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5D.
“Five or six hundred heads would have guaranteed your freedom and happiness but a false humanity has restrained your arms and stopped your blows. If you don’t strike now, millions of your brothers will die, your enemies will triumph and your blood will flood the streets. They’ll slit your throats without mercy and disembowel your wives. And their bloody hands will rip out your children’s entrails to erase your love of liberty forever.” - Jean-Paul Marat
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[Recording of interview with the director]
Milo, I trace my interest in the moving image to childhood, to Disney. To the seven dwarfs in Sleeping Beauty. My favorite scene is the goodbye scene at the end, part of the happy ending sequence. I think I sexualized it, at least my therapist thinks so. I’m not entirely convinced. There is something hot about it. Otherwise, why would the little guy blush. Dopey. Such a pervy stoner. As for visual art, I would say my favorite, most dramatic painting award goes to David, for Death of Marat. The Napoleon on horseback painting is grand, but the bathtub scene wins. …What is it with Disney and seven? Remember the seven year thing with the re-release. Video crushed that deal. Money won at Disney. Now Disney is a fleshtone corporation, a world order monster. Mulan. They have a different mission. Like MoMA. More abstract, all the time. Me, I love detail. I love drama. I don’t focus group life. I’m a detective hunting a good story with the Muse as my client. That’s how I look at it. My Muse is Truman Capote. Or Neal Cassady. Or Meryl Streep. Different one for every day. Look, who needs escape? If I want escape, I shoot H. What ever happened to virtual reality? We have video games. Not the same. As if we didn’t notice? I’m into dreams, visions. I’m an old Hollywood hippie. I don’t need some school marm telling me about creativity. Creativity? Put drugs, money and a bus full of hot people together and you get creativity. You get weird. And you will most definitely get drama. Maybe a disease or two. That’s why I took Johnny Law. I had to do it. After I saw the script, I had to do it. It has everything. Murder. Rape. A great bad guy. James Dean. A love story, with a brother twist. Revenge. A drive-in. Cars, guns, a crazy mother, an absentee dad. Set in the mountains of Appalachia. In a word exotic and apple pie. But most importantly, drama.
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America is neither dream nor reality. It is a hyperreality. It is a hyperreality because it is a utopia which has behaaved from the very beginning as though it were already achieved. Everything here is real and pragmatic, and yet it is all the stuff of dreams too. It may be that the truth of America can only be seen by a European, since he alone will discover here the perfect simulacrum - that of the immanence and material transcription of all values. The Americans, for their part, have no sense of simulation. They are themselves simulation in its most developed state, but they have no language in which to describe it, since they themselves are the model. As a result, they are the ideal material for an analysis of all the possible variants of the modern world. No more and no less in fact than were primitive societies in their day. The same mythical and analytic excitement that made us look towards those earlier societies today impels us to look in the direction of America. With the same passion and the same prejudices.
…
America is a giant hologram, in the sense that information concerning the whole is contained in each of its elements… Holographic also in that it has the coherent light of the laser, the homogeneity of the single elements scanned by the same beams. From the visual and plastic viewpoints too: things seem to be made of a more unreal substance; they seem to turn and move in a void as if by a special lighting effect, a fine membrane you pass through without noticing it. This is obviously true of the desert. It is also the case with Las Vegas and advertising, and even the activities of the people, public relations, and everyday electronics all stand out with the plasticity and simplicity of a beam of light. The hologram is akin to the world of phantasy. It is a three-dimensional dream and you can enter it as you would a dream. Everything depends on the existence of the ray of light bearing the objects. If it is interrupted, all the effects are dispersed, and reality along with it. You do indeed get the impression that America is made up of a fantastic switching between similar elements, and that everything is only held together by a thread of light, a laser beam, scanning out American reality before our eyes. In America the spectral does not refer to phantoms or to dancing ghosts, but to the spectrum into which light disperses.
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- America, by Jean Baudrillard, Chris Turner
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Redefining the translator means recognizing that the translator is a problematically constituted, and an intricately functioning, subjectivity, whose paradoxical condition is to inhabit in-betweenness, and more precisely the undefined - and undefinable - space between source language and target language. The dialogue in which the translator is constantly involved is of a singular nature, both linguistically and somatically, as it expands to comprehend present, past and future…
And there is more. Collaboration, at the same time partnership venture and text-devising practice, sits at the heart of ‘creative’ translation, demonstrating how creativity is not an individualistic concept. A collaborative project, either a translator working together with the source language writer or with other translators, turns out to be an important translational moment displaying the richness of each subjectivity simultaneously entering into relationships with the text and with language, creating intriguing intertextual configurations; collaborations ultimately allow us to see how the people involved are all contributors, that is co-writers. Complex, yet democratic and communal, this is a practice adopted, for example, by feminist translators, who have been ‘womanhandling’ texts not only with highly experimental, politically motivated interventions but also with challenging, and less travelled, routes of rewriting these texts […]. Within this location of multiple voices and personae the retracing of the translators subjectivity needs to include ideas of both ‘fragmented’ and ’share’ agency, while the translation dialogue becomes an ‘intercontextual’ and ‘intercreative’ process, a meeting point not only of different of similar contexts, of skills, expertise, cultures, but also of perceptions and cognitions.
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- Translation and Creativity: Perspectives on Creative Writing and Translation by Eugenia Loffredo, Manuela Perteghella
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MILO: Baudrillard is a genius.
ZEELIO: America is a pictographic hologram.
V: As for redefining the translator, I think this is key to understanding Steve Roden identity as an anti-genius, and further explains why his paintings are so awful. His translations, too.
PJM: The fact is, the academy understands 4D perfectly well, but is so inhibited by its prejudices - Marxian and feminist, cultural and anthropological - it can not afford to abandon the failed ideology and embrace the dimensional future.
ZEELIO: So, the streets are empty at the moment the democracy needs its citizens, its neo-revolution.
MILO: And the creative academics murder and hide the bodies of geniuses and artists any time they have the chance, in the labyrinth of their language, psychosis, bureaucracy and mediocrity.
PJM: It isn’t the middle class that fails.
V: What they call collaboration was what got women’s heads shaved after the Liberation.
ZEELIO: Instead of neo-revolution, we get neo-colonialism.
MILO: Creativity and the United Corporate States of America.
PJM: Surveillance and torture.
V: Dimension lost in translation.
MILO: These anthropologists are transporting slaves in the interstitial. Someday, free people will look at this moment with the same disgust and horror with which we all - meaning free, natural democratic persons - view the slave ships that traversed the Atlantic between Africa and the Carolinas, Ireland and New York, China and San Francisco.
***
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Creativity takes root in childhood. For the child, life is a creative adventure. The most basic explorations of a child’s world are creative exercises in problem-solving. They begin a lifelong process of inventing themselves. In this sense, every child reinvents language, walking, love.
“The kernel of creativity,” says psychologist Teresa Amabile, “is there in the infant: the desire and drive to explore, to find out about things, to try things out, to experiment with different ways of handling things and looking at things. As they grow older, children begin to create entire universes of reality in their play.”
Our experience of creativity in childhood shapes much of what we do in adulthood, from work to family life. But if creativity is a child’s natural state, what happens on the way to adulthood? The psychological pressures that inhibit a child’s creativity occur early in life. Parents can encourage or suppress the creativity of their children in the home environment and by what they demand of schools. Most children in preschool, kindergarten—even in the first grade—love being in school. They are excited about exploring and learning. But by the time they are in the third or fourth grade, many don’t like school, let alone have any sense of pleasure in their own creativity.
Amabile’s research has identified the main creativity killers:
- Surveillance: Hovering over kids, making them feel that they’re constantly being watched while they’re working.
- Evaluation: Making kids worry about how others judge what they are doing. Kids should be concerned primarily with how satisfied they—and not others—are with their accomplishments.
- Competition: Putting kids in a win/lose situation, where only one person can come out on top. A child should be allowed to progress at his own rate.
- Overcontrol: Telling kids exactly how to do things. This leaves children feeling that any exploration is a waste of time.
- Pressure: Establishing grandiose expectations for a child’s performance. Training regimes can easily backfire and end up instilling an aversion for the subject being taught.
One of the greatest creativity killers, however, is more subtle and so deeply rooted in our culture that it is hardly noticed. It has to do with time.
Children more naturally than adults enter that ultimate state of creativity called flow. In flow, time does not matter; there is only the timeless moment at hand. It is a state that is more comfortable for children than adults, who are more conscious of the passage of time.
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"The Art of Creativity" (When the creative spirit stirs, it animates a style of being: a lifetime filled with the desire to innovate, to explore new ways of doing things, to bring dreams of reality.) By D. Goleman, P. Kaufman, published on March 01, 1992 in Psychology Today
(Where are the great artists this methodology was supposed to create? - #81)
(While these do-gooders are feeding parents this anti-art bullshit, and stuffing kids with Ritalin or into restraints, the corporations are creating a global surveillance state; dimensional evaluation regimes; enforcing artificial “competition” constructs [such as Democrats versus Republicans] that substantively undermine representative democracy; building a worldwide network of privatized or “black” prisons and eroding civil liberties; applying brutal and relentless pressure against all dissent; and monopolizing human time. - #3)
(”Flow” is what comes out my ass, when I get the flu. - #119)
(”Creative” is what you get, when you’re out of work, out of money, hungry and have a family of six at home, desperate for you to come through. - #54)
(”Creativity” is a guillotine. #207)
(This creativity regime produces nothing useful except for generations of young people who have no capacity to confront the reality of the corporate, militarized police state they’re about to enter at 18 or 22 or 25, laden in debt, unable to form significant relationships with other real people, and good computer skills. - #428)
(If you want to learn creativity, study Muay Thai or BJJ, Kali or tactical firearm applications. #38)
(I learned more about creativity trying to walk home from school, than I ever did in a classroom. I grew up in a tough neighborhood. - #28)
(When creativity doesn’t work out, there’s always dope. #400)
(Creativity is a lie. #74)
(If you want to check out some great examples of creativity, here are a few: 1) The 2000-2010 takeover of the US public education system by Robber Barons and corporations [a.k.a., “kill the teachers’ unions”]; 2) the Supreme Court’s granting of corporations “free speech” rights in the form of unlimited money spent on political advertising; 3) the defense of torture by Yoo, Addison, Cheney and all their accomplices; 4) the installation of Jeffrey Deitch by Eli Broad and his other Robber Baron clients, especially with regards the skirting of pertinent ethics issues; 5) Subsequent “political” justifications for not prosecuting Bush Administration war crimes or financial sector/corporate treason/war profiteering/fraud… Of course, I could go on and on. We live in a very creative artificial world today. #96)
(Lady Gaga is creative. #418)
