[internautica]

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Cherry

art depression article

When Daddy comes in, he carries you to bed. Is there anything you feel like you could eat, Pokey? Anything at all?

All you can imagine putting in your mouth is a cold plum, one with really tight skin on the outside but gum-shocking sweetness inside. And he and your mother discuss where he might find some this late in the season. Mother says hell I don’t know. Further north, I’d guess.

The next morning, you wake up in your bed and sit up. Mother says, Pete, I think she’s up. He hollers in, You ready for breakfast, Pokey. Then he comes in grinning, still in his work clothes from the night before. He’s holding a farm bushel. The plums he empties onto the bed river toward you through folds in the quilt. If you stacked them up, they’d fill the deepest bin at the Piggly Wiggly.

Damned if I didn’t get the urge to drive to Arkansas last night, he says.

Your mother stands behind him saying he’s pure USDA crazy.

Fort Smith, Arkansas. Found a roadside stand out there with a feller selling plums. And I says, Buddy, I got a little girl sick back in Texas. She’s got a hanker for plums and ain’t nothing else gonna do.

It’s when you sink your teeth into the plum that you make a promise. The skin is still warm from riding in the sun in Daddy’s truck, and the nectar runs down your chin.

And you snap out of it. Or are snapped out of it. Never again will you lay a hand against yourself, not so long as there are plums to eat and somebody-anybody-who gives enough of a damn to haul them to you. So long as you bear the least nibblet of love for any other creature in this dark world, though in love portions are never stingy. There are no smidgens or pinches, only rolling abundance. That’s how you acquire the resolution for survival that the coming years are about to demand. You don’t earn it. It’s given.

- Mary Karr, Cherry

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Opinion: Why Make Fellini the Scapegoat for New Cultural Intolerance?

art article movies language

"Excuse Me; I Must Have Missed Part of the Movie" (The Week in Review, Nov. 7) cites Federico Fellini as an example of a film maker whose style gets in the way of his storytelling and whose films, as a result, are not easily accessible to audiences. Broadening that argument, it includes other artists: Ingmar Bergman, James Joyce, Thomas Pynchon, Bernardo Bertolucci, John Cage, Alain Resnais and Andy Warhol.

It's not the opinion I find distressing, but the underlying attitude toward artistic expression that is different, difficult or demanding. Was it necessary to publish this article only a few days after Fellini's death?

I feel it's a dangerous attitude, limiting, intolerant. If this is the attitude toward Fellini, one of the old masters, and the most accessible at that, imagine what chance new foreign films and film makers have in this country.

It reminds me of a beer commercial that ran a while back. The commercial opened with a black and white parody of a foreign film -- obviously a combination of Fellini and Bergman. Two young men are watching it, puzzled, in a video store, while a female companion seems more interested. A title comes up: "Why do foreign films have to be so foreign?" The solution is to ignore the foreign film and rent an action-adventure tape, filled with explosions, much to the chagrin of the woman.

It seems the commercial equates "negative" associations between women and foreign films: weakness, complexity, tedium. I like action-adventure films too. I also like movies that tell a story, but is the American way the only way of telling stories?

The issue here is not "film theory," but cultural diversity and openness. Diversity guarantees our cultural survival. When the world is fragmenting into groups of intolerance, ignorance and hatred, film is a powerful tool to knowledge and understanding. To our shame, your article was cited at length by the European press.

The attitude that I've been describing celebrates ignorance. It also unfortunately confirms the worst fears of European film makers.

Is this closedmindedness something we want to pass along to future generations?

If you accept the answer in the commercial, why not take it to its natural progression:

Why don't they make movies like ours?

Why don't they tell stories as we do?

Why don't they dress as we do?

Why don't they eat as we do?

Why don't they talk as we do?

Why don't they think as we do?

Why don't they worship as we do?

Why don't they look like us?

Ultimately, who will decide who "we" are?

- Martin Scorsese, 1993, The New York Times.

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An Anthropologist On Mars

art headspace autism article

This was the case with the B.s, the autistic family I had visited in California—the older son, like the parents, with Asperger’s syndrome, the younger with classical autism. When I first arrived at their house, the whole atmosphere was so “normal” that I wondered if I had been misinformed, or if I had not, perhaps, ended up at the wrong house, for there was nothing obviously “autistic” about them or it. It was only after I had settled down that I noticed the well-used trampoline, where the whole family, at times, likes to jump and flap their arms; the huge library of science fiction; the strange cartoons pinned to the bathroom wall; and the ludicrously explicit directions, pinned up in the kitchen, for cooking, laying the table, and washing up—suggesting that these had to be performed in a fixed, formulaic way (this, I learned later, was an autistic in-joke). Mrs. B. spoke of herself, at one point, as “bordering on normality,” but then made clear what such “bordering” meant: “We know the rules and conventions of the ‘normal,’ but there is no actual transit. You act normal, you learn the rules, and obey them, but ...”

“You learn to ape human behavior,” her husband interpolated. “I still don’t understand what’s behind the social conventions. You observe the front—but ...”

The B.s, then, had learned a front of normality, which was necessary, given their professional lives, their living in the suburbs and driving a car, their having a son in regular school, etc. But they had no illusions about themselves. They recognized their own autism, and they had recognized each other’s, at college, with a sense of such affinity and delight that it was inevitable they would marry. “It was as if we had known each other for a million years,” Mrs. B. said. While they were well aware of many of the problems of their autism, they had a respect for their differentness, even a pride. Indeed, in some autistic people this sense of radical and ineradicable differentness is so profound as to lead them to regard themselves, half-jokingly, almost as members of another species (“They beamed us down on the transporter together,” as the B.s liked to say), and to feel that autism, while it may be seen as a medical condition, and pathologized as a syndrome, must also be seen as a whole mode of being, a deeply different mode or identity, one that needs to be conscious (and proud) of itself.

- Oliver Sacks, 1993

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