The Seasons in Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger

If you’re interested in seeing Tilda Swinton peel apples while the novelist, screenwriter and art critic John Berger discusses his father’s technique of peeling apples and if you’re interested how both of their fathers were not forthcoming about their wartime experiences you’ll want to rush out to see The Seasons in Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger, currently playing at Film Forum. You'll also learn that both Swinton and Berger were born on Guy Fawkes Day. The film directed by Colin MacCabe, Christopher Roth, Bartek Dziadosz and Tilda Swinton is a tiresome hagiography of the writer who's perhaps best known for his book and TV series Ways of Seeing and the screenplay for The Salamander.  The simple peasant existence Berger has lived for decades in the French alps is juxtaposed to the juggernaut of global capitalism, which the author animatedly and repeatedly condemns. It makes one cringe to see an otherwise inspired and complex writer like Ben Lerner, who appears in a segment of the film, looking with doe-eyed admiration at a figure whose nostalgic Marxist fiats are treated like scripture. Those who grew up holding Berger’s art criticism in high regard will be disappointed to hear him trumpeting Leger, a techno-cubist who’s a curious choice for someone for whom industrialized society is anathema. Archival footage of  Jacques Derrida is employed in a section of the film dealing with animal consciousness and in support of Berger’s idea that mankind doesn't possess a superior apprehension of death to animals, despite humans' vaunted consciousness. The story of a pig’s demise is brought to bear in support of the author’s point. If you unconditionally love Berger and everything he says, then The Seasons in Quincy will be manna. If you regard yourself as a humanist who's vaguely indisposed to the excesses of materialism, but realizes that the Latin for utopia translates as “no place,” then you might be disinclined to worship at this Berger altar. 

Suicidal Ideation and Other Thoughts

photo of North Pole (NOAA/Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory)

What if you get suicidal thoughts without taking CHANTIX? The advertisements for the drug always warn about possible side effects including such ideations, but the problem is, if you are entertaining such dark notions and there is nothing to come off of which will bring you back to your normally optimistic state, then you've definitely got a real problem. It’s actually comforting and nice to know that there's a cause for the kind of hopeless feelings that make you want to jump off a cliff. Other things that may create suicidal thoughts are the choice of candidates in the current election, the state of your marriage or relationship, the state of your career or bank account, dismissive treatment even from people who you feel are beneath you and the possibility that Kim Jong-un could invent an ICBM with the capability of delivering warheads to targets in the United States--or arm ISIS with such weapons. Predictions about the melting of the North Pole and the consequent global effects on el Nino and the Gulf Stream may also make you want to put an end to it all. But after all these problems are solved, you're still not taking Chantix and you still are suffering from bad thoughts then you have come up against the kind of brick wall that may actually make you want to take your own life.

The Power and the Glory

Hermine tracked by wunderground.com

Hermine was stagnated off the Northeast. Tropical storm warnings had been issued from Virginia to New England; at the very least erosion and riptides lay in the offing. However on Sunday of the Labor Day week the sun was shining in the town of East Hampton. In fact, contrary to some earlier reports the weather was particularly gorgeous. Nevertheless residents of the resort community lined up on Main Beach occupying benches and tables in front of the gray shingled snack bar famous for its freshly baked chocolate chip cookies and clam chowder to watch the rising waters. The onlookers gazed out with the serenity that derives from watching an increasingly angry sea. It was the kind of scene that merited the talents of a nineteenth century painter like Thomas Eakins who captured the community of emotion surrounding emblematic events. Thomas Struth who photographs museum goers looking at paintings might also have made something of the mesmerizing effect the churning tides were having on the assembled crowd. At one point the iconic white lifeguard's chair was shifted from its normally secure position and a gaggle of strong young bodies immediately raced out onto the sands, turning the cumbersome structure on its side, then effortlessly portaging it further inland as if it were an aluminum canoe. Going to the beach is generally a selfish pursuit aimed at satisfying the "oceanic feeling." However, what was going on Sunday morning on Main Beach was a little closer to worshippers reciting the Lord's Prayer, a mile or two down the road at St. Luke's Episcopal Church. People were experiencing the kind of awe that’s manifest when nature’s power and glory are imminent.

When the Mountain to Climb is Not Climbing the Mountain

Sometimes the mountain you have to climb is not to climb the mountain. Sometimes you have to learn to live without the rush that comes from tempting fate and embarking on some extreme activity. Sometimes you have to get by without testing your limits. Naturally there are many personality types who have no problem avoiding just these kinds of challenges. They’re risk and loss averse and content to avoid danger and certainly the prospect of stress and failure. They don’t need the highs and have spent their life avoiding situations that threaten to bring about the lows. On the other hand, perhaps carrying a generational burden, a whole other personality seems to thrive only in an aspirational state where there’s constant striving for what, at the time, seems impossible. This may involve anything from a job, to a physically desirable love object or a wave. While some may be content reading on the beach in Hawaii, there are surfers who put their lives in danger seeking the Big Kahuna. Marathon runners talk about the wall and there's going to come a day when those with insatiable appetites may find that they’re either starving or getting sick and it’s at this time that the gamble may lie in taking that big risk, i.e. in not choosing to do what one has always done, in not following the well trodden path with all its familiar signposts. Indeed one of the most difficult and trying parts of this particular endeavor may rest in watching the other climbers from the distance.

Pornosophy: Is There a Price to Pay for Free Love?

Free love means you can do it with anyone you want, right? But it immediately begs the question of what's the kind of love that's not free with the answer being the kind which binds you to any person or thing on an exclusive basis. It can also mean the kind of love for which you have to pay. For instance, prostitutes by definition don’t practice free love. But is there a price to pay for free love? The obvious example is that if you practice free love you're more likely to get STD’s. Yet, let’s put an end to that contingency by positing the idea of you rolling with a particularly health conscious crowd of swingers who all protect themselves in the right ways (with dental dams, condoms etc). The real price however lies in the social contract. Detachment is one of the downsides for practitioners of free love. Those who saw Sullivanian analysts back in the 60’s may remember that possessiveness was frowned on by some of these practitioners. Thus if you were seeing a Sullivanian and it was your birthday and you wanted to be with the person you loved, you would in essence be showing a kind of favoritism that ran against the free and equal spirit of the cause. You would also be propagating the same colonialist, nuclear values that a truly liberated spirit would want to avoid. A true practitioner of free love is wary of his or her own imperialist impulses and will not look at those they care about as their property—something which is a tall order indeed. Eschewing classical monogamy with all its joys is thus one of the most costly consequences of those who both desire and choose to make themselves available to just about anyone. "It’s all good" as MC Hammer says—until it becomes bad. Or maybe love isn’t the right word. Perhaps the correct expression should be free sex.