02 October 2004
rivers of sin
'Hell is being trapped in a room with all the animals you have ever eaten'. (I think this was Canetti, but I can't find the reference. Stand to be corrected).
Anyway, replace room with 'vat', animals with 'booze' and eaten with 'drunk'. Imagine! cheap wine mixing with cheaper lager, medium-priced wine curdling with expensive cocktails, rough cider with clear spirits...plus...the odd litre of Baileys creating a creamy scum round the side (we all drink this badly, no?). Hell is trying to stop yourself drowning in a sea of your past alcohol consumption.
Wondering around central London on a Friday night, mentally multiplying everyone's personal booze vat, one imagines Lady Macbeth slightly reformulating her famous 'guilt' speech:
Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this booze
Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one a slightly unpleasant shade of combined-alcohol brown.
Hic.
Talking of waterways, went to see The Ister last night, a documentary based around Heidegger's 1942 lectures on Holderlin's, erm, der Ister. It follows the course of the river from Romania to Germany, via the former Yugoslavia (oddly enough, I went to the film with a Romanian, a Serbian Croat, and a German. Sounds like the start of a bad Zizek joke...). Anyway, it features interviews with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jean-Luc Nancy, Bernard Stiegler, amongst others - those strange French Heideggerians who witter on about technology and death in a (mostly) entertaining manner for most of the film. There's one really odd moment when Stiegler, a former bank robber and now director of IRCAM (fact), starts arguing that dogs are men, because we adopt them and give them names. Like...yeah!
Made by two Australian blokes, the Ister is bloody long, but does some really clever things with the footage they managed to cull (filmed with a mini-DV camera). Lots of repetition and some funny coincidences: when Lacoue-Labarthe ('LL Cool P' as some wag used to call him) starts talking about a kind of 'historial emphysema' of the present and the importance of an understanding of 'breath', the camera pans to a shot of his ashtray, overloaded with fags. Ho ho ho. At the end of the film, we see a duck unsteadily wondering about the edges of the river, which is now cluttered with junk and bottles. We are informed that there is no longer any possibility of a poetic account of the Danube, a la Friedrich, and even the duck doesn't fancy a swim.
So - horrah for tenacious Australians with a thing for patriotic German poetry and Nazi ontology.
"Whenever you observe an animal closely, you feel as if a human being sitting inside were making fun of you." - Elias Canetti, The Human Province
Anyway, replace room with 'vat', animals with 'booze' and eaten with 'drunk'. Imagine! cheap wine mixing with cheaper lager, medium-priced wine curdling with expensive cocktails, rough cider with clear spirits...plus...the odd litre of Baileys creating a creamy scum round the side (we all drink this badly, no?). Hell is trying to stop yourself drowning in a sea of your past alcohol consumption.
Wondering around central London on a Friday night, mentally multiplying everyone's personal booze vat, one imagines Lady Macbeth slightly reformulating her famous 'guilt' speech:
Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this booze
Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one a slightly unpleasant shade of combined-alcohol brown.
Hic.
Talking of waterways, went to see The Ister last night, a documentary based around Heidegger's 1942 lectures on Holderlin's, erm, der Ister. It follows the course of the river from Romania to Germany, via the former Yugoslavia (oddly enough, I went to the film with a Romanian, a Serbian Croat, and a German. Sounds like the start of a bad Zizek joke...). Anyway, it features interviews with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jean-Luc Nancy, Bernard Stiegler, amongst others - those strange French Heideggerians who witter on about technology and death in a (mostly) entertaining manner for most of the film. There's one really odd moment when Stiegler, a former bank robber and now director of IRCAM (fact), starts arguing that dogs are men, because we adopt them and give them names. Like...yeah!
Made by two Australian blokes, the Ister is bloody long, but does some really clever things with the footage they managed to cull (filmed with a mini-DV camera). Lots of repetition and some funny coincidences: when Lacoue-Labarthe ('LL Cool P' as some wag used to call him) starts talking about a kind of 'historial emphysema' of the present and the importance of an understanding of 'breath', the camera pans to a shot of his ashtray, overloaded with fags. Ho ho ho. At the end of the film, we see a duck unsteadily wondering about the edges of the river, which is now cluttered with junk and bottles. We are informed that there is no longer any possibility of a poetic account of the Danube, a la Friedrich, and even the duck doesn't fancy a swim.
So - horrah for tenacious Australians with a thing for patriotic German poetry and Nazi ontology.
"Whenever you observe an animal closely, you feel as if a human being sitting inside were making fun of you." - Elias Canetti, The Human Province
