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

[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.