I'm Not There

I'd write a long, annoyed post about the hipster arrogance of I'm Not There and lack of awareness that I see everywhere with self-important people around my age, but I'm going to take the hipster's way out and say I can't be bothered. All the issues pertaining to the way movie criticism aspires to get as far away from grounded reality as possible are there to be seen, I don't need to explain it.

The American blogger Abagond has the right idea about how to write posts, I might copy his format.

This should be on the Worst of Perth

I've been reading about local Islamic feminism, and I came upon this article:
http://www.perthnow.com.au/news/western-australia/brothel-forces-out-muslim-womens-support-centre/story-e6frg13u-1225876704903
This is really depressing, not in the least because of the horribly sexist way this is written - more attention (and a photo) is given to the male owner of the Muslim Women's Support Centre than the women who manage and use it, not to mention the women working for the brothel. And of course the media uses this as an excuse to promote hatred of women who are both too sexually open and too prudish and too non-white.

My take on creativity, ideals and empathy

I appreciate creativity and I value art because, personally, it lends ammunition to the kind of oppositional tactics people who fall through the cracks of commonly-accepted templates rely on. When you walk in on a display of ideological allegiance which contradicts your own existence you either lie to yourself and to the others and try to align yourself with a reality that's directly opposed to yours or challenge it and try to offer something new to the people who, you are convinced, are suffering from the template's limitations. If you say you're an artist this process can be made a lot easier, but you don't have to be an artist to be creative.

Children of separated parents are familiar guilt, as it imposed upon them by society for being aberrant and acting as a symbol of the dysfunctional reality behind the ideal promoted by society through cultural institutions and, through them, individuals who haven't experienced the same degree of dissonance. Ideals formulated by establishment figures who haven't experienced a great degree of elaboration from the accepted norm or those who have, but haven't come to terms with it logically, only serve to divide people and stifle natural human empathy for conditions applicable to everybody in society. Art, in that sense, acts as a medium for a social and personal energy that encourages empathy and common human understanding, that being creativity. The same institutional controls as mentioned have as much a role in art as creativity, but at least the social aspect of art encourages you to be aware of it.

The 'average person' and stupidity

If there is any overarching, symptomatic, pervasive problem with the way people communicate in the present day, it would be how it's fashionable to describe the average person as 'stupid'. I was reminded of this by a recent Cracked editorial, which chalks up the popularity of unfunny sitcoms to how "a lot of people are stupid." The popularity of this kind of sentiment doesn't really need to be explained - the person saying this and the person hearing it are both excluded from this supposedly rampant stupidity and consequently receive unwarranted ego boosts - but the problem with it isn't quite as logically straightforward, although it's still pretty obvious.

Put simply, it works on the same level as advertising: calling the vast majority of people stupid associates your intellectual superiority with common sense, without any rational basis, just like advertising associates certain values, which are in turn associated with buying a particular product, with common sense. It also discourages empathy and understanding and, this being something I probably fall victim to every now and then, causes you to associate any opinion that differs from yours as being opposed to common sense. Because the mass media encourages this particular behavior, these attitudes turn into tropes aimed at regulating a certain understanding between different people about the proliferation of cliche in various media - that is, it encourages people to accept it as a natural consequence of most people not being as intelligent as they are. People who watch commercial television who, after a point, cotton on to some of the formulaic constraints applied to the production of a number of television shows, are discouraged from analysing what signifies the lack in creativity, and why they don't like it, and are instead prompted with the simpler option of just dismissing their own, very valid concerns in favour of having their ego pampered through irrational association.

So, if you know anyone who tends to justify the lack of creativity in media produced by large, profit-motivated institutions, or the removal of political freedoms, etcetera, with a perceived median stupidity, or if you do it yourself, ask them what they think makes them more intelligent than the average person, or ask yourself, and offer some sympathy for the faceless 'average person' who is blamed for something s/he has no hand in.

Drugs and currency

Dick Gregory recently proposed an interesting idea as to why the Euro is currently threatening the US Dollar. The gist of it is something like:

• The drug trade is a multi-million dollar industry and most drugs are sold on street corners (he said something like 98%)
• This means most dealers are carrying a huge number of 5s and 105s and 20s and 50s by the end of the day, and they don't store them in a warehouse or anything, they take them to the bank and exchange them for $100 bills
• The Euro, on the other hand, has 500 Euro bills. So the drug trade is migrating because they can minimise the amount of contact made with the establishment.

I have grown uninspired again, probably because of too much freedom, Fable 2, cold mornings and biscuits. A post on the Young Ones is in the works, when I feel interested enough in the show again, not to mention the one on video games (it's taken ages to sort through the list and order it).

Oh dear

Australian TV is filled with fat male idiots who think they're funny and advertisers who want you to know that the mining corporations are on your side and if they lose money then they're going to mug you for their losses. Will Anderson was funnier and more insightful than Dave Hughes, so it's a shame that his crippling cocaine addiction has made him a stooge for public relations firms. Oh dear.