Lack
What am I really, but a scrap of paper - white and blank, good to remember things by, to scribble and sketch on, but not for much else.
A piece of paper that is now adrift on a torrent of rainwater, on its way to an unknown destination.
I was buying dinner a few days ago when one of those irritating survey person came up to me and asked if I could spare a few minutes to do a survey. I felt myself frowning irritably - I was hungry - but I found myself saying yes anyway, feeling too lazy to cook up an excuse to escape the situation.
What do I do for a living? I'm a studio assistant, I say, feeling a sense of alienation wash over me. It's a feeling that I'm getting used to.
Not that it is a bad thing to be in my situation right now - there are lots of people out there who wants my job. But it's just that I started off differently, having been shooting for a few years, thinking that I'm pretty good before waking up to good old reality.
I saw a couple of movies that I had trouble understanding. One of which is Wong Kar Wai's Ashes of Time, which I sort of put on hold halfway. The second is The Reader, which is about a 15 year old boy who had an affair with a 30-something woman.
Here's a very good review of the movie, by Roger Ebert.
After the initial shock of seeing Kate Winslet's saggy breasts (as opposed to the perfect ones in Titanic. Maybe Jack cheated in the sketch.) the story began to unfold and while it was easy to understand, I sensed that a message was being conveyed but it eluded me.
There's a lot about guilt and shame in the movie, but the thing that struck me most is, as how Ebert puts it:
There are enormous pressures in all human societies to go along. Many figures involved in the recent Wall Street meltdown have used the excuse, "I was only doing my job. I didn't know what was going on." President Bush led us into war on mistaken premises, and now says he was betrayed by faulty intelligence. U.S. military personnel became torturers because they were ordered to. Detroit says it was only giving us the cars we wanted. The Soviet Union functioned for years because people went along. China still does.
Many of the critics of "The Reader" seem to believe it is all about Hanna's shameful secret. No, not her past as a Nazi guard. The earlier secret that she essentially became a guard to conceal. Others think the movie is an excuse for soft-core porn disguised as a sermon. Still others say it asks us to pity Hanna. Some complain we don't need yet another "Holocaust movie." None of them think the movie may have anything to say about them. I believe the movie may be demonstrating a fact of human nature: Most people, most of the time, all over the world, choose to go along. We vote with the tribe.
And I think that it's so true.
A piece of paper that is now adrift on a torrent of rainwater, on its way to an unknown destination.
I was buying dinner a few days ago when one of those irritating survey person came up to me and asked if I could spare a few minutes to do a survey. I felt myself frowning irritably - I was hungry - but I found myself saying yes anyway, feeling too lazy to cook up an excuse to escape the situation.
What do I do for a living? I'm a studio assistant, I say, feeling a sense of alienation wash over me. It's a feeling that I'm getting used to.
Not that it is a bad thing to be in my situation right now - there are lots of people out there who wants my job. But it's just that I started off differently, having been shooting for a few years, thinking that I'm pretty good before waking up to good old reality.
I saw a couple of movies that I had trouble understanding. One of which is Wong Kar Wai's Ashes of Time, which I sort of put on hold halfway. The second is The Reader, which is about a 15 year old boy who had an affair with a 30-something woman.
Here's a very good review of the movie, by Roger Ebert.
After the initial shock of seeing Kate Winslet's saggy breasts (as opposed to the perfect ones in Titanic. Maybe Jack cheated in the sketch.) the story began to unfold and while it was easy to understand, I sensed that a message was being conveyed but it eluded me.
There's a lot about guilt and shame in the movie, but the thing that struck me most is, as how Ebert puts it:
There are enormous pressures in all human societies to go along. Many figures involved in the recent Wall Street meltdown have used the excuse, "I was only doing my job. I didn't know what was going on." President Bush led us into war on mistaken premises, and now says he was betrayed by faulty intelligence. U.S. military personnel became torturers because they were ordered to. Detroit says it was only giving us the cars we wanted. The Soviet Union functioned for years because people went along. China still does.
Many of the critics of "The Reader" seem to believe it is all about Hanna's shameful secret. No, not her past as a Nazi guard. The earlier secret that she essentially became a guard to conceal. Others think the movie is an excuse for soft-core porn disguised as a sermon. Still others say it asks us to pity Hanna. Some complain we don't need yet another "Holocaust movie." None of them think the movie may have anything to say about them. I believe the movie may be demonstrating a fact of human nature: Most people, most of the time, all over the world, choose to go along. We vote with the tribe.
And I think that it's so true.