as i sit in my current favorite coffee shop, around the corner from where i now live (for another week or two at least), my mind is besieged with the regular rise in tide of my stream of consciousness that flows from consuming new information. not just any information i suppose, but that which is delivered in well written and insightful style.
i will begin by praising the well written word. it will be a sad day indeed when newspapers disappear into the void of the internet, and not only because my eyes would much rather read from paper than from the screen before me now. i recall an interview in which colbert pointed out that the times gives us yesterdays news today. we do indeed live in a time where any/all news is immediately pumped intravenously into us via the internet, but i for one find myself drinking from the proverbial fire hose at times. how can we possibly keep up with it all. but, it is not the sheer volume of information that i am choosing against...it is the quality. do i want to read hundreds of news blurbs tweeted by the masses? not really. i find that i would much rather take in a handful of well written, engaging articles that someone has actually spent time reflecting on, the ones that really make me think, than overburden myself trying to consume all of the information that floods my screen.
amusingly it was an article about the writer john keats that brought me to this thought. a well written piece about a poet, or the movie about him more precisely. or, to be even more precise, about the filmmaker and the sexuality of the movie. sex? yes...and no. the movie is rated pg, so no, but, our reviewer observes, "a sequence in which, fully clothed, the couple trades stanzas of “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” in a half-darkened bedroom must surely count as one of the hottest sex scenes in recent cinema." which brings me to my first thought: in a consumer world of continuous overstimulation i love the idea that what is not seen can be as powerful, if not more-so, that what is. further (and the statement that really got me), “(the movie) could easily have become a dark, simple fable of repression, since modern audiences like nothing better than to be assured that our social order is freer and more enlightened than any that came before. But Fanny and Keats are modern too, and though the mores of their time constrain them, they nonetheless regard themselves as free." that, both the writer and the filmmaker, while not overlooking its flaws, don't dismiss the social norms of the time as backwards, uninformed, etc. is, to me, very refreshing. i'm not saying we have it all wrong, but since, as was stated, we live in a society that indeed loves to feel as if it has everything right, and is more enlightened than those that came before, it is encouraging to see here a gentle skepticism and critique of self which rarely shows through in our generation.
to sum up, be it excessive information or excessive skin, good art trumps every time. taking time to craft something, to say what it is you have to say, and to do it well, makes all the difference. but in a world that has trained itself/us to say more more more, faster faster faster, quantity over quality, go go go, it is ever harder to do, and quite hard to take the time to find. so, i am glad to have stumbled upon these thoughts today.
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Wednesday, September 16, 2009
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