This Week: 27.5 km!

Well I extended my weekly tally to 27.5 km which was not a bombastic surprise but counts as a good progress. I fear i won't be able to reach this record next week.
I'm getting familiar with some faces who  are apparently early risers!  

Sat 3 Nov: 7.5 km
"Thula Borah" and "If These Trees Could Talk"

Monday 5 Nov: 7.5 km
"Les Discrets" and "God Is an Astronaut" 

Thursday 8 Nov: 5 km
"Agalloch"

Friday 9 Nov: 7.5 km
"Crippled Black Phoenix", "Hammock" and "This Will Destroy You"

Take Shelter: Movie Review by Roger Moore

Here's a brief review of "Take Shelter": an unsettling psychological thriller with an astounding performance by Michael Shannon. It;s written by Roger Moore and published @Orlando Sentinel. 

With special thanks to Dr Bahar Sadeghi who introduced the movie. 

pedram

Michael Shannon plays a good man and caring father besieged by nightmares

In days of old, they might have thought Curtis a prophet of doom, or possessed by the Devil.

But since he’s a modern working class Joe, drilling test holes for a contracting firm, these dreams Curtis is having provoke a modern response. Is he seeing the future, birds swarming before a nightmarish rain of oil, a tornado? Or is he coming unglued? Should he protect his family by preparing them for disaster, or check himself into a hospital, protecting them from him?

That’s the provocative conflict at the heart of “Take Shelter,” the second film to team rising star filmmaker Jeff Nichols and the great character actor Michael Shannon. As Curtis, Shannon brings his usual mix of menace and vulnerability, adding confusion and acute paranoia to the brew inside of this guy’s head.

Curtis has a lovely, resourceful wife, played by the marvelously earthy and omnipresent Jessica Chastain (“The Help,” “The Debt”). He has an adorable daughter, a nice rural Ohio home and a loyal dog. But he’s seen the dog bite him in his nightmares. The dog goes outside.

His pal at work (Shea Whigham, terrific) runs the gigantic drill, and on a break, sizes him up.

“You’ve got a good life, Curtis. I think that’s the best compliment you can give a man.”

But the dreams won’t stop. Curtis wets the bed, seeks medical help and yet hedges his bets. There’s an old storm shelter in the yard. He’s going to fix it up to withstand anything.

Shannon wonderfully modulates Nichols’ portrait of a man whose mind and life seem to unravel before our eyes. Nichols surrounds him with great character players such as Chastain and Whigham, with Kathy Baker playing his mother and Ray McKinnon (“The Blind Side”) well-cast as the concerned brother who shows up to see what’s up.

Nichols walks a tightrope between giving us a dark, Gothic tale of misunderstood prophecy and a sobering lesson on the state of mental health care in rural America.  And Shannon, piling up the accolades with every film (“Reservation Road,” “The Runaways”) adds the troubled and troubling Curtis to a growing resume of vivid and utterly real off-center characters.

Roger Moore

@Orlando Sentinel

(Courtesy of Dr Bahar Sadeghi)

Charlotte Sometimes

All the faces

All the voices blur

Change to one face

Change to one voice

Prepare yourself for bed

The light seems bright

And glares on white walls

All the sounds of 

Charlotte sometimes

Into the night with

Charlotte sometimes

Night after night she lay alone in bed

Her eyes so open to the dark

The streets all looked so strange

They seemed so far away

But Charlotte did not cry

The people seemed so close

Playing expressionless games

The people seemed so close

So many other names

Sometimes I'm dreaming

Where all the other people dance

Sometimes I'm dreaming

Charlotte sometimes

Sometimes I'm dreaming

Expressionless the trance

Sometimes I'm dreaming

So many different names

Sometimes I'm dreaming

The sounds all stay the same

Sometimes I'm dreaming

She hopes to open shadowed eyes

On a different world

Come to me scared princess

Charlotte sometimes

On that bleak track

(see the sun is gone again)

The tears were pouring down her face

She was crying and crying for a girl

Who died so many years before

Sometimes I dream

Where all the other people dance

Sometimes I dream

Charlotte sometimes

Sometimes I dream

The sounds all stay the same

Sometimes I'm dreaming

There are so many different names

Sometimes I dream

Sometimes I dream

Charlotte sometimes crying for herself

Charlotte sometimes dreams a wall around herself

But it's always with love

With so much love it looks like

Everything else

Of Charlotte sometimes

So far away

Glass sealed and pretty

Charlotte sometimes

The Cure

Being in Uncertainty

I read the following post @ Talking Philosophy blog. It looks at Felix Baumgartner's epic effort from an interesting perspective. 
pedram

Like millions of people I watched Felix Baumgartner’s space jump last Sunday. He leapt from a tiny capsule pulled 24 miles into the sky by a helium balloon. He fell to the ground from the edge of space, breaking the sound barrier, and several records, in the process.
I found his achievement moving and compelling. And this surprised me because quite often I find extreme feats of this sort rather sterile, and perhaps a little bullet-headed.  When someone walks across the Antarctic, or climbs Everest without oxygen, it seems to involve a chest-beating determination to assert oneself against nature. The self-assertion makes it seem a small inward-looking response to the largeness and awesomeness of the world. It reminds me of the character in William Golding’s novel Pincher Martin who takes huge pride in surviving against the odds on a tiny rock in the middle of the ocean,  staving his hunger with vile rock-dwelling creatures and sheltering himself by squeezing into a tiny jagged hole. The astonishing twist in that story shows  his pride in that narrow victory to be the very same thing as his failure to see and appreciate something much larger and more beautiful than his deluded and debased survival.

Golding’s novel has a belief in God at its centre. So as an atheist, I read it at arm’s length. I can’t share its central vision.  Some or all of Baumgartner’s jump team are atheists too. That’s the message I took from mission control’s reassurance to Baumgartner that “his guardian angel” was with him. The notion of a guardian angel is so kitsch, so primitive and so not a part of most religious people’s  experience of faith that it seemed to me that these colleagues of Baumgartner were stating their atheism at the same time as they indulged an (entirely understandable) need to supplicate (someone, something) for their friend’s survival.

That these scientists felt drawn to this playful but clumsy invocation of a supernatural entity in which they probably disbelieved gives me a clue about why I found Baumgartner’s jump so moving.

An atheist invoking God in response to peril can easily be seen as a momentary weakness, a panicked irrationality, so it is not terribly interesting. More interesting is the way an atheist might feel when contemplating the strange empty  infinity and complexity of the universe and the sheer oddness of being a conscious presence within it. We might not be at all tempted to say that the idea of God needs to be invoked to explain the universe. But the idea that God exists and that we humans are in a state of separation from that God can seem like a very vivid way of experiencing our awe in the face of a not-yet-fully-explained universe and also of capturing  some central philosophical problems. The idea of a God from whom we are separated and whom we strive to rejoin (the idea of a fall followed by redemption) has in the past lent philosophy some of its fundamental structure. Hegel’s self-positing spirit, for example, is a version of God coming to self-knowledge through a process which involves first the generation and then the overcoming of separateness.  And even if we eschew Hegelian ways of thinking,  the idea of a God that we must strive to rejoin feels like a rich metaphor for the traditional philosophical project of characterising reality in a manner which makes it both independent of us and yet within our knowledge. The truth (if it is a truth) of the atheist’s claim that there is no God sometimes seems like poor compensation for the loss of the religious worldview –  because that worldview is a very beautiful and metaphorically fertile orientation to the strange condition of being conscious in the world.

There is an atheist’s plight, I think. Not for all atheists, but for some atheists most of the time, and perhaps even for most atheists some of the time. The plight is this: there is no God, but sometimes invoking the concept of God seems a very compelling way indeed of doing justice to the strangeness, the beauty and the peril of our lives.

So, just as Baumgartner’s colleagues summoned the idea of a guardian angel to fill the space left by their disbelief in God,  I too look around for metaphors to fill the space left by my own disbelief in God. And Baumgartner’s endeavour at the physical margins of our world, the point where it joins the universe, seemed to fit the bill. Where Pincher Martin, in Golding’s novel, squeezes himself into a small hole on a small rock and feels big, Baumgartner took himself to the edge of the largest possible space to (in his own words) “see how small he was.” It was (corny expressions seem unavoidable here) an encounter with the infinite. The symbolism of falling also has poignancy. It speaks of a chosen passivity, a surrender, very different from the assertive striving  of a Pincher Martin, and very resonant with Christian mythology. Finally the sheer pointlessness of jumping from space seems a rather heroic defiance of the meaninglessness that threatens to engulf us when we look at a vast universe empty of mind: it embraces meaninglessness joyfully and colonises it with purpose.

I don’t want to spend too long teasing out the symbolism of the jump. Instead I want to ask a question. It seems from the above that we (or many of us) have a need for what might be called aids to reflection, aids to the contemplation of certain fundamental features of our presence in the world. If a belief in God is not available to us as a supplier of such aids, we look for it elsewhere. What I want to ask is this: Can a religious person endorse this status of religion as being, not the provider of truth but simply a provider of resources for reflection? If we reject every distinctively religious claim (that there is a god, that there is a soul, or an afterlife, or reincarnation …), if we say that religion offers us no truths of its own but onlyresources for the contemplation of the truths of science and philosophy, and if we say that religion is not even the only supplier of such resources because art and literature and jumping men are also resources, might it still be possible to be religious? Note that I’m not asking  a question about the value of religion, considered from outside the religious perspective. I’m asking whether the religious perspective itself can survive a certain view of its status. In a review of Alain de Botton’s Religion for Atheists John Gray quotes  Keats to suggest that “the heart of religion isn’t belief, but something more like what Keats described as negative capability: ‘being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’.” But can a religious person really and wholeheartedly subscribe to such a view?

I think that this question translates into (at least) three more specific questions (only very roughly formulated here):

(1) Is it really true that a religious practitioner can give an entirely “non-creedal” account of religion, one that does not claim there to be any distinctively religious truths  and states that religion is simply not about belief? Quakerism, for example,  advises us to “remember that Christianity is not a notion but a way.” But is it, in fact, possible for a religious person consistently to sustain this religious non-cognitivism?

(2) If religion turns its back on the notion of religious beliefs, can it still maintain a distinctive territory for itself, or does it simply become a part of art and literature? If we contemplate God without asserting his existence, and derive very important lessons from the contemplation, what – if anything – makes this different from contemplating, say, Achilles, or Hamlet, or Dorothea Brooke?

(3) A version of religion which denied the existence of God, and of every single other supernatural phenomenon, would be a very profoundly revisionist one. It might be one that almost every single religious practitioner rejected. Is such extreme religious innovation coherent? Or does religion have to be defined in terms of (certain very general) widely shared features of people’s actual religious practice?

Perhaps these questions seem unmotivated: if one rejects religious belief, why struggle to find common ground with religion? That might very well be a good question. But the extremity of the current antipathy between atheism and faith seems to call for an exploration of different, happier and more mutually enriching forms of interaction between them.  So I’d be grateful for any comments that considered the three questions above. If John Gray and Keats are right, and religion is, not about belief but about “being in uncertainty,” are those questions the right ones for the project of making sense of religion so-conceived? How could they be better formulated? What further questions are there for that project? What direction might the answers take?

Stamping This Week

Mon 29 Oct.
5.2 km
Listening to: "Hammock" and "If These Trees Could Talk"

Tuesday 30 Oct.
7.5 km
Listening to: "Crippled Black Phoenix" and "Les Discrets"

Friday 2 Nov.
7.5 km
Listening to: "Planning For Burial" and "Swallow The Sun"
Pedram

The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.

The Cold Plateau

Beyond highest mountains, imagine how far you will go,,,
How high are your expectations?
The cold plateau,
Will it surprise you? Does it embarrass you?  

What was the promise?  
Was it where you wanted to dwell peacefully? 
Was it all about peace?
Wouldn't you envy the heroes of
The cold plateau,

Wipe clean your face!
Face rare naked beauty!
Face  the conjurer of tomorrows!

Pedram,Oct 28,2012

Jacques Audiard: 'My work is like rolling thunder'

For a man who is a bundle of intense, nervous energy, Jacques Audiard is a surprisingly slow worker. Since he started directing, in 1994, he has completed just six features, with lengthy gaps between them. Indeed, the three-year run up to his new film, Rust and Bone, represents something of an acceleration. "I am free," Audiard shrugs, "because I work for a producer [Pascal Caucheteux] who says, 'We'll go when it's ready.' He doesn't give me a deadline. The films take a long time to write – too long, perhaps. That is where the time is spent."

But what films they are. His last, A Prophet, the coruscating study of a French-Arab convict who becomes a player in the Corsican mafia, was four years in the making, and won a runner-up prize at Cannes in 2009; it also made a star of its lead, Tahar Rahim. Before that, in 2005, there was The Beat That My Heart Skipped, a nerve-shredding remake of James Toback's seminal New Hollywood film, Fingers; again, it made a huge star of its lead, Romain Duris, in a role originally played by Harvey Keitel. Rewind another four years and there was Read My Lips, in 2001, in which deaf office worker Emmanuelle Devos falls for hoodlum Vincent Cassel and takes part in a brutal robbery. Read My Lips emerged a full five years after the film that put Audiard on the map: A Self-Made Hero, his fantastically watchable account of a fake Resistance fighter, with a liquidly brilliant central performance by Mathieu Kassovitz.

Rust and Bone is a reworking of a book of short stories by Canadian writer Craig Davidson, and of two in particular: the title story and another called Rocket Ride. It's a substantial rewrite: the killer-whale trainer played by Marion Cotillard was originally male; an accident that is a backstory in the book becomes the climax of the film; the film's two central characters live in entirely separate worlds in Davidson's original, and never meet (Audiard's film has them conducting a complex, passionate relationship). Moreover, the film is set in France, in an anti-glamour Riviera of ramshackle workshops, grubby flats and battered wastelands. (This is not, as Audiard is at pains to point out, an assault on the plushness of the Côte d'Azur; it is simply because the only killer-whale aquarium in France is located in Antibes.)

Key to this part of the process is Audiard's scriptwriter, Thomas Bidegain, who worked on A Prophet and also acts as the director's unofficial translator. Sitting in on our interview, he chips in, amplifying his director's words. "The way we work is to talk about what the film should be, the kind of film we want to do. We were coming out of A Prophet – a jail movie – no women, no space, no light, no love. So the idea we had was to do a love story."

But Audiard, twitching with auteurist pride, cannot be talked over. "I really believe the form of the film must be in the scenario; cinema is not just added value to the scripting. I believe in it as a totality. There was a specific problem with this film, which we saw often during the writing: the clash between realism and stylisation. You had constantly to be looking for an equilibrium. If it's too realistic, it's boring. If it's too stylised, you don't believe it." Bidegain adds: "What attracted us to the short stories was the universe they described, a universe of catastrophe – a world where people just have their body left to sell. The characters were normal people, but their destiny is magnified by accidents."

But this is the director's show, and Audiard wants to talk about a key scene in which Cotillard's character, Stéphanie, loses her legs. In Davidson's story, the incident is described with gruesome precision: the trainer stands on the killer whale's lip, slips, and is horribly mutilated as the animal attempts to eject him from its throat. The film's treatment of this central moment is, in sharp contrast, cryptic and impressionistic; a chaotic, dream-like sequence, slowed down to the point of abstraction. "We start out very realistic," Audiard says. "We shot the marine show just as it is, very natural. But if you do the accident like that, it would be over so fast. So we go outside the point of view of the character: what we make is more like a fantasy. It could be an image a child dreamed, after the story was told to him."

That seems as good a rationalisation of Audiard's extraordinarily fluid image-making as you're likely to get from the director. His is an ability that is as confident as cinema has seen for decades. It is not for nothing that Audiard has been repeatedly compared to Martin Scorsese in his Taxi Driver and Raging Bull period; he has the same restless imagination, the same unerring confidence in handling the camera. Audiard is reluctant to explain details – "It is immodest, like I am God!" – but rather poetically likens his scene-building to "rolling thunder", a tension crackling away in the background before the climactic moment.

He used CGI for Cotillard's post-amputation scenes, digitally removing her legs. "It's just a cheap computer manipulation, you know. When we shoot, she's just wearing green socks. You get used to the green socks, then one day we saw the first finished CGI, and you think: Wow! It's really erotic." He expands on this: "We know this from the original story – that's what the film is about – she is someone who doesn't like sex before the accident: she's too controlled. She finds in love the possibility to be abandoned, to let go – she finds out what love is."

Audiard has been here before. In Read My Lips, the disability is deafness, but the film has a near-identical dramatic drive: a woman whose impairment is an analogue to a repressed emotional life; an insensitive, inarticulate man; a relationship that unlocks them both. Audiard says he never noticed the similarities; it was his editor who pointed them out. But it is this inquisitiveness about his characters' inner lives that really marks Audiard out as a director. For a long time regarded as essentially a crime guy, a modern Jean-Pierre Melville (perhaps due to his predilection for spiffy trilby hats and a pipe), Audiard looks very much like a director with a yen for intense, emotional romances. "Maybe it's a problem of vocabulary – 'crime' is perhaps too specific a term for what I do."

Be that as it may, you would have thought Audiard would be a natural candidate for a Hollywood – or at least an English-language – transfer, like so many of his French colleagues, with varying degrees of success: everyone from Renoir and Truffaut to Besson and Audiard's former star Mathieu Kassovitz have tried it. The Beat That My Heart Skipped cleverly aligned him with the cultier end of 70s American cinema; and Rust and Bone, after all, could easily have been a boutique Hollywood production, with an Oscar-winning lead. But Audiard remains wary; partly, his sketchy English makes it a tad tricky; and partly he genuinely seems to prefer the unploughed pastures of his homeland. "If you open the door of a boxing gym in Brooklyn, you know what is behind it. You've seen it 200 times, in 200 films. If you open it in Antibes, it's all new. There is curiosity. Had we set set it in America, it would be a kind of cliche, somehow. You need something to say about the place where you make films. I know Europe. The US I don't know so well. I need a film that sees something, like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest did for Milos Forman. It makes it worth the trip."

@Guardian

by: Andrew Pulver