The end of lightness

[matrixmann]

In a dark age...

... why not let the darkness embrace you instead of practicing a happy-go-lucky culture?

Comments

[mandarinsun.livejournal.com]

I agree with you, but to answer as towards others motivation it is because the worst sin is to be not "liked" quoted from Facebook.

I think the smiling selfie guy that sells uzi's to terrorists is like an instance of the new face of evil. Evil used to be someone scowling, but now is someone that can't stop to consider what is moral and immoral and is only interested in pleasure and pleasing others.

[matrixmann]

I put this up in realization, during those times which seemed dark, desperate, it generated some of the brighter moments in human culture. Material that remains, that still is a footprint ten years later or even more.
If you take a look what culture generates now, you're not even sure if someone actually remembers a year later still. And what's what culture produces? Nothing edgily. Only stuff where mankind celebrates itself over nothing. Acute, loud, head-hurting, acting importantly, more importantly than it is, and missing honest engagement.

[mandarinsun.livejournal.com]

You must have seen that Slavoj Zizek one called The Pervert's Guide to Ideology. He is doing what structuralists like Roland Barthes were doing. They saw all current, or recent, films or tv shows as cultural content that a philosopher/critic could find subtexts for that tell a story about the current ideology of the time. So, the creator of The Sound of Music wasn't really consciously creating a movie that was very critical of organized religion, but it could be read or interpreted that way.

This can easily go to far and feminists make really awful readings of movies using this method, but it is an alternative way of potentially watching anything.

Try watching things with the sound off too.

I once read about a Buddhist master that came to the US and one of his meditations was to watch tv. If you have no emotional reaction to images it is just like a kaleidoscope of disconnected images.

[matrixmann]

Sure that is the case. Cultural left-behind works reflect the zeitgeist of the time they were created in.
Well, one musn't read it too strict, but what it gives you as an information e. g. is: Was belief more relevant in a time or not?
Were you allowed to be out as leftist or not? How about that stuff of male and female roles society?
Say, e. g. you notice the Disney corporation also must have had some more liberal times than now because how could series such as Dinosaurs or Gargoyles be made possible under that roof? (If one knows the serries or has seen some bits of it, you know they're not the typical stuff that Disney releases.)
Such things always come through if you count one and one together with it.

[mandarinsun.livejournal.com]

I think there are dozens of television series, made in the last twenty years, that are pretty to very good. Stuff like Breaking Bad, Penny Dreadful, Game of Thrones, Deadwood. A lot of the series made my HBO though maybe like twenty five percent of the series that are produced by them. There is a series based on the Phillip K Dick novel, the Man in the High Castle that Amazon Prime put out that I want to see.

New series like these have taken the place of the novel.

There are good movies like Philomena, Ex Machina, The Book Thief.

I share your general feeling in this post, but it is up to people to find meaning in things and just saying everything sucks means that you are guaranteed never to find anything you like.

A lot of the tv series nowadays that are long series that people watch multiple seasons of from the beginning to the end do seem like they are written by a team of writers that are looking for sensationalist ideas and a plot climax at the end of every episode that will drive ratings. But, this was how all of Dickens novels were done too, at least the part about written to have cliff hangers at the end of each part. They were published in weekly installments in newspapers.

There are some series that are great to look at and have good acting but don't really have much of a plot if you think about them too much like Penny Dreadful and Lost.

I think I can find things that are interesting if I look around and are a little forgiving.

Like Battlestar Galactica and American Horror Story have many bad parts, but have some really good parts too.

The problem with what you've said here is that you're guaranteeing that in the future you'll dislike everything. A lot of the techniques of film making are really good now. Even dumb films like this bad thing I saw where twenty somethings dive for treasure in the Bahamas last night for fifteen minutes before turning it off because the dialogue was insipid was great to look at.

Sometimes I feel like I can see a movie as part of the current cultural zeitgeist or moment and see something, like one scene, that is really profound saying something about the current human condition. At least, it's possible that it's there. The director of whatever might not even have thought about it much, but everything made currently or recently is like a future document of what it was like to live now.

That's an idea from structuralism of say Roland Barthes or Claude Levi Strauss or Theodor Adorno. They are all like cultural codes that can be deciphered many different ways.

[matrixmann]

Hm... I think that is just a mistake that people often get by me saying such things.
It's more like "humans, you bore me to death - just mind your own roots, take a look at it and you might find something that you can transport into content of these days which makes you do something different than the regular schemes by the text-book that each other keep influencing themselves with like awful incest".
Like a command to get a little dynamic into the stories and music being thought up and just not only remain with the stuff one can currently make a lot of money with.

[matrixmann]

Maybe I can also put that another way just by the example of this piece of blog.
Always talking about the same topic gets boring, so you don't try to repeat yourself. If I achieve to make that properly, I don't know, but I try my efforts. Reoccurring golden threads just may be possible as well, and this I wouldn't see a problem with that as it's just written by one entity.
But, what I definitely must keep up with is to always come up with something new. A new topic, music for or with a certain purpose, ways of writing, things that I see. In latter issue, I think it's best to pick things which people regularly don't notice - somehow I've also got a little talent in seeing them.
Because just - trying to copy another one's writing might not guide anyone here to me to have a talk.
Also, I think there's no group I can fit in, I don't have the mindset that suits to anything, so why acting like all the others and complaining about the same things that they do?
Besides, even though this is bluntly said "killing time", I rather prefer to try to give it a little meaning. Just not put anything out for the sake of putting anything out.
Even though I don't value my out-pourings too high or of any great significance to the world.