Avatar: A Film Review

Well, we finally succumbed to the hype and went to see Avatar. A friend had told us she had heard it was "anti-American." No worries on that score. I see it as profoundly American in its depiction of the perennial battle within the American soul between the individual and the collective vision, between self-interest and idealism, between the avid pursuit of material gain and ecstatic transcendentalism. If there are, on the one side, the abject creatures of American capitalism, the other side is led to eventual triumph by a quintessentially American Marine.

The film is American, also, in its inextricable muddle of myths, most of them deeply Romantic--from that of the Noble Savage to the Enchanted Forest, from the Arthurian knight to the Savior of Mankind. The hero's transformation from agent of the capitalist exploiters to hero of the oppressed embraces the saving of a Damsel in Distress and a spectacular initiation rite that involves hand-to-hand combat with his personal dragon (read, perhaps, inner demon, or "shadow"), harnessing its power, and riding it to freedom. All this takes place in a gorgeous Garden of Eden governed by the spirit of an all-powerful, animist deity envisioned as an energy (or "Force"!) which unites all beings, whether flora or fauna.

My quarrel with the film has nothing to do with its "politics," then, but rather with its essentially juvenile and hackneyed vision of the eternal struggle between Good and Evil, and its reinvention of the old myth of apocalyptic violence as its necessary outcome. It's Armageddon revisited, for the zillionth time. Eventually, perhaps, our human species will tire of its fascination with the spectacle of the clash of titans, whether down here on earth or in outer space. For now, we watch it re-enacted in a new and necessarily yet grander fashion, and with the same dreadful fascination.

That said, there remains much about "Avatar" to recommend it. The landscapes it envisions--vast mountains, floating in space, lush forests--are truly awesome. The flora and fauna of this alien environment are created with wonderful imaginative attention to the detail of color and design, movement and scale. From the tiniest, most delicate insect to the massive, lumbering creatures of land and graceful dragons of the air, the beings that inhabit this planet entertain us with their charm or their terror; the forest is peopled, too, with vegetation that delights both the eye and the imagination. It's a richly envisioned world, reminiscent enough of our own to convince, yet different enough to be wonderfully strange and exotic.

Ah, yes, and those special effects... kind of breath-taking, in 3-D. You take your ride down the sheer face of a bottomless cliff on the back of your speeding dragon. You stand on a vertiginous mountain top and survey the endless depths and distances below. You are shaken by the roar of space fighter engines, the thunder of missiles. Great forests explode... You can't help but be taken in by it all. It's not exactly a "willing suspension disbelief," but rather an assault on the senses which your senses are simply powerless to resist. They are invaded, conquered, and occupied.

Okay, it's all an adventure. Subtlety is not this film's strong point. Did I mention the "love interest"? No? Well, there's romance to be had here, too. Might as well simply give in and enjoy for what it is.

Megaphones

This morning, rather than write anything myself--because I feel lazy--I offer you this link sent to me by my friend Stuart, an artist and a stalwart reader of The Buddha Diaries. In other words, he has his head screwed on right. I think this video is brilliant, because it shows us how we could make our voices heard, if we chose to do so. Too often I know I sit around and mope a bit about how bad things are and wish I knew how to wake people up, because in my judgment vast numbers of us are asleep. These guys have the guts and the balls to actually go out there and do it. With wit. With biting humor. (Or, in this case, humour.) Thanks, Stuart. Good on you, as they say Down Under. See you Wednesday at The Ebell Club in Highland Park. (I should use a megaphone.)

1001; and a Sneeze

If it was 1000 yesterday, it must be 1001 today, and counting... Entries, that is. In The Buddha Diaries. It's a good number. There were, as I recall, 1001 nights...

Anyway, this sneeze. It came during meditation this morning, and I thought it worth writing about, because its sudden arrival reminded me how valuable a sneeze can be. It announces its imminent eruption with a tiny tickle in the back of the nose--a tickle to which it's impossible not to pay attention. It comes as wake-up call to attention particularly in sangha, where you think, oh my god, I'm going to sneeze and disturb every other sitter in this circle. Got to stop it before it happens.

Well, you know how hard it is to stop a sneeze. The tickle persists, grows more insistent the more you try to hold it back. The passing seconds split up into milliseconds as you observe its progress, struggling, but helpless against its inevitability. This is a really good moment to heighten your attentive powers, watching and waiting for the sneeze to reach the surface. It arrives, explodes, sends shock waves throughout the body, and seemingly beyond, out into the surrounding space...

You now have the opportunity to watch the recession of the sneeze as you might watch the recession of the breath, only more dramatically, as a physical sensation. The initial shock waves are strong, wracking the whole system with their intensity. Then, gradually, stage by stage, they come in diminishing strength, like slowly fading ripples on the surface of a pond until, at last, they disappear forever and the body re-establishes its calm.

And sometimes--have you noticed?--it is possible, by dint of very careful, very minute attention to the detail of its presence, to stop the sneeze in mid-path, before it can arrive. It's kind of like catching a speeding bullet.

What a blessing! What a wonderful opportunity to learn better how to observe the breath which, after all, does exactly the same thing but with greater subtlety. It arises, gathers strength as it comes in and reaches a peak before it starts to recede and arrives at its most distant point of departure. If every breath could be a sneeze, we would be far more adept, I think, at paying attention to it.

There. I had not intended to write today. I'm off shortly for a full day's retreat and then, this evening, have a speaking gig downtown. Kind of a twelve-hour day. But then the sneeze came... So, friends, Gesundheit! And have a great weekend!

1,000; and Some Art

Here's another milestone. Today, I get to write my 1,000th entry in The Buddha Diaries... Hard to believe!

We made a few gallery stops yesterday. I had been intending for a while to stop by the Taylor De Cordoba Gallery to see some new paintings by Kimberly Brooks. A word of disclosure here: Kimberly is a colleague on The Huffington Post, and has been a welcome reader and supporter of my writing. I don't suppose that anyone comes here to The Buddha Diaries looking for anything other than a very personal take on art and other things. As I have written elsewhere--notably in "Persist," "I Am Not an Art Critic." That is, I no longer need to abide by the conventional rules of criticism--like the one that says you can't write about your friends. I understand the reason for the rule. I just don't choose to be bound by it any more.

So let's take a look at Kimberly's work. She's a proficient painter, mostly pictures of people in environments that could be called "genre paintings," and she has been concentrating recently on portraiture in what she identifies as "The Stylist Project." They are portraits, mostly, of women, presumably themselves stylists for the movies, advertising, or the fashion industry. I have to confess ignorance on this score. But they are, we sense, comfortable enough in the material aspect of their lives and for the most part in themselves, for who they are. They are in touch with their own sensuality, with the physical world, and clearly enjoy the pleasures of clothing, jewelry, shoes, ranging from high-end designer to art-world eccentric.

There is, in these portraits, certainly, a celebration of the feminine, a delight in the "style" these women create for themselves and project. At the same time, there is an awareness of the inherent paradox of "style"--that, while glamorous, it carries with it the seeds of its own superficiality, its attachment to outward appearances--which is implicit in what I take to be a hint of satire in these paintings. In making a "project" of the series, I'm assuming that the artist is wanting to discover, in the paintings, something about what these people share in common, how their passion for style is reflected in the way in which they present themselves to the world. What she arrives at is an observation of our culture that suggests a fascinating surface--and a disturbing depth.

Lloyd Hamrol is another friend. I have known him for more than thirty years, and for that long have admired the way he uses sculptural forms to engage the viewer in a participation in the work, often in public spaces where they are in daily "use." (Check out some of these wonderful Sited Works and Installations, which are so satisfying in their relationship to the environment in which they're built, so "user-friendly," so very human in their scale and invitation.) I'm delighted that Lloyd's work is being celebrated at Cardwell Jimmerson Contemporary Art in Culver City, a space I've mentioned before as one that pays deserving tribute to artists whose work should be better known, and more frequently seen.

The current installation is a re-creation of Lloyd's 5 x 9 series from 1966, a selection of the many possible configurations of these playful, elegant objects constructed out of five pivoting elements of plastic laminated plywood, each 6" x 30" x 30". The basic form is utterly simple, the five pieces lying in close alignment on the floor. Swivel them on their pivots, though, according to your preference of whim, and they transform magically into three-dimensional fantasies with plain, reflective surfaces that shift color and shape at shifting angles and in shifting light. They have something of the quality of articulated children's toys made large, for adults who have come to understand the sophistication of aesthetic choice and the pleasures of the interplay of form. (I regret that I have been unable to pirate a picture to post, but the link above will give you a good sense of the work.)

Leaving Culver City, listening to NPR in the car, we heard a wonderful quote from the song-writer Bill Withers ("Ain't No Sunshine When She's Gone"--a personal favorite.") The NPR piece was about a new documentary about the elusive Withers, who chose to escape the limelight in favor of a kind of personal retreat. The quote goes like this: "It's okay to head out for wonderful, but on your way to wonderful you're going to have to pass through all right. When you get to all right, take a good look around and get used to it, because that may be as far as you're gonna go." Ah, yes!

From the galleries, we drove on--through hideously dense traffic, to the Skirball Center, to attend a fund-raiser for the Progressive Jewish Alliance. More about this in another post. Not tomorrow, since I'm busy all day from early morning until late at night. But soon...

Teaching Ignorance

Did anyone else come across this article in yesterday's New York Times? It seems that, not content with promulgating their absurd antipathy to evolutionary science, the "creationists" in several states are now seeking to include their rejection of the science of climate change in school curricula. I tend to attribute most of this country's problems to its long-standing starvation of the basic education system for its citizens. The willful ignorance of much of the electorate has led us into the deplorable state in which we find ourselves today. Too many voters, it seems to me, are led by the nose to vote plainly against their own interest because they lack the essential skills of critical thought and readily accept the lies and half-truths that are fed to them; and then turn around and blame those they have elected.

Where once we might be able to attribute this to a "starve the beast" attitude toward education (a process that now, after fifty years and more, has produced what was perhaps the desired result--an easily manipulable citizenry,) we are now treated to the spectacle of people in power who want to go one step further: to actually teach ignorance in the schools as though it were knowledge. The fact they they have a base of support and are not simply laughed out of court should surely be enough to dismay all right-thinking--sorry, make that "thinking"--people. Whither these United States of America, when so many of these states capitulate to the fear-mongering, religion-driven agenda of the willfully ignorant? Their passionate dedication to the cause of ignorance itself may well be the end of all of us.