Christmas Lights

Home made card. The spirit of 2009 is for a return to our artistic culture. Speaking for ourselves. Listening to others. Not 'popular'. Just personal taste for sharing with others.

10.00 am. Today it is very cold and frosty and the fog is lying around the edge of the village. I am looking out from the height of my front study, pushing my legs against the radiator for warmth and checking that the cars are running safely on the icy lane out of the village. No one is outside all wrapped up in cheery scarves and gloves at the bus stop across the road. It is so cold that even the most doughty grandma and child is waiting for the possibility of some warm sun before heading to the village shop. Sun will not come. The forecast is for snow, if not today, then for sure tomorrow. So the accountant and I have just put the wire of plain clear twinkly lights out of a house window and on to the shrub border that lies alongside the path to the front door. We are subdued in our taste. However, our neighbour spouts a different combination of coloured flash – this year he has outlined the roof line of his car shelter roof in reds and greens. We had to be bullied into doing this a few years ago by our younger daughter. She of Mother Christmas tendencies, and themed party giving from an early age. But it is welcoming to have the lights at Christmas. And kind. It looks particularly special in the snow, like little stars in a white blanket of cloud. I look forward to the effect tomorrow.

Professor James R Flynn

Otago University Library - as it is now, but the tables are from the original building. I could comment further, but I think I have left enough clues today.

I was taught political philosphy by Jim Flynn at Otago university in the late 1970s, when he was first researching and writing about Race and IQ. He is Chicago trained, one of the brightest people I know, and went on the Freedom Rides down in the American South in the 1960s. It is easy to guess why he was hiding out in a New Zealand University - and has remained there, and he is not the only one from the Cold War period.

Flynn taught our Honours class to do statistical analysis, which as Political Studies students in the days when real money was still spent on large scale social science research about voters actions, was a skill we were thought to require. As we were mostly word orientated arty types, maths scared us, and he was incredibly patient, so the Standard Deviations have never scared me since. His first year Political Philosophy class in contrast, was a baptism of reading the original philosphical writers from Aristotle to R M Hare, and writing essays every week, marked by a post-graduate tutor. I loved it, and carried on, most of the 300 strong class did not survive. Flynn was recently on Channel 4 in a series about race and discrimination talking about just how far the research which he was starting then has gone to counter the crazy racial prejudices of the inherently selfish. The idea that discussing ethical issues as the 'ideal' or the 'object', rather than theoretical metaphysics of logic, was his cue to training us to 'check the evidence' as the correct basis for any political stance. It is good to remember that Marx was an economist as well as a social theorist, turning over huge books of collected figures in the British Library.

Correct attitudes in statistical interpretation has been brought out by the latest Climate change and academic science brouha. I was a young political ecologist activist as well in those days. I have no doubt that the figures are hardly conclusive, but it is important that they are kept - even if it is 200 years before any sense is made of them. The problem is always what I like to call the Doomsday scenarios. From religion to insurance salesmen - lets have a single 'bogey man' tactic. Rising sea levels is a strong image. Pollution on its own is bad enough. But in an age when hours in the British Library is not the only way to share information, academics can't cower in their institutional isolation any more than the politicians can. If you have to defend your work to the educated masses as well as the intimates of the learned cloisters, that is as it should be, even from the University of East Anglia.

Flynn is a Distinguised Associate of the Psychometrics Centre of Cambridge University, where he is described as a psychologist. His son Victor is a professor of Mathematics at Oxford, and did his PHD at Cambridge, after an undergraduate degree at Otago.

Brazilan Art and film - Helio Oiticica

My own picture of the police at the G8 protest, London, April 2009. The shock of the middle classes when the police fail to show respect. I had to use all my 'schoolmarm' powers on a police officer to escape the 'kettle tactics'. The orders were clearly based on a fear of a much more aggressive demonstration than was actually happening.

Event this week.

Dr Karl Posso
Department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American StudiesUniversity of Manchester

Suspended Animation: Affect and Affection in Tropicalist Brazil

This paper will examine the central function of the affective image and object in a
selection of works by ‘Cinema Novo’ filmmaker Glauber Rocha (1939-1981) and the
neo-concrete artist Hélio Oiticica (1937-1980) produced during Brazil’s ‘Tropicalist’
period of cultural experimentation in the late 1960s. The concern with social and
political issues at the time of the military dictatorship led Rocha and Oiticica to
attempt to displace conventional knowledge and recognition in order to develop
artistic modes for intervening ethically in the world. Affection in their work becomes
less a question of what is represented – transcendent ideals – and more a case of
violent sensation, a means of interrupting action-reaction circuits: this shift towards
the affective suspension of representation, and of judgement, in/by their work, I
argue, functions as a timely event of ethical intensity.

A paper to be given on Thursday at Cambridge University, and which I would like to hear…

But I have 2 preliminary thoughts. One is that this particular combination of filmmaker and artist was featured at the Tate Modern in 2007, and one of my concerns then about the published work on Oiticica in particular was the arguement that as an artist he was a 'universalised' creative, and not influenced directly by thinking about the poverty problems around him until later in his career. He was not the only Brazilian in the late 1950s to change direction on this - and most important was the art critic, Ferreira Gullar, who had promoted Oiticica, but who became a poet, and went off to Recife to participate in Street Theatre and other direct action cultural work. But there was a French PHD student in Art History from Manchester University speaking at the Tate Modern seminar, who I hope has learned more about the sitituation in Brazil since then. Manchester has some good Brazilian academics in post. Oiticica's work is placed in the care of Texas University, which also has other Brazilian artists work. I am not sure it serves them well if it excludes the environment in which the work was created. Brazil needs this material in its own institutions.

The second point is that I feel by working from the artistic work, to the restrictive event (the didatura) to the change in focus as 'ethical' it ignores signs in the artistic production prior to 1964 - and Glauber Rocha was radical from the begining. My own work with the artistic influences on Joao Cabral de Melo Neto, who was critically interpreted as following an intellectual art appreciation of Miro - image - poem, rather than thinking what images and politics did Cabral instinctively use as a man from Recife, and place in his work. The phrase 'misleading ideas' is much more subtle when, even more than 'tropicalia', the idea of hiding radical truths about Brazilian society in learned cultural discourse of internationalised art is engaged. Of course Cabral had to be 'politically protected' in the Diplomatic Service. The colour idea is key - has Posso picked up on that I wonder. Well I don't mind if my own ideas turn out to be the same as everyone else. I am sure that as a professor, Karl will be much better able to express himself than I can.

I had another quotation that I have been keeping in reserve in thinking about aesthetics of poverty.


"..only what is repressed is symbolised; only what is repressed needs to be symbolised" .


This is apparently from Ernest Jones (1916) who was a contemporary of Freud in Vienna - I don't know the original source, this is in Freud for beginners (1979) p 173. I expect it relates to dreams, not politics.

One last Brazilian puzzle for today. The significance of the 'yellow mercedes' in Clarice Lispector's The hour of the star. Discuss in relation to the 'yellow mercedes' in Amarelo Mango.

Looking for writing peace

Tomorrow I go to the British Library to read: Chaves, Irma. A traição da linguagem : uma análise da poesia de Carlos Pena Filho. No funding to study, so I will be doing it by myself.

Other thoughts. An article about the film District 9 by my friend Alfredo Suppia.
Alfredo teaches cinema at UFJF in Brazil.

Connections to City of Men and Blindness. I don't like Science Fiction. AT ALL. I grew up in a house full of my father's collections of magazines and stories and typed personal sightings - he was a member of the local UFO society in the 1950s and 1960s. I hate the pornographic element of that era of Sci-fi. But the political implications of these recent films, is as Alfredo is pointing out, a matter of some deep seated fears of other people in the mass. Especially in Brazil as Rio now has to consider what to do about the divisions in that city before it becomes an Olympic unity. Discuss. Alfredo presented a paper about the film City of Men at a Leeds University World Cinema conference in 2007. There is some academic writing about the film which was made by the Mexican director Alfonso Cuaron for Universal as having a different concept to the very English work of PD James who wrote the book. It revolves around questions of aesthetics, politics and ways of representation. Here is my essay on the matter.....

Blindness which is based on a book by Jose Saramago, the Nobel prize winning Portuguese writer, which has had a similar discussion of the differences when the film maker (The Brazilian Fernando Merielles) has an apparantly different agenda. District 9 has South Africa ( Neill Blomkamp) and New Zealand (Peter Jackson). I know that race agendas in these two countries have a different history in some ways.

At the same time I bought the DVD of De Battre mon coeur s'est arrete (The Beat that my heart skipped (Romain Durais,2005)) which is set in contemporary Paris. I first saw it at the Arts Cinema in Cambridge. It has very specific points about identity and migration and talent to make, as a 'remake' of an older film called Fingers (1978) - about piano playing in actuality. Ironic as I now find I have a genetic condition where my heart does indeed 'skip' beats.

So an older question currently in my mind is the ability of personalised fictional story versus the more mass movement 'action' sort of story - a bit ying and yang of the range of story telling - to make similar points about the reaction of contemporary society to the issues of how others live and how threatening we might find that. Or indeed the prejudices and assumptions of our own experience as to what the 'genre' description might promise us as 'entertainment' or 'enlightenment'. I am also considering a book Filmosophy by Daniel Frampton alongside all this.

How much does what we 'think' we are going to see and learn affect what we think a film is about. We are conditioned by critical reviews that concentrate on plot, on the actors, on the director, on the location, on the 'genre', on the cinematic visuality. There are other ways we 'read' film on a personal enjoyment level. I saw very little film or television in that same house of my childhood. So my readings are not conditioned by years of exposure to all kinds of filmic experience. Each film I see is selected to suit my own formed prejudices and I won't waste time 'gazing' at things that don't interest me. Possibly a more obscure critical view that does not relate to those used to seeing a lot of visual entertainment. I don't know. And I don't have the time to replace 50 years of 'not knowing' about that kind of infiltration of the senses. So my film 'philosophy' might be very different from the next person. Or no two people see it the same. But they try to bond over shared 'likes' and 'dislikes' in media. Or at least the young do. A very powerful marketing tool for media as we all know. My own younger daughter was, and is, addicted to Science Fiction. From Buffy to District 9. But she did not read the latter film in the same way that I did. And it is not just the fact that I went to South Africa as a teenager when it was still under apartheid and have experience of the vast favelas of Brazil as well. She has a degree in philosophy from the University of Kent. Where they study this kind of thing.

This interesting interview with the director of District 9, Neill Blomkamp, shows how he attributes film and visual and graphic effects as his learning inspiration. The political side, as he admits, is much less knowingly absorbed as an influence, even as a child growing up with apartheid. A lot of film directors seem to have that awareness of visual language first, and story-boarding films comes out of that idea of how the film will look on the screen before all else. I call it the 'squared' effect - making boundaries first. Graphic or digitised films show this even more as the 'artificial' aesthetic strictures make quite limited visual shows. I am going to see the No ghost just a shell exibition of an Manga character called Annlee by two french artists at the Tate Modern again tomorrow just to check on this.

Back to the jigsaw of life

I come back to Knowing after a long gap. I stopped because it all got too personal and I switched to daily 'blog drafts' which remain locked in my computer.
But to summarise, the personal comprised health issues, for which I am now waiting for a second operation at Papworth Hospital in Cambridgeshire. It also has the unexpected but delightful company of a granddaughter, the lovely serene Molly Ava, who lives 3 miles away and gives us all a reason to smile. It has expanded my places to write to 2 rooms upstairs, one on the cool back side of the house, and the other on the sunny front overlooking the whole village. The big Leylandi trees have been cut down for firewood and the autumn colours are just wonderful. I have stacks of apples in the kitchen waiting to be cut up and put in the freezer, which makes me seem much more domestic than I am. There is an uneasy truce around and a change afoot of which I can say no more.
I found this Australian lady finding herself in the very village and area in which I live, a rather different experience to my own, but very interesting to see your own surroundings from a different enquirying mind.
Lost in Arcadia

I am re-reading my battered old copy of Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire which I 'deselected' from the library I ran some years ago. That is because my studies are centering on a 'philosophy of development' at present - how does culture tackle the representation of poverty...and whose culture does it use, morally 'universalise' and all that kind of stuff.

My most recent film - 2 actually, 1 documentary and 1 fiction at the Barbican annual Brazilian Film Festival, run each year by Adriana Rouanet (PHD student at Kings College, London). The theme this year was Urban Tales. Both the films featured a story 'within' a story. Jardim Angela was a documentary of youngsters in Sao Paulo making their own films with professional help, and followed the story they devised and the most talkative member of the team as he expressed his experience and life in a gang. The second was Basic Sanitation (Saneamento Basico,2007) which I had been waiting sometime to see, which is a fictional story of a group of responsible young adults who make a very bad film about a monster (Actually ironically a kind of 'Creature of the Black Lagoon') because they cannot get the money for a sewage system which is needed for their village. It was a wicked ironic working of the 'system' in Southern Brazil by Jorge Furtado, who was there to answer questions afterwards. But it was the full audience that unwittingly caused a bigger laugh. Most Brazilians in London who come to events like this festival are young educated professionals and students, wealthy or middle class and from the South. (There are other Brazilians working in London in kitchens and cleaning and as we all know as electricians - the festival had a promotion for the Jean Charles Menezes film -but they do not go to this kind of event. )
One young lady congratulated Jorge on making a film about 'her Brazil' - expressing delight that it was not all the stuff about gangs and violence and poverty that the British think from the Brazilian films that are usually shown in the cinema here. Jorge made a comment on 'para ingleses ver', and then said he had been told the apopcrypal story that it is thought that the Queen of England thinks that the world smells of fresh paint, because where ever she visits that is what she can smell. It was such a wonderful and ironic response, when the real subject of his film was the inability of the Brazlian system to provide basic sanitation in a village that in other respects looked like Switzerland, much less for the crowded and disgusting hovels that are home to millions of much less privileged Brazilians. At one point in the film there is actually a discussion on how the smell of flowers can be replicated in a film at all - a very ironic point about the whole process of how film represents, or does not.
The English are not blind when they visit Brazil. What they can't understand is why the wealthy Brazilians they meet in London don't want to do anything about it but ring their hands, make films and collect money for charities. That is a little harsh. But you can see why it was funny in a black kind of way. I am sure Jorge Furtado will remember it. I amused myself by asking the young men next to me (Brazilian film students) if they thought the sequence of motorbike riding in the film was from a 'romantic 1950s chanchada'. They had the wit to ask Jorge what his influences were - he told them Billy Wilder. It was in fact a homage to Walter Salles film about Che - Motorcycle Diaries.