A still from Eija-Liisa Ahtila's quietly crazy The House
As this is the place of attempting to compile all things I do and some things I think, then why not finally start it off with the topic of creation.
Over the Christmas break, I spent a lot of time doing what felt like nothing, I mean, in comparison to the busyness of pre-holiday work and socializing and brain activity. Of course, I totally screwed myself over. Catching up on all the movies and tv I missed over the previous six months is not “nothing,” no matter how dumb they might be. They slow-burned and combined until they became one big movie about nothing less than death.
I yearned to get back to work, to go see and write about art and dance and weird performance art. Which I have done in the past few weeks. And it is all about death.
Maybe I was too happy in my early 20s. So now I’m obliged to do the armchair-philosophy existential shrug thing. Thinking it’ll be over by mid-February.
Not to say that I’m depressed or that all cultural and artistic output these days is depressing. No, a lot of what I’ve taken in recently has been inspiring and beautiful; this creation out of death. I don’t feel morose or dualistic, but everything has ultimately come down to an avoidance of death until it can’t be avoided, which isn’t sad, just very basic and a little boring. And absolutely true.
Take the new feature film Creation, for example, which I saw last week. Life and death, on grand and minor scales. I wrote about it here. As well as the multi-screen film art of Eija-Liisa Ahtila, which also travels its own paths through the question of not-existence.
In 2010, winter is rough and strange.
a poem about everything 