identity

Stuart Hall and the Rise of Cultural Studies

| Paul Greer

“Culture, after all, is a matter of constructing a relationship between oneself and the world. “People have to have a language to speak about where they are and what other possible futures are available to them,” he observed, in his 1983 lectures. “These futures may not be real; if you try to concretize them immediately, you may find there is nothing there. But what is there, what is real, is the possibility of being someone else, of being in some other social space from the one in which you have already been placed.” He could have been describing his own self-awakening.”

— Hua Hsu

 

“Brexicuted” by Chris Shepherd (2018)

Video | | Paul Greer

My old college friend and prolific animator and mentor, Chris Shepherd made this short film last year about the political issue currently dominating British politics at the expense of literally everything else.

Wherever you fall on the debate it’s pretty funny. I was lucky enough to see it last autumn at the Encounters film festival, but it is currently available on YouTube.

Posted here in celebration of Withdrawal Agreement Day in Parliament (haha!).

(You might have to click through to watch.)

Crash

Quote | | Paul Greer

“We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind—mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the preempting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary for him to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer’s task is to invent the reality.”

— J.G. Ballard

I Need My Pain

| Paul Greer

This Kirk talk was reminded to me from a previous post.

There is a definite theme here. Possibly against some of the perceived nullifying effects of old school psychotherapy?

For some reason, though, in my head it happened in TOS and Kirk was pretty much talking to himself, resisting effects of a creature that had come onboard and was removing all psychological trauma of the crew. Kirk was the last. It was one of those episode where Spock turns into a hippy.

Can anyone confirm this?

1975, talking to Michael Sragow, then the film critic for the San Francisco Examiner.

Quote | | Paul Greer

“I think we all have this little theatre on top of our shoulders, where the past and the present and our aspirations and our memories are simply and inexorably mixed. What makes each one of us unique is the potency of the individual mix.

“We can make our lives only when we know what our lives have been. And drama is about how you make the next moment. It’s like when you’re watching a sporting event, like a soccer game here; when it’s going on, you don’t know what’s going to happen. But all the rules are laid down.

“I don’t make the mistake that high culture mongers do of assuming that because people like cheap art, their feelings are cheap, too. When people say, ‘Oh listen, they’re playing our song,’ they don’t mean, ‘Our song, this little cheap tinkling, syncopated piece of rubbish is what we felt when we met.’ What they saying is ‘That song reminds us of the tremendous feeling we had when we met.’ Some of the songs I use are great anyway but the cheaper songs are still in the direct line of descent from David’s Psalms. They’re saying, ‘Listen, the world isn’t quite like this, the world is better than this, there is love in it,’ ‘There’s you and me in it’ or ‘The sun is shining in it.’

“So called dumb people, simple people, uneducated people, have as authentic and profound a depth of feeling as the most educated on earth. And anyone who says different is a fascist.”

— Dennis Potter