June 2011
2 posts
THE HOPELESS DREAM OF BEING
Split natures and broken faces in Aeschylus and Bergman
Born out of the Satyr chorus under the religious auspices of the Dionysian festival in 6th century B.C.E, drama is that unfathomable moment in Western aesthetics when we see before us on the stage for the first time, a poor, suffering individual referring to himself as ‘egô’, ‘I’, yet plainly someone else—a performer. He is and is not...
THE WEEK IN NEWS, 2
MEN WITH WEAPONS WALKING HU JINTAO TAKING PICTURE MORE OF A DEAD RHINO TV PRESENTERS A PAGE FROM THE BOOK PUSH IN TO BULB
May 2011
4 posts
THE WEEK IN NEWS, 1
BLOOD ON WALLS OF BUS PROTESTERS SHOUTING ‘NO TO AMERICAN DRAMA” HOUSE WITH THREATENING MESSAGES SCRAWLED IN BLOOD SEALS OF INFLATABLE BOATS HILLS MORE OF FLAMES PEOPLE LOOKING AT LAPTOPS SMITH’S HANDS OFFICIAL BALL DRIVERS AND RIDERS Wide of the sophora flowers
REALISED; RELEASED
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, 2011
Edition of 50, 40 pages, 19 x 26 cm, digital offset print
$AU30 at www.leonbatchelor.com
...
Hamlet and Dionysian man
“In this sense the Dionysian man resembles Hamlet: both have once looked truly into the essence of things, they have gained knowledge, and nausea inhibits action; for their action could not change anything in the eternal nature of things; they feel it to be ridiculous or humiliating that they should be asked to set right a world that is out of joint. Knowledge kills action; action requires...
BERGMAN'S CATHEDRAL
Image via Arnold Frich
“People ask what are my intentions with my films-my aims. It is a difficult and dangerous question, and I usually give an evasive answer: I try to tell the truth about the human condition, the truth as I see it. This answer seems to satisfy everyone, but it is not quite correct. I prefer to describe what I would like my aim to be.
There is an old story of how the...
April 2011
2 posts
Rudd as literary construct
Image via The Canberra Times
Politics is not poetry. It is built on a sickly bureaucratic tongue, prone to repetition, passivity, dangling third-person plurals and a whole stinking host of corpse-like lexical impoverishments. This is the lingua franca of politics, a system with a grand taxonomy. The newest local addition is the Ruddism; the verb “fiddle-faddle”, the graceless metaphor “life’s...
The Promethean Coup:
E-commerce and the chrysalis of artificial life in space
“Such contrivances have I invented for mortals, yet, wretch that I am, I have no device by which I can escape my present sufferings.” [1]
Having thieved the creative ‘fire’ of Zeus and bestowed it unto man, Prometheus laments the age that he must spend chained to a rock, far from the inspired toiling of the sovereign souls...