The Complex Christ | Signs of Emergence

There Was No Blood | Religion and Identity

Not the most romantic of movies, but we went to see There Will Be Blood last night. It's a terrific movie. If you haven't yet seen it, do. No matter how big your plasma screen, you'll need to see this one on the big screen.

Oil, Crude and Spiritual, are the two things two men are drilling for. Boring down into dangerous fissures within themselves and their communities, risking explosion and hurt to those around them. Daniel Day Lewis' extraordinary performance as Daniel Plainview, and Paul Dano's equally good one as revivalist revelation cult leader Eli Sunday are full of gutteral, primordial sounds, helped along by Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood's score.

No matter how deep they dig, and what riches they bring themselves - crude or spiritual - it's real blood that they both know are absent. Plainview's 'son' is simply an orphan he took on, the brother that finds him a fraud, and the blood of Jesus that Sunday screams for never materialises into grace. There may be oil and wealth, but there is no blood, no family blood to root one of them, none of God's blood to save either. And so they fight and drill deeper into darker places.

This is, of course, a film about the American identity: a country built on escape from back-slidden families, a new puritan world with opportunities for all. A country built on, and sustained by, oil. Yet, it seems, a country at sea in its own quest for identity, for real history. As an outsider it seems the US is, more than elsewhere, a country in search of blood. Family blood - desperately trying to cling on to Scottish, Irish, African, Spanish heritage - and God's blood - desperately trying to divine Christ's blood to purify all the soiled ground beneath everyone's feet.

And, in the final instance, as in the film, there is blood. There always will be. In the madness of the consuming search for God's blood and our family's blood, we strike out and wound the other. If we get blood-fever, like Gold or Oil Fever, then blood we will find. Violent, painful and destructive. The same blood lust that wounded Christ.

Grace needs no drilling, no violence to the earth or the body. Instead, it seeps into us if we will seek the peace and silence to simply wait for it. Only then will it, in the mystery of the elements, become blood, binding us to God and our brother, allowing a gentle security of identity to take root.

Technorati: American | Grace | There Will Be Blood | Violence

His Dark Materials | PowerReligion

Andrew Jones posted yesterday about the imminent release of the first film of the Philip Pullman trilogy 'His Dark Materials'. (Why the hell has is been re-named? Durrr.... ) In the post he leans to siding with Matt Barber, who has written that Pullman's anti-theist stance is a strong theme, and thus Christians should avoid the films.

The other weekend my dad asked me my response to the same question - he'd had a very strong email from an Australian campaigner saying Christians should be actively boycotting the movie and protesting about it.

I totally disagree.

The books are a 'rich casket of treasures' - for children and adults alike. And, while one reading might be a strongly atheistic view, I think that Pullman is more interested in critiquing the 'power religion' exemplified by historic Catholicism and institutional Anglicanism. The villains of the book - though this is apparently watered down in the film - are the members of the 'Magisterium', the paranoid and power-mad government of religion, who fight to close down free thought and cut off children's souls to gain power for themselves.

And I have to agree with him. It's clearly powerful stuff, but no more cutting than Jesus' critique of the Pharisees as 'white-washed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but inside are full of shit.' I heard Pullman in conversation with Rowan Williams, and was struck how both were egged on by 'fundies' on their own side... but both resisted their encouragements to slam the other. Indeed, Pullman admitted to being struck by the character of Christ, and said he was writing about him.

If we try to protect our faith from criticism like this, we seal it from the tricksters, and prevent it from being refined. If we truly believe it, we should allow our children to see the film, and trust that the truth will out. If we begin protests on things like this, don't we risk end up jailing people who let kids name their teddies Jesus? I hope the God believe in is more robust than that.

As I quote in the book, the trilogy ends with the hero Lyra, having 'killed God' urging people to 'work hard, all of us, to build the republic of heaven.' I think this is a fabulous metaphor: heaven as republic takes the power away from the high-and-mighty pompous white men who try to keep the gates closely guarded for only their own pure few. And that's something I can definitely cheer for.

Technorati: Golden Compass | Pullman | Northern Lights

He Who Gets Slapped

A strange and beautiful weekend.

We were down in Bristol, seeing some good friends. In one of those marvellous moments, I found myself taking the complimentary tickets of a multi-Oscar-winning animator to see the World Premier of the new score to the 1920's classic He Who Gets Slapped.

Will Gregory, of Goldfrapp fame, had written the score, which was performed to a projection of the film by the BBC Concert Orchestra, with a little help from Adrian Utley of Portishead and others.

It was brilliant. The emotional depth that music added to the silent film was stunning. And the film is simply brilliant too. Produced in 1924 - MGM's first production, and thus the first ever use of the lion in the intro - it had some wonderful 'special effects', and a rich and complex story about a cheated scientist who becomes a clown. I highly recommend catching it if you get the chance.

A friend and I turned our phones back on afterwards to be greeted with a whole host of missed calls and texts. My daughter had broken her leg. Slap.

Eels | Quantum Physics | Many Worlds | Meaning

A quite brilliant piece of TV on BBC 4 tonight. Worth the license fee on its own, Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives traced the journey of Eels front-man Mark Everett uncovering the life of his father, the eminent physicist Hugh Everett III. Everett Snr, in a radical challenge to the Quantum Mechanical orthodoxy of the day, proposed his 'Many Worlds Interpretation', in which parallel universes split off at each moment of decision. Derided at the time, he became depressed and withdrawn. He died young, and Mark's mother and sister followed soon after, his sister taking her own life, writing in her suicide note that she was 'going to find her father in one of his parallel universes.' He was a hidden man, who rarely spoke at home. It was only a few years before his death that his theory was finally accepted; it is only through this documentary that Mark discovers just how important a figure in science his father was.

And, strangely, I wrote a poem about Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation a few weeks ago. Which it seems timely to put here, and add to the probably already huge canon of poetic works on the subject ;-)

Perhaps I Prefer The Inefficiencies of This Universe
To The Cold Efficiency of Your Myriad Others

Relativity,
Two clocks moving apart
At light speed never separate
And, in time, are forever together.

Yes, Albert,
As soon as you Equalled the product of m and c-squared,
You locked us in:
No information shall travel faster than light,
Yes, our infinity, given a limit:
46.5 billion light years
To the edge
Of us.

But you are there, and I here,
And strangely, from each centre elsewhere,
A new spacetime arcs out,
Socking the eye with an infinite number of
Observable universes.

And thus, inevitably, an infinite number of you.

Some mother said I was unique, but now
A father’s physics wants me to believe in
Another me,
Beginning 10 to the 10
to the 29 metres far away.
Too far, and yet too close,
For my comfort.

Quantum physicist,
Hugh Everett III, what have you done?
“The existence of other universes
is inevitable”
Said your Many Worlds Interpretation,
Which denied too the objective reality
Of wavefunction collapse.

And I’m like, WTF?

You go on:
“Between 0 and 1:
A single random number
With all its infinite decimals,
Is expressed, computationally,
Longer
Than
The computational expression
Of the whole set of numbers
That exist there.”

Meaning?

Apparently this:
A universe of infinite parallels
May be more economic
Than a straight, linear,
Singular
One.

Meaning?

Somewhere you and I are together,
Though, in this universe, we are apart,
And somewhere else there are more in betweens
Than we could ever fathom.
And that may be more efficient
Than this.

And now my gourd is swirling,
Thinking,
What is love, and life and us,
Other than to trust in this membrane-thin world,
And chose to forego
In the infinite possibility
Of the efficient multiverse,
And dig long
And deep
For life,
And love,
In this
One?

Technorati: Eels | Parallel Universe | Everett

In The Shadow of The Moon

In The Shadow Of The Moon is a magnificent movie. No voice-over. No animation. No mock-ups. Just archive footage, and interviews with the Apollo astronauts. It's stunning as a film, stunning to be reminded of perhaps the single greatest technological feat of mankind, and stunning to be reminded - in a way Gore never quite achieves in AIT - that the earth really is immensely precious. Armstrong's continued absence from any documentary - literary or on film - only serves to add mystery to an already ethereal and epiphanic event. He was the first to step out onto another world; what God whispered to him before leaving for someplace else he will continue to keep to himself.

If, you're in London, you'll have to catch it soon, as it's been on a scandalously limited release. If you miss it, buy the DVD, with the largest screen you can lay your hands on. Or, better still, read Andrew Smith's 'Moondust' - which very likely inspired the film.

Technorati: Al Gore | Andrew Smith | In The Shadow of The Moon | Moondust | Neil Armstrong

Once...

is a wonderful film which I can't recommend highly enough. Dublin. A busker. A Czech pianist, selling roses on the street to scrape a living. Not a great deal else. Subtle, simple film-making hung around wonderful music.

Go see now.

Technorati: Once | Dublin

Helvetica: The Movie

Just what everyone has been waiting for: a well kerned, beautifully cut doc about the world's most ubiquitous greatest font. Helvetica. Showing at the ICA

Anyone up for a pilgrimage?

Technorati: Helvetica | ICA

Another Day with the Soliton Geek Show

Technorati: Pete Rollins | Higgins | Russinger

Violence in the Movies

So, I have just ducked out of the fine weather - lovely Ventura sunshine and cool ocean breeze - to see The Bourne Ultimatum with Dr's Huggins and Rolly-mo.

The Great Huggster describes himself as a film buff. Which, I think, means he watches films in the buff. As if this information isn't violence enough to our consciousness, the film was very violent.

But that's OK because, as Peter Rolly-Mo has it, this was politically sensitive violence. And 'we're all dead anyway'. His middle name isn't Jason for nothing. In our identity-fluid times, this sort of violent entertainment can actually sensitize us to the world's problems. Who are we? Why are guns with video cameras just so alluring? Why does the guy never seem to get more than only a little bit hurt?

With the hand-held camera work it was hard to tell. And apparently it's not the end of the series. Which worries me. What worries me more is having to spend 4 more days with these Irish nychtophiliacs. Like the Belfast drama group they are both associated with, they love the dark. Help.

Technorati: Ikon

Tales of Two Buildings::Two Cities::The Divine Vision

Mika Brzezinski recently refused to lead with a story about P@&i$ Hi%ton over the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In a similar vein, Wired reported in 'A Tale of Two Cities' that a trawl of the web revealed more interest in the iPhone than the recent triple-attempted bombing on London and Glasgow.

Celebrity::Security::Gossip::War :: These are all the hallmarks found branded on the urban belly. We'd be foolish to try to pare them. London wouldn't expect us to stop and stare in the face of car bombs. Crowds and spectacles, criminality and terrorism. Londinium's clay has been trodden on and burnt by them for millennia. It's a wise and rooted place.

On Thursday and Friday I was fortunate enough to see the resurrection of two of the city's iconic buildings:

Gravity and Grace (2) | Leaving the orbit of a large Mass

In the last post, about Herzog's new(ish) film The Wild Blue Yonder, I mentioned that much of the footage was shot on a Space Shuttle mission. From the haircuts it looks early '90s. May be even earlier. That or NASA have some serious fashion issues hanging over.

Going into space has always been a huge dream of mine. Given the opportunity to do just one thing in life, I'd chose going to the moon. No argument. Shame it'll never happen.

The experience of weightlessness is beautifully communicated in Wild Blue Yonder. Astronauts go to sleep in sleeping bags on the walls. Except, of course, there are no walls. Wall, floor and ceiling only make sense with gravity. In zero gravity these axes disappear. There is no sensible Cartesian system. No up or down. The 'special relativity' of earth gives way to the 'general relativity' of the entire universe.

This is what happens when you leave the orbit of a large mass. You lose it's gravity, but escape into some new grace. For a while many of us have circled the heavy institution of the church, considering an escape velocity, but always dragged back toward its centre. And I wonder if it's going to be soon time to jettison that aging planet, and find new orbits entirely. It may be a long and strange journey, in some weird and wonderful craft. But it's one I feel we'll have to make. Leave the sterilized, artificial atmospheres of the 'special case', and jump into the general relativity of the Universe in its hugeness.

Or...

Technorati: Einstein | Herzog | NASA | Gravity | Relativity | Shuttle | Wild Blue Yonder

Gravity and Grace (1) ¦ Wild Blue Yonder ¦ Living Between Two Oceans

Last night I went with my good friend and doctor of film Gareth Higgins to see Werner Herzog's latest film 'The Wild Blue Yonder'.

It's a deeply comic, deeply environmental parable about space travel, aliens, shopping malls, complex math and hyperspace. And quite wonderful for it.

Speaking to Gareth afterwards, I mentioned that the path of the film reminded me very much of the wonderful children's book 'Penguin Dreams' in which Chongo Chingi flies into the air, and goes so high through space that he pops out back through the surface of his pool. Herzog uses the same trick in this movie: footage from a Space Shuttle mission is cut with mathematicians describing the theory of 'chaotic travel' to other galaxies... the 'astronauts' are then seen diving into this new world as the footage switches to incredible shots of divers exploring waters beneath an ice cap.

The metaphor is, I think, a beautiful one. As humans we live at the interface between two oceans: the seas below, and the 'ocean of the air' above. The tallest human construction is only a few hundred metres tall. Relative to the size of the planet, even Everest is only a minor imperfection; scaled down, Earth is smoother than a billiard ball.

We are, in many ways, but a minor irritant on the surface of the planet. And it will scratch us off with no thought unless we learn to live in peace. The dream of zooming off to another planet is satirized by Herzog very well here. It ain't going to happen. If it could have, aliens would have taken our fine earth by now. They tried. But no one came to shop for their trinkets.

It's a great film with some incredible footage and wonderful music, and reminded me very much of another environmental meditation, Baraka. What is particularly striking are the disorientating shots of zero-gravity living, and the parallels between floating in space, and floating under the ocean. But more of that in the next post.

 

Technorati: Wild Blue Yonder | Herzog | Penguin Dreams | Environment | Ocean | NASA | Space

CCTV ¦ The All-Seeing (soc)i(ety) ¦ Faceless

The other day I was walking along our high street when I saw this 'mobile CCTV'... tank parked up. They were snapping, so I thought it only polite to reciprocate.

It seems we've totally resigned ourselves to being discreetly observed at all times. Speed cameras, CCTV, Congestion Charge cameras... I the novel I've been working on I talk about a 'black atlas' of London, plotting the routes you could drive without being filmed. I'm not sure you could get 200 feet any more.

Teaching a class of 12 and 13 year olds the other day I asked them, in the context of a debate about terrorism and security, whether they thought CCTV everywhere was an infringement of their civil liberties. Initially most of them thought it wasn't. It was 'a good thing, to stop crime and terrorists.' Of course, we then began to discuss what sort of level of filming one would need to really achieve this, and it basically boiled down to Big Brother: someone watching everyone's every move.

We're not far off. This evening on the news there was an item about drone planes being deployed in the near future to track terror and crime suspects. I for one would have a shot at one if I saw one ;-)

Which brings me to the excellent piece about Manu Luksch - an Austrian film maker who has created 'Faceless', a film shot entirely from CCTV footage of herself she has obtained under freedom of information legislation. Predictably, many were very unwilling to give it, despite clear guidelines for speed and cost of delivery of the images. It's a step up from the Dogme 95 manifesto: the Manifesto for CCTV Film Makers is an even harder taskmaster. But one that I think is highly relevant for these strange times.

Technorati: CCTV | Terror | Faceless | Dogme | Luksch

The [Other] Lives of Others

I'll add my praise to the fantastic debut feature 'The Lives of Others'. It really is a remarkable film.

For those of you who haven't seen it, it follows the story of a Stasi Officer assigned to bug and follow the life of a writer under suspicion in 1980's East Germany. Through what he overhears about the lives of others, his own life is turned around. In short, literature and music are his salvation, his guides to self discovery.

It is incredible to think that all this was going on just a few years ago and not so many miles away. The French had their WW2 resistance, the Spanish their civil war, the Italians their own troubles. We in Britain have been spared any such strange goings on: governments listening in to your every move, networks of informants, phone taps and systemic distrust.... Or we had until recently.

I was fortunate enough to end up going to see the film with my sister, who happened to bring along a house-mate who actually grew up in East Berlin at precisely this time. Chatting afterwards - he absolutely loved the film - what was interesting was his suggestion about what the film had shied away from.

"The Stasi were petrified of two things, really: capitalism and the Catholic church. It was being a Christian that really made you a threat to the authorities."

He has first-hand experience: two brothers both locked up for years for trying to escape to the West. Both of them having their freedom mysteriously 'bought' after 9 months in jail by the West Germans, and taken in. He still has no idea who paid for these 'undesirables' to be taken off the FDR's hands, in exchange for some much-needed cash, but he thinks a group of West German Christians raised the money.

What is interesting then, is that the locus of irritation and salvation is shifted in the film. Art saves, not religion. Art is politically challenging, religion isn't. No mention is made of faith at all in the 163 minutes. This isn't the fault of the film-maker; he had a story and has told it brilliantly. But, as my sister's friend said yesterday, there are still some equally extraordinary stories of redemption and persecution to come out of that time. Who will tell them?

Technorati: Catholic | Religion | Stasi | The Lives of Others

Long Live The Queen

I'll add my congratulations to Helen Mirren for her Oscar win last night. I thought the film was fantastic, primarily because it exhibited 'the miracle of restraint'. It would have been too easy to go for money shots of Princes William and Harry grieving their mother's death. As it was, you never even saw their faces.

At a guess, I'd predict that most in the emerging church movement are more naturally liberal than traditionalist, perhaps more anti- than pro-monarchy. I'm not.

Am I a flag-waving Unionist who stands for the National Anthem? Do I think there's some divine right of succession? That the Windsors are somehow better than the rest of us? That power hierarchies are good? No. But I also don't see any other practicable system working in any other nation. Does the current system do our democracy any harm? I don't think so. Quite the reverse: to have a - albeit nominal now - totally independent figurehead who the Prime Minister's government has to report to, and who has the right to refuse to sign into law any bill, is a strong and robust checking mechanism.

We may not believe the Queen has a divine right to rule. But, as the film suggests, the fact that she might think she has means she takes her role very very seriously. Unlike the fly-by-night Alistair Campbells and Cherie Blairs of this world. And it is essentially a benign system. It isn't broke; let's not whip ourselves to fix it. As a Spanish dignitary once said when asked if he thought the monarchy should be replaced, "It would make as much sense as getting rid of the tigers in London Zoo. They are toothless, and the tourists love them."

Technorati: Helen Mirren | Monarchy | Oscars | Britishness | The Queen

Loving Thy Neighbour: Out of Great Silence?

I've just returned from seeing Into Great Silence - a documentary by Philip Gröning about the Grande Chartreuse monastery, one of the most aescetic in the world.

I am a huge documentary fan, and this is a truly wonderful film. The mix of HD digital and Super 8 footage, the all-natural light, with no crew allowed, and no commentary and no soundtrack... It really immerses you in the life of the monks, just as Gröning did himself, having been granted permission to film 16 years after his first request.

It is a long film - and one always has to forgive documentary makers for this given that they really only get one shot at it. Another film will not be made here for perhaps another 50 years, so it deserves our long attention.