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| date | 2000-12-16:00:14 |
| SelfConciousness |
Physical nudity has never been a big thing for me, which is odd because it was where I grew up. But I've done enough stuff since that it's no big deal--the open showers in the dry at Creighton Mine take a couple of hundred people, and a shift or two there rapidly erodes any concern about modesty, but even before that it was not big deal. But the spiritual nudity of an artist is a bit more difficult, and involves different kinds of vulnerabilities. This is the role of an artist's Muse: to laugh with him rather than at him when she sees how small his spiritual penis is. |
| Movies |
On a friend's advice, I watched Good Will Hunting. She said it saved her from having a huge fight with her husband, as it lead to fruitful and productive talk about the value of following your dreams. It's a film I've avoided for a long time, because I thought it would cut to close to the bone. Although my family was well off, I grew up in a grotty little town up the hind end of nowhere, the South Boston of Canada. Will Hunting probably would not have had the friends he did. Those people would have recognized him as "other" in a moment, and he would have been their enemy. I didn't think about that while watching the film, though--it is my way to immerse myself in the story, in the characters, however implausible they may be. Real life, after all, has far more implausibilities than any film. I cried my eyes out during the scene where Sean, the psychologist, is telling Will over and over again that it's not his fault. It is his fault--he knows it. He's responsible. That's what children believe. And sometimes adults wind up believing it too. The awful responsibility of Will's gift in the modern era of destructive technology is treated too lightly, at least for my taste. Sure he turns down the NSA, but there's no suggestion of the tension the offer must create in him. We never see what drives him, which must at some level be the desire to know, and organizations like the NSA could provide him with opportunities to do stuff he never could do otherwise. It has to be a temptation for him--it's a temptation to all of us, with the back cabinets of our minds full of ideas we decided not to bring out into the light of day for fear of what would be done with them. So my feelings about the film are mixed, although any film that makes me cry has to be counted as a good one. |
| Play |
The Winter concert at the kid's school was a great success. This is the first year that Alex really got into the singing--he finds the whole thing a bit overwhelming. And Tim's inaugural performance was great. The grade 4-5 class did a play entitled "Gilgamesh: A Story of Friendship" that was actually pretty true to the original, although it was kind of ironic having them do what has come down to us as essentially an Assyrian story, via the library of Ashurbanipal, during Hannuka, which celebrates the victory of the Jews, lead by Jacob Maccabees, over the Assyrian invaders (and, to an extent, their Jewish collaborators.) Given the setting as a children's play, they managed to avoid the scene in which Enkidu spends seven days having sex with a temple prostitute. |