddhiste car ce n’est pas précisé) bien avant de se retrouver dans des salons de thé comme accompagnement théâtral des discussions et des dégustations, et avant même de devenir de vrais spectacles théâtraux.


Il serait aussi bon de savoir quels furent les contextes sociaux et culturels qui ont produit cette forme artistique. Quelques éléments sont donnés avec le Roi des Singes et « Le Pèlerinage vers l’Ouest » de Wu Cheng'en du XVIe siècle. Mais une telle forme littéraire épique a nécessairement des racines dans des traditions orales anciennes, beaucoup plus anciennes.

Mais le livre insiste sur le caractère familial de ce théâtre traditionnel, chaque troupe étant formée autour d’un grand acteur et maître et ce maître puisant dans sa famille des membres supplémentaires qui se consacrent au théâtre dès l’enfance. Le livre insiste aussi sur le fait qu’un acteur ne peut devenir un grand que dans la mesure où il commence sa formation très tôt, bien avant l’adolescence, et qu’il se spécialise très vite dans l’un des quatre grands rôles de ce théâtre, chaque grand rôle générique ayant des sous-catégories : « sheng » (homme adulte), « dan » (femme), « jing » (visage peint) et « chou » (bouffon). Il est bon de noter que tous les rôles peuvent être tenus par des hommes et que la promotion des femmes est récente, tout comme l’interdiction de la vente des enfants aux compagnies théâtrales par leurs parents.


Le livre insiste sur la difficulté de survie de ce théâtre dans le monde actuel, dans sa forme de théâtre vivant du moins. Le livre note en passant que le CD et le DVD ont transformé la présence de cette forme artistique dans la société, y compris internationale, sans compter la télévision, le cinéma et la radio en ordre anti-chronologique. Il serait bon d’insister un peu sur ce fait.

Traditionnellement ce théâtre associe quatre formes d’art : le chant, le récitatif, le mime et le combat. On notera que le récitatif est plus important que le chant quand les deux formes sont présentes. Les pièces mettent l’accent sur une des quatre formes, rarement toutes. Alors que le décor et les accessoires sont très peu nombreux sur scène, le maquillage, les costumes et la codification de la gestuelle sont des formes très élaborées, sans parler bien sûr du chant et du récitatif, donc du langage mis en musique, qui eux aussi sont fortement codifiés.


La révolution culturelle a eu un impact lourd sur cette forme artistique en interdisant les pièces traditionnelles et en mettant en avant un répertoire « révolutionnaire » de paysans, d’ouvriers et de soldats de l’Armée Populaire autour d’événements de la révolution maoïste, et ce sous la direction de la dernière épouse, puis veuve de Mao Zedong de 1966 à 1976, période qui finira avec l’élimination d e la « vande des quatre » non mentionnée dans le livre.

Le livre signale le renouveau de cet art mais n’insiste pas suffisamment sur justement ce renouveau tant dans la formation que dans les formes et les sujets et préfère insister sur le public vieillissant et la nostalgie en particulier pour les pièces révolutionnaires de la révolution culturelle.

Un bon livre d’initiation pour ceux qui ne connaissent que peu ou pas cette forme théâtrale.


Dr Jacques COULARDEAU



Tuesday, June 18, 2013

 

Bleaker than bleak and blunter than black

STEPHEN KING – JOE HILL – IN THE TALL GRASS

This is a story written to be read and I must admit it reads pretty well, even though there is only one reader. There is no sound track behind the story, hardly a musical jingle at the beginning and at the end. You will never know the color of the wind nor the sound of the setting sun or of the rising moon. Stephen King has had a lot of his short stories read like that over the decades, though I must admit read that plain sounds slightly cheap in a way. But then we only have the story, the words, and the intonations of the reader. You have to block your vision not to see the words and your audition not to hear the noises and the various voices of the grass, the moon and the black rock. When you are there in the heart of this solo voice with no surrounding environment you can start enjoying the story and nothing but the story.

This story takes Stephen King back to the time when he was Richard Bachman, when he was writing stories that had no redeeming element at all and redemption is the core of this story, a redemption of some kind indeed. A brother and a sister, the sister pregnant, not from the brother but from a discarded male that has no importance at all, are driving to San Diego for the delivery and are presently crossing Kansas. They come to something that may look like a village around a church, but there is no one apart from a few cars on the parking lot of the church. The church is dedicated to the Black Rock of the Redeemer. And there is redemption attached to that Black Rock. And this Redeemer is reminding us of the Black Man that has appeared so often in Stephen King’s stories. And redeemed you are going to be.


The brother and the sister, plus the bun in the oven hear a boy calling in the grass and that’s the first step of the redemption coming with the desire to help this boy calling from inside the tall grass on the other side of the road, not heavenly redemption with angels and seraphim, but the other type of redemption, black, bleak, blunt and sinister. You just have to pay homage to the Black Rock and then you will survive in that under-grass kingdom. If you don’t you will forever stay there but you will become food for the survivors or for worms and other blackbirds or crows, another symbol of the devil in Stephen King.

Does Joe Hill, the son of the father, in other words Stephen King’s son, one of Stephen King’s sons, pulls his father back to the bleakest strand of his imagination? Yes for sure but it is no destitution, no backward movement but definitely a step forward into the dark side of the nightmare, if there can be a darker side to this nightmare than the nightmare itself. And we are kind of glad to come back to these stories that led to total destruction. Stephen King under his own name always left a door slightly ajar at the back of the end of a story through which we could imagine there was an epiphany even if it was starting all over again like in The Dark Tower. But here nothing, absolutely nothing. Enter this story and die.


And die we will, with pleasure and enthusiasm, till the last or rather final chime tells us the story is finished.

Yet there is something perverse in this story. The perverse element is Becky, the sister and her bun in her oven. She imagines her miscarriage as being her delivery, the delivery of a girl, if it is a girl, and there we can wonder if there is not something shameful or guilty in this unwarranted pregnancy out of wedlock, especially since they find an under-grass world in which a father has torn apart a dog first, then his own wife,  the kid’s mother, only to survive and feed on something, anything, why not your wife and your child’s mother, and he would not hesitate one minute if he could catch his own son, Tobin. Is Stephen King settling accounts with his own father, though he seemed to have been raised by his mother and no one else, or is it Joe Hill who is settling some accounts with his father, or is it Stephen King who is settling accounts with his own son, Joe Hill, or is it Owen King?


Difficult to know in this world tyrannically dominated by a father who is hunting and eating anyone he can see, starting with a dog, then his wife, the mother and then who knows what, leaving behind a son without a father he can coddle to, leaving a pregnant girl delivering the miscarriage of her fatherless child and they are just expecting to survive long enough to have a new batch of newcomers, a large family if possible to have some stored food in the fridge of the under-grass world for the winter.

Better forget loving anyone and making children and marrying. It will anyway end up in blood and cannibalism under the authority of a heartless black stone that will edict itself the redeemer of the cosmos.


I loved that story in a way and I just enjoyed the accounts it helped me to settled with a father long dead by now but whose recollection is and will always be painful, till death finally us part for ever and ever in the centuries of centuries in the world of nothing at all. If it is not cathartic for you, just let yourself slip into the fright of a nightmare or the fear of a dream.


Dr Jacques COULARDEAU



Friday, June 14, 2013

 

A rather disappointing seventh season

DEXTER – THE SEVENTH SEASON

This season takes Deb down into the deepest layers of hell. It starts with Deb falling upon Dexter’s killing a Christian serial killer in his church and it ends with an even grosser and more deliriously crazy crime. Dexter used to be more or less manipulated by his Dark Passenger, by a need he had to satisfy, an impulse he had to follow, but little by little he realizes that there is no dark passenger and that he is entirely responsible for his crimes and that leads to the idea that he is killing to survive, and eventually to avenge the killing of his mother.

As soon as this idea that survival is the main objective Dexter becomes a plain ordinary simple and banal serial killer. He does not kill dangerous people, I mean dangerous for society because they are serial killers themselves, but he kills because he feels menaced. His killing is no longer an act of vigilante justice but an act of pure fear, the fear to be taken, and when his sister is totally involved, the fear she might get caught or that she might become the target of some other criminal, and little by little of the police itself. It is no longer awesome but it has become awful.


The psychological level of the characters, Dexter among them, then loses a lot of its appeal. Dexter is a monster, a self-centered, egocentric, selfish monster. He has not one ounce of humanity left. He has become a danger for society by not being a scavenger that takes care of mental rubbish and social garbage. Then the suspense in the series is no longer only about when and how he is going to be caught but rather how he is going to get out of his mess by killing whom, when, where, how. Up to now there was an ethical dimension he called a code in that appeal. Now it is purely morbid and nothing but morbid.


The series uses some circumstantial subjects to build some kind of setting and environment to the predator’s hunt. The Ukrainian mafia in Miami opens night clubs with Ukrainian dancers who are essentially strippers and pole dancers, in other words something close to prostitution that is more or less tolerated but the Ukrainian mafia uses that cover to import all kinds of highly profitable drugs. This clandestine commerce then comes to a direct clash with the Colombian drug mafia that tries to defend their territory. But that transforms the series again into a simple criminal action film like so many others.

The series tries to widen Dexter’s scope by making him fall in love with another criminal who has killed exclusively to protect herself from all kinds of ills, a father first who was brutal, a gambler, a child molester, etc, and then juvenile institutions and then the serial killer she makes an escape at 15 with and whose crimes she shares, apparently with a lot of zeal but her lawyer manages to get her some immunity for these crimes because she was considered to be a hostage more than an accomplice. She knows what killing means, and she is in poison, and she understands Dexter and Dexter understands her. They fall in love, real love, not some social convenient arrangement like with Rita. But she menaces Deb who is trying to step between her and Dexter. Then Dexter has to get her in prison for one crime he had covered up.


But she escapes. Food for the next season.

Then this season revives Maria La Guardia, the Captain, and her love affair with Dokes, a Haitian sergeant who hated Dexter and had seen him through, and her obsession, in continuation of Dokes’s own obsession, against Dexter and she brings back out of the boxes the case of the Bay Harbor Butcher, but things have become tricky and since Dexter promised Deb not to compete with the police any more, he has to find other solutions than killing people and he becomes very good at framing them. He thus frames Maria who has tried and is trying to frame him. These two framers and their accomplices are like writing the new constitution of the Crime Republic, but that is easy, that is not even respectable, nor believable. And the framers lose their frames in the mean time and have to come back to the radical solution: dispose of the menace.

I am afraid I have to say this season is packed with action and dynamic intrigue, but the main and most successful actor has become the mosquito in the very opening credit sequence, even if its nlife is very short-lived. Even the love of Deb for Dexter is turned into something perverse and sickening. Crime corrupts and absolute crime corrupts absolutely.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU



 

Sin, fun and crime under the sun

STEPHEN KING – JOYLAND – 2013

If you still believe Stephen King is still the master of horror and nothing else, you will be highly disappointed. This book is partly a thriller, but essentially a social novel that deals with questions that have nothing to do with horror, except the mental horror that some extreme religious preaching and bigotry can represent in a society of liberal and free humanistic thinking.

But this book is a masterpiece and you will spend a full night reading it from cover to cover. So I would advise you to start it on a Friday night since on the following morning you may not be obliged to get up early and go to work. At least if you are one of these lucky schmucks who do not work on Saturdays, nor on Sundays. Not true of the people in this book since the employer is an amusement park owner and the industry is that of amusement parks, or carnivals, the ancestors of theme parks and other Disney Land and Disney World.


What makes it such a masterpiece, such a short and mesmerizing story?

First the story teller: an older man who tells us what happened to him when he was 21 or so, after his first year of college, when he accepted employment in the amusement park Joyland in North Carolina for the whole summer. The distance this older story teller establishes between himself and the character is very interesting: the vision of an older man on what he was when a young greenie in social experience. This life in 1973 for a young man and his college acolytes just one college year after high school graduation is fascinating, sex life of course which is in fact very limited, love life which is slightly more developed though it is more lover dumping for him and it is the poor young greenie man who is dumped by his high school sweetheart who left him a virgin on the shoulder of the road with the memory of just a few soiled pants and underwear by indirect manipulation. The vision of the world by this young man, Devin Jones, Jonesy for the Carnival world, is absolutely amazing and extremely moving and emotional. We have to fall in love with this young man, fully in love, including when he is playing the bigger than nature doggie for the kids in the amusement Park, when he is wearing the fur as he says.

Second this first chap is surrounded by two close friends, friends for the summer who will become friends for life and who will be crucial in the story. Tom and Erin become a love-at-first-sight-and-for-life couple and Tom will be able to see the “ghost” of the girl who was assassinated in the park some years back, whereas Erin will do the research necessary to find the killer. The fact is that Devin will stay in the park after Labor Day to button it up for the winter as a permanent employee because he wants to know the secret, because he is not sure he just wants to go back to college, because he wants and needs some real time to think about the future. And beyond these three young people there are many other people, including a serial killer who killed many girls and the suspense is to find out who he is.


Third and that is probably even better Devin manages to get acquainted with a young mother with a physically challenged young child who is bound to die soon. The woman is very reluctant at first to let Devin come close but the child, Michael, insists because he has some kind of psychic power and sees that Devin is his last chance before dying to go to the amusement park. With this woman and her son we reach a tremendous level of emotion: how can you satisfy the expectation of a ten year old child who knows he is going to die in the coming months and who just wants a last pleasurable experience before going back home, before stepping beyond the screens of the living. At this moment Stephen King proves his mastery in human emotions and sentiments and we are totally possessed by his tale. Even if it were only for that emotional level you should read that book at once.

Stephen King adds a theme of his he has often touched. The mother’s father and Michael’s grandfather is one of these radio cum TV preachers who were starting to become more than famous in these early 1970s.  How can we accept the vision of hail, brimstone and fire that rejects the daughter when she rejects the bigotry and starts having some kind of free life that made her pregnant? How can anyone decent accept the idea that Michael’s physical challenge is the punishment of god against his own mother who did not respect the bigotry of her father? There are many pages of pure joy and pleasure in the deepest emotional experience we can feel in our heart, mind and senses, joy and pleasure that brings up the light of some better future that might be free of such fundamentalist fanaticism.


Then the thriller part is fascinating too, but I will not reveal the killer, of course not. I will not reveal the end either but rest assured that Devin will become the prisoner, hostage and next victim of the killer. And Michael knew it all along, without maybe knowing the identity of that monstrous serial killer.

And you will absolutely share in full communion the last scene of the novel after Michael’s death. So beautiful, so alas impossible in so many countries where funerals are over regulated. But Stephen King imagines the last voyage of dead Michael in the most realistic way that nevertheless makes him fly to the sun. The dream of all children who are doomed to live in a wheel chair.


Dr Jacques COULARDEAU



Thursday, June 13, 2013

 

L'étatisme tyrannique conformiste de la république française

JOSÉ VALVERDE – LE MENSONGE DE LA CULTURE NATIONALE ET DU THÉÂTRE D’ÉTAT – www.auteursediteurs.fr

Ce n’est pas tant un texte qu’une mise en scène. Ce n’est pas tant un style qu’une mise en abyme, un terme que les critiques un peu snobs des USA emploient à toutes les sauces, même les plus abyssales, ce que les anglais qualifierait d’« abysmal », adjectif invariable bien sûr. Je suis un peu vieille classe, il est vrai mais j’aime beaucoup parler de la pièce dans la pièce, un tour fort prisé de Shakespeare, par exemple.

Mais l’anglais n’est pas la tasse de thé de José Valverde.

Tous les moyens employés ont un seul objectif : impressionner le lecteur comme s’il était un spectateur par un deus ex machina permanent et répétitif qui vise à être efficace et risque de vous donner le tournis. Alors asseyez-vous et reprenez calmement.

L’auteur a du savoir-faire dans ce domaine et il a le savoir nécessaire pour rendre ce savoir-faire quasiment mortel, pour nous rendre le visage de la mort que nous donne la culture, comme le célèbre masque funéraire de Alighieri Dante, et toute la beauté de ce masque funéraire est non pas dans les traits de Dante lui-même, mais dans l’immense héritage de cet homme prodigieux, dans son Inferno et dans son Paradiso, avec un entre-deux qui tient de la purge pour petits péchés intestinaux.


On est alors en droit de se demander ce qu’il reste de ce livre après l’avoir tué jusqu’à la dernière page ? Un certain  Dan Brown vient de centrer son dernier roman à énigme sur le masque funéraire de Dante qu’il fait voler à Florence et migrer à Venise. José Valverde qui nous livre ce livre mystérieux comme un masque funéraire d’une vie bien remplie, va-t-il voir les voleurs du Mash-up venir le piller pour en faire de la bouillie ministérielle ? Il y a de fortes chances que oui car les ministères et les ministres, surtout ceux de la culture, adore le mash-up idéel et idéologique qui est plus respectable que le plagiat. Le mash-up est au plagiat ce que la crème pâtissière brûlée est à la crème aux œufs.

Mais il nous reste après lecture quelques idées simples  et de simple bon sens, donc qu’aucun ministre d’aucune culture ne pourra comprendre, et le tout dans mon propre désordre.

1- Si la culture est liberté, elle est ingérable car imprévisible et donc le ministère de la culture ment et gère du vent avec force moulinets des bras comme quelque moulin à vent de Don Quichotte, ce qui est presqu’une insulte pour Cervantès quand on connaît le Sancho Panza de cette ministre de la culture.

2- Si la culture c’est un objet diffusé par des structures institutionnalisées, le ministère de la culture est en fait un vendeur de bonbons, cacahuètes, eskimos, chocolats dans les travées d’un foirail aux bestiaux. La plus belle bête est celle qui a été nourrie aux hormones et la culture qui gagne c’est le produit qui a été nourri au moulin à prière des vendeurs de soupe.


3- Si la culture c’est, ou ce sont, les savoirs humains, le producteur principal de ce savoir c’est la recherche scientifique et le ministère de la culture est donc un coquille vide d’escargot déshydraté par l’ingestion de quelques granules anti-limaces. Mais surtout ne construisons pas une pyramide de Chéops en mettant en un seul conglomérat trois ministères actuels : éducation dite nationale, universités et recherche (notez le singulier), et culture (notez aussi le singulier. Cela ferait une belle bête à trois têtes et dix cornes et autant de couronnes : cela serait une bonne chance de faire revivre une certaine apocalypse et sa Babylone qui règne en maîtresse absolue des corps et des instincts les plus bas.

4- Si la culture c’est le produit des industries culturelles, le ministère de la culture est un charlatan de foire foraine, donc une survivance d’un mode de pensée ancien qui ne sert à rien car on sait bien que ce n’est pas Dieu le père qui gère les foires expositions et les comices agricoles. Notre ministre de la culture n’est même pas bien sûr capable d’animer ou de mener le concours de labourage. Par contre il est très fort pour le pâturage qui fait du tout petit lait avec toutes les herbes folles qui poussent au côté et au fossé de la route nationale dramatique qu’il désherbe à la faucheuse tous les ans à coups de subventions, en fait de non-subventions, mais les unes et les autres ont le même sens : gérer nos écuries d’Augias.

5- Si la culture c’est l’éthique, et comme elle me donne des démangeaison je pense que c’est plutôt les tiques qui me font tiquer devant les tics de langage et de comportement, n’allons pas jusqu’à parler de la pensée, de nos ministres successifs qui traitent un langage dominant comme une rente à perpétuité, si donc la culture c’est l’éthique, on traite de l’ordre moral et donc de LA culture officialisée qui tient plus de la propagande mentale et spirituelle que de la créativité humaine. La culture devient un ensemble de mantras dignes de quelque religion himalayenne. Le ministère de la culture est alors une officine normalisatrice, une refonte du Livre des Morts Tibétains en une sorte de notice nécrologique de ce qui devra survivre dans l’oppression, l’interdiction, la diabolisation aux noms de mots comme beauté, vérité, humanism-ité, laïcité. Et quelques autres concepts du même jet, voyez le Littré pour vous les confirmer, avant la communion solennelle.


6- Si la culture c’est un construit il est indispensable de commencer dès la naissance et même avant pendant la grossesse. Mais alors le ministère de la culture n’a rien de maternel. Il est impuissant, impotent et stérile car il n’a aucune autorité sur les maternités, les sages femmes, les crèches, les écoles maternelles et les accoucheurs à forceps. Il est la mouche d’un certain coche qui se moque complètement de la dite mouche car ce coche est tirée par la vie et non par la mouche mortuaire pondeuse de vers cadavériquement intéressés, affamés, cannibales, et c’est vers là n’ont rien à voir avec des vers de poésie ou des versets spirituels.

7- Si la culture c’est la nouvelle religion intégriste des Droits/Devoirs de l’Homme, notez les majuscules, le ministère de la culture est le nouveau pape d’avignon, sans majuscules mais avec chasuble d’or bien sûr, goupillon de fonte bien sûr et sabre d’acier trempé bien sûr, et ce pape d’avignon sans majuscules fait respecter sa lecture gallicane, parfois gauloise (vous savez nos ancêtres) indiscutable et laïque de la pensée humaine libérée de toute discrimination religieuse, donc de toute religion, sans dieux ni maîtres, sauf la sienne qui consiste à dénoncer toutes les autres. Il est donc un intégriste de la liberté dominée, contrôlée, maîtrisée, enfin en un seul mot libérée, un ministère de l’oxymoron, de la liberté enchaînée dans un mausolée funéraire.

8- Si la culture théâtrale était une culture de la liberté elle ne fonctionnerait pas sur la base des chiffres accablants du public qui bouffe du fric quand il est comparé au privé qui an fait. Le public et ses 2.427.000 spectateurs en face du privé et ses 2.976.649 spectateurs. Le public et ses 50,18 euros de subventions par spectateur en face du privé et ses 2,31 euros de subventions par spectateur, presque VINGT-DEUX FOIS MOINS. Le théâtre d’état, le théâtre de la république, le théâtre public est pour le moins un théâtre privé de rentabilité, un théâtre du gaspillage des fonds publics dans l’inefficacité à amener un vrai public populaire au théâtre ou le théâtre à un vrai public populaire (p. 101-103). Et en plus ce théâtre d’état travaille pour les morts, non pas comme un salon funéraire mais comme le dépositaire colombaire des cendres après la crémation. Le théâtre public joue des pièces nouvelles pour 2,71% de ses spectateurs. Alors que le théâtre privé joue essentiellement des pièces nouvelles d’auteurs vivants.

9- Neuvième heure de la mort de Jésus. 999, trois fois neuf, ou 666, 18 et donc deux fois neuf. Il reste dans ce paysage dévasté après cinquante ans de politique culturelle d’état centralisée que la vie vient du ruisseau et non de l’Elysée, vient même du par-terre et non des palais hérités des âges anciens. C’est une vanité tyrannique que de croire que la beauté et la transfiguration du réel en spirituel plus ou moins surnaturel mais définitivement trans-réaliste peuvent naître et croître dans l’ordre établi étatique. Et le ruisseau comme le par-terre ne sont jamais là où on les attend. Ils risquent fort d’être derrière et devant les caméras qui retransmettent en streaming live des performances hors scènes car la créativité n’a rien à faire des scènes qui tentent de l’enclore dans un ring en forme de corral. Il n’est nul besoin d’un lit pour faire un enfant. C’est même bien plus amusant sans lit.


Dr Jacques COULARDEAU



Friday, June 07, 2013

 

Preljocaj et Delente unis ici dans un photographe chinois

ALBENA DIMITROVA – LIVING DANCE – YANG WANG – BALLET ANGELIN PRELJOCAJ

Ne dites rien, ou Presque, sur ce livre car c’est un livre d’images qui parlent toutes seules en noir et blanc et sans le moindre mot. Vous pouvez même ne pas regarder les rares pages de texte. Ces textes apportent d’autres éclairages comme s’ils tentaient de coloriser les danseurs en mouvement, comme si le mouvement avait une couleur.

« Un moment rendu immuable, hors du temps, par le photographe. »


Chaque image du danseur ou de la danseuse dans sa danse n’est pas immuable mais est une pérennisation d’un instant unique et évanescent en plein dynamisme de mouvement. Le corps dans l’image ne saurait tenir tout seul, ne saurait durer dans son mouvement arrêté par la caméra. Mais ce n’est ni immuable ni hors du temps. A chaque vision, chaque fois que nous fermons les yeux et les ré-ouvrons, à chaque saccade de nos yeux, c’est ce mouvement suspendu qui se recrée dans nos prunelles justement dans sa suspension et ce mouvement meurt du même mouvement qui l’a créé jusqu’à le revoir encore et encore.

Pérennisation de l’instant évanescent d’un équilibre nécessairement instable entre l’envol et la chute, en plein mouvement qui naît, se développe et se termine en une seule et même énergie. Le dépassement de l’instant réel n’est que la répétition de cet instant réel et donc de cet équilibre évanescent entre l’envol et la chute. Nous avons là un mouvement ancré dans le temps en transition que notre œil mental démultiplie à l’infini sans jamais l’arrêter, le stopper, le rendre immuable justement.


« La nudité c’est quand on se livre. Tout est visible sur le corps. Je ne me tiens pas de la même manière habillée ou nue. »

Se livrer c’est dire son âme et son esprit et ici essayer de les dire par la danse d’un corps nu, par le mouvement de ce corps et de chacun de ses muscles qui, pris en un instantané, portent chacun d’entre eux le mouvement physique qui n’est que la force de l’âme et la vitalité de l’esprit. Le nu ajoute-t-il quelque chose ? Oui, certes, il ajoute la visibilité de chaque muscle, de chaque articulation, de chaque pouce de peau et de chair qui créent en nous une émotion, l’émotion d’un mouvement qui ne mourra jamais.


Face à la nudité il n’y a que deux attitudes possibles.

Celle du voyeur doublé de l’exhibitionniste qui vise simplement l’onanisme mental ou physique du spectateur. Cette nudité n’est qu’un déraillement de l’âme et une surdité de l’esprit.

Celle du cerveau savant qui est le nôtre et qui recrée l’entier du mouvement dans l’instantané du cliché. Seul le cerveau humain peut ainsi recréer ce qui n’est pas montré et dépasser la nudité montrée qui devient alors la clé du mouvement recherché. L’émotion alors n’a rien à voir avec les glandes endocrines, du moins pas celle de l’onanisme, mais a tout à voir avec la force et l’inspiration qui porte ce mouvement que nous reconstruisons dans notre œil mental.


Ma conclusion viendra de Sergio Diaz : « Par la danse je mes suis forgé, j’ai appris à voir au plus profond de moi. Je ne serais pas le même homme si je n’étais pas passé par là. »

Il ne s’agit que d’ajouter qu’il a aussi appris à montrer ce qui vit au plus profond de lui, et de faire remarquer que le public de la danse a du apprendre à regarder, contempler et admirer cette vérité profonde qui a la lumière cosmique de l’univers infini, et non seulement la couleur indécise de la surface des corps montrés et animés d’émotions à partager qu’alors on ne voit plus.


Dr Jacques COULARDEAU



Thursday, June 06, 2013

 

The three sacred monsters are impressive and disquieting

STEPHEN KING – JOHN MELLENCAMP – T. Bone BURNETT – GHOST BROTHERS OF DARKLAND COUNTY

The format is so strange that we remain aghast and flabbergasted for at least five minutes when we open the delivery box. The size of the “object” is that of the long play vinyl record of the old days, and thick enough to contain maybe three or four records of that type, and the whole thing is intriguing. The libretto which is the only thing that comes out is the same size and we find out this libretto encloses two CDs and one DVD.

Let me look at this singular assortment in the most incredible disorder.

The first CD is the songs of the musical play in disorder as for their chronological order in the libretto with small in-between tracks to link them all in a way or another with some dramatic dialogue. That gives dynamism to the music since we are within a story that is being told. We discover the order of the songs is not that of the libretto because we are a good audience and we look for the lyrics. This is a very good idea to give the seventeen songs in a dramatized presentation, hence with an obvious added value.  That’s ten times better than the second CD that gives the songs in proper order in the classical format, one after the other. I guess that will give choice to listeners, on one hand the traditionalists and on the other hand the innovators. The first CD is like a presentation of the songs on a radio with an actor saying a few words between each song. Pretty awesome it is, as the new generation seems to like saying after Supernatural and the Winchester brothers. This allusion is not gratuitous.

But before moving to the libretto let’s say the music is very good and somewhere between some swinging country-leaning rock music and then some more meaty fleshy sanguine music from the rock planet of more recent times and yet the general format is very regular, the way people like Jimmy Hendrix used to do things. It does sound like a good modern advanced form of music for some Broadway show, some musical dramatic production that wants to attract the theater audience of major stages in major cities.


I then got into the libretto, the play itself, the story and there we get two brothers, in fact two sets of two brothers as if we had Dean and Sam Winchester as well as Michael and Lucifer. And of course each pair is duly associated with Cain and Abel, page 31 for Drake and Frank, the more recent real live ones, and page 58 for Andy and Jack, the older ghostlike ones from the past, and that reference to Cain and Abel is in proper order, older brother and then younger brother, because Stephen King knows his Genesis by heart. He of course knows the older son is the killer of the younger son because the older son fails to capture the attention of God and the younger one succeeds..

And of course, since we are in the 21st century we can take some liberty with the Bible, and the two pairs of brothers invert the order of the model, and it is the younger son who kills the older son both because the older son is the failure and the younger son is the winner of something, no matter what, on the background of teenage hatred that has to do with girls, with one girl because these two pairs of hormone-dominated non-castrated draught animals, generally known as brothers, are not satisfied with draught beer, or drafting any kind of plan to conquer the moon: they have to fall in love with the same girls who prefer the older brother at first and is attracted by the success of the younger brother afterward and change their allegiance. More horrible that that you cannot imagine and you may die. It is squalid, bleak, awful this time and in no way awesome, but definitely horrible. Girl-friends sure do not get the good side of the deal.


One generation of brothers (in fact the two older brothers of the father of the second generation of brothers) are playing their parts as ghosts and we learn more or less that they are trapped on the earth because the third brother of this older generation, hence the father of the two brothers of the younger generation, is carrying a deep sense of guilt in his mind about the event that killed his two brothers. It is his telling the truth, in fact a first part that is innocuous and then the second part that is somber and dense, that is supposed to free the ghosts that can move on to another world. Unluckily this telling of this old story starts a whole chain of events that will fatefully get rid of the younger pair of brothers.

But inversion is essential: Stephen King rewrites the Bible in the style of Sigmund Freud who felt so guilty about his Old Testament and his Judaism that he built his psychiatry on the Greek mythological model and in the systematic inversion of Biblical references. It is a basic crime in Mosaic law for a son to look at his nude father, so Freud made the killing of the father a fundamental symbolical crime necessary to get to adult age as well balanced as possible. It is a crime in Mosaic law for a son to desire his mother. Of course Freud rewrites this part as a fundamental desire that will make you a grown up in no time provided you symbolically kill your father and then symbolically transfer your desire for your mother onto another woman who is not a relative or a sister. And he calls that oedipal of course, a good Greek reference.


So telling the tale of symbolical guilt for the surviving third brother of the older generation, who is quite alive as the father of the second generation of brothers, is a way to come to terms with his purely personal and psychological, sorry psychiatric guilt that requires immediate psychiatric treatment, in depth if you please. In other words the telling of it all is cathartic. Cathartic for the father who projects his guilt into the public tale because then it is assumed and carried by other people. But it is anti-cathartic for the second generation of brothers who at once get into a situation that leads them to do the same things as their two dead uncles. And what’s more whereas the two dead uncles were only responsible for three deaths, the younger generation of brothers, or nephews if you prefer, are responsible for five deaths. In the first case the younger brother only really kills one person, and it could have been seen as an accident caused by an abuse of alcohol, in the second case the younger brother is directly responsible for four deaths, including his own and his father’s. That’s Freudian to a maxium peak of intensity, especially when we know the mother of that second generation of brothers preferred her older son. In other words the accidental death of the mother at the hands of a nonsensical fight between the girl friend and the mother leads to a sort of Freudian vengeance that makes the younger son kill the father and the older son. Isn’t that twisted and warped, corrugated would some people say, I guess.

Stephen King in his Freudian rewriting of Genesis is making the load of guilt heavier than anything you could imagine and Cain, I am sorry the younger brother Frank in the second generation has seen his guilt multiplied by four. The modern Freudian world is not exactly a happy story.


The question we have to ask here is why that motif of the tale of two brothers is so pregnant in American literature particularly since the Second World War. Steinbeck had done a lot already with his East of Eden, Supernatural and Dexter had been particularly heavy on the subject too, and now Stephen King has transformed the sorry religious or mythical tale of Cain and Abel into an apocalypse, a mass murder, a case of epidemic serial killing. When we think how much effort it has taken for all the Christian churches and temples to hide the fact that Jesus had many brothers, the most important of whom is James supposedly the Minor (James the Major is a fairy tale) who was stoned to death after an illegal decision of the high priest of the Jerusalem temple in 62 CE, when we think of that we can wonder why this story of two brothers is coming out so strong in modern American culture.

Some will be entitled to wonder if the USA are not schizophrenic somewhere, more or less carrying in their collective unconscious the guilt of having killed their brothers, their European brothers, their English brothers, their Indian brothers, their Black brothers? That makes many human brothers they have killed and tortured most of the time to death. The history of the USA sounds like a giant Guantanamo. Are the Americans of the USA in need of a deep and vast cathartic psychoanalysis? Or will it be enough to prescribe one pill of Prozac to all Americans every day starting as soon as the first day of conception (via the pregnant mother till the real birth) and then in the milk bottle of the baby?


The DVD does not add much, except the three artists sitting; one next to the other, like the three monkeys of the fable and the song recorded in Studio given at the end of this making-of is just perfect for them:

But you can see with those eyes
And you can hear with those ears
And you can speak with that tongue

For sure the three members of the jury really see nothing, hear nothing and say nothing that will change my approach, but they are quite fascinating speaking of their work as if it were their new born baby or their teenage high school crush. They sure are sentimental, especially Stephen King. One thing is sure in this DVD, the songs and their lyrics seem to have been written by John Mellencamp first and then Stephen King came along and wove a tale of twice two Cain-like and Abel-like brothers. I am sure Stephen King must have thought of this two sons quite a few times.


Dr Jacques COULARDEAU



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