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
# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 5:39 AM
0 comments
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
# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 3:26 PM
0 comments
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
# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 2:45 PM
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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
# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 1:40 AM
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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
# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 1:51 PM
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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
# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 2:14 PM
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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
# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 6:50 AM
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Thursday, June 13, 2013
L'étatisme tyrannique conformiste de la république française
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
# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 4:00 AM
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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
# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 3:53 PM
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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
# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 2:50 PM
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