Dita von Teese, her name itself harkens back to some past era of mystique, sexuality and glamor. With her luscious curves and corset trained body, she is a woman who has dedicated her life to the craft of burlesque. For those unfamiliar with burlesque, it is the art that mixes strip tease with vaudeville - sexy, playful, and always a fabulous show. This last Tuesday marked the last night of the San Francisco leg of “The Queen of Burlesque” and her talented entourage’s tour. I was lucky enough to score a last minute ticket and check out this fantastically magical show with some good friends.
The Fillmore was full of patrons decked out in retro outfits and fanciful ware. The drinks were large but pricey and there was already a line of enthusiasts at the table selling all sorts of risque swag. I must say, as a virile young man, that I was ultimately as distracted as a puppy in a yard full of bouncing balls with all the beautiful tattooed women in their vintage dresses and done up hair, until the MC drew the attention of the crowd behind a gigantic blue curtain. The crowd silenced, then exploded like a tsunami with the mere mention of Miss von Teese.
In his book “Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics, and Materiality,” Tim Edensor reflects upon modern day Britain’s regulation of urban space, citing trends and realities which pervade urban space globally:
“As the contemporary city becomes increasingly subject to regimes of regulation and demarcation, space tends to be divided up and assigned for specific kinds of activities, whether for shopping, playing, living, or working. Challenges to these boundaries are policed so that, for instance, it is deemed inappropriate to dance in shopping malls or to live or sell goods on the side of the street. Within this authoritative spatialization… certain spaces are deemed suitable for nothing… Industrial ruins belong to this assignation…”¹
In the San Francisco Bay Area, and I mention this specifically because this is a blog focused upon Bay Area writers, this “authoritative spatialization” is pervasive, especially in the more urban areas of San Francisco and the East Bay. Other cities, Detroit being a good example, approach the post-apocalyptic in their presence of ruins. In the Bay Area however, ruins are often demarcated for redevelopment. Places such as Treasure Island and Hunters Point shipyard are to be swept off the map by urban planners and turned into green recreational space and high priced condos.
In essence, society has no patience for the aesthetic of the industrial ruin. Personally, I have made ruins the focus of my filmmaking for the past two and a half years. It is ironic then that, in my pursuit of using these sites photographically, I am often subjected to security guards and no trespassing signs. Society, with its myth of private property, seeks to enforce the disuse of ruins, just as it reinforces appropriate activities within the public sphere.
This is not a movie. This is not some crappy film projected onto a moth eaten screen in some shit-hole theater with a bunch of morons laughing at all the wrong jokes and wiping their fat, sugar-coated, hands all over the hideous burgundy velvet-wrapped seats as they spill popcorn all over the poorly lit aisles. This is not some high-definition top-of-the-line technology on a wide format flat-panel television in my friends’ living room where the cheap beer and cigarette breaks interrupt us constantly. This is not some ripped download on my laptop in my bedroom at two in the afternoon when I’m trying to pretend I’m not hung-over, but unwilling to use my head for anything that resembles thought and avoiding movement because of the shards of glass that shoot throughout my blood stream with every cough and shudder.
This is not a movie. This is not overblown special effects distracting you from a razor-thin plotline and dialogue written by a hydrocephalic teenager on Ritalin being phoned in by hack actors who get by on good looks and back room blow jobs. This is not a soundtrack anchored down thoroughly by shitty songs from today’s popular bands to create emotional responses that the horrible script and banal actors couldn’t evoke if their life depended upon it. This is not chopped up strips of film slapped together by an editor fresh out of the UCLA film department with a worthless degree and delusions of grandeur pretending that non-chronological structuring is avant-garde or anything more than pseudo-intellectual pretension.
This is a play. This is a real theater, with a hand built set back dropping the actors who have spent weeks perfecting their motions for hours of lines that they have memorized. Night after night they perform in front of an audience, and only have one chance to get it right for each member of the audience. They have no cutting room floor for their mistakes to dissolve into. They have no photo processing effects to disguise the faces they make. They have to convey line after memorized line with clarity and timing more precise than the atomic clock in order to evoke the emotions of the audience, no matter what emotion, be it humor or tragedy, appall or shock. They have no green screen to create the illusion of scene long after they have retired to their trailers to snort lines of cocaine off transvestite hookers’ asses. They have to pretend like little boys and girls playing in a fort built of couch cushions with such intensity that the audience is sucked in entirely, forgetting that they are sharing this space in a building in downtown wherever, with their lives on hold for an hour, maybe two. This is where audience members have a sense of participation, throughout their stifled coughs and intense fascination. This is where actors have to time their lines to react to the audience’s laughter or gasps of surprise. This is where thespians truly perfect their art.
Not long ago, some of my fellow film students and I embarked on an assignment. It forced us together to do a collaborative film project, so I came up with the idea that each of us could go to the Tenderloin district in San Francisco and video the neighborhood at different points during the day. Well, due to a mixture of what was probably laziness and time constraint, we decided to just walk through the neighborhood together and capture whatever we could capture. What resulted was an odd film…it painted a contested image of the Tenderloin, known of course for its crumbling architecture, prostitutes, and drug addicts. But it is actually so, so much more. It was a study of the grotesque of San Francisco; the grotesque being what could possibly be a model to interpret the city’s primal layers.
What is the grotesque? Originally, the term appeared in the 16th century describing some odd statues surrounding a Roman villa. But since its rooms were below ground level, its Renaissance observers mistook them for grottos, along with the connotations which grottos often have: earthiness, darkness, and death¹. Even now, at least in terms of art history, the grotesque still exists on the periphery of the art systemic, mostly because it has never been defined with any solidity. Culture in many ways is imagistic, and because so often the grotesque is fundamentally imagistic, we may interpret the former through the latter. Of course this does not mean that the grotesque is simply confined to the visual. The image is only the end result, whether or not it is constructed through sound, text, the visual, etc. In the introduction to the text “Modern Art and the Grotesque,” Francis S. Connelly writes, “Grotesque…describes the aberration from ideal form or category, to create the misshapen, ugly, exaggerated, or even formless.” The Tenderloin is one body of the San Francisco grotesque.
The very first time I took my little sister out in San Francisco made me very aware of just how fucked up my view of reality is. [FULL DISCLOSURE.. this was just the first time I took my sister out and realized she had no grasp of my plush lifestyle]
I had the whole day off.
We started at Red's Corner. Just to make this intro really easy to understand, I'll sum it up this way...
"Hello little sister... this is"...
Black man 1, 2, 3... Jew 1, 2, 3... White guy 1, 2, 3.. Black man 1, 2...
Anyhow...
Towards the end of the night, we walked up to the front door of a Jazz club in my hood and Jimmy.. a 6'5 brother (in his 40's) in a suit who looks like he could kill me in 3 seconds. I introduce him to my sister. "Jimmy... this is my sister. If you've got a younger brother anything like you, I'd LOVE to set him up on a date with her..."
My sister is in shock and ultimately tells me, in private... "I thought you hated Jews and ..."....
[I was such a bad rapper that I actually sat at a table at my favorite coffee shop and had the entire group of black women sitting with me convince someone at another table not to kick my ass while I went to take a piss. Really. That bad of a rapper. Seriously..]
SUCH IS THE LIFE OF A POLISH.. JEWISH... GANGSTAH RAPPAH....
We have a time machine. 20 years ago...
Like all Plafrican Americans, I grew up listening to N.W.A... I bought my Raiders cap and jacket (via allowance). I was tough. I was pimp. I actually had to ask someone was a posse was. So.. like all suburban white kids, I learned how to rap. Kinda. A Raiders jacket, saying "yo momma" a lot, and having one of my friends shove me back into the car as soon as I said something really really stupid was more like it.
But all of a sudden... I felt a rush.. *scratch*.. and the plight of MY people needed to be felt... *scratch*... well, the plight of someone needed to be... *scratch*... *BEATBOX*...
I WEAR POLYESTHER... I WALK WITH A LIMP...
I had something to talk about. I had a message....
I TAKE OFF MY YAMAKA.. YOUR GIRLIE TAKES OFF HER BRA...
I... became... a gangster rapper.
[Goofy, white, glasses, listening to Eazy-E... no.. really.. it was that bad]
We got a crew together. It was Jerry K (Jewish; lawyer), Slinky Slava (Jewish; accountant).. it is kinda funny how everyone in the "crew" actually fell into the stereotype, but anyhow... We had a group of people together, everyone of them a Jew (and then me.. Jew via osmosis).
CUZ I'M JEW LIKE THAT.. I'M HE-BREW LIKE THAT...
Our crew had to represent. We had to be Kosher. We had to like Kielbasa (because sausage is fucking awesome).. and we had to be together. Kinda like.. Oh shit. So we were the Kosher Kielbasa Krew. The worst acronym that ever existed for a rap group. Everyone in the band had someone killed in a concentration camp, beaten to death, and the lives of their immediate family were destroyed by evil in recent memory. Yet our acronym was [not willing to say it... you know what it is].. oh that was horrible.
So we got a hold of pictures from one of their hate zines and re-used it. White pointy hoods.. (with yamakas)... surrounded by stars of david and sausages. We took the acronym back.
I SPIN... HER SHOES GET WET.. AND NOW SHE NEEDS TO LIGHT.. A NEW CIGARETTE...
So our gang went to Marshall's, got white t-shirts, and a bunch of iron-on bubble letters (as well as the fuzzy ones that are squarish..) and came up with the following ways to take the J in JEW back...
WHAT JEW TALKING ABOUT?.. (JEW = YOU) WHAT JEW TALKIN BOUT.. (see.. TALKIN=TALKING, ABOUT=BOUT, cool eh?) JEW KNOW WHAT I'M SAYING.. (JEW = YOU) JAMBA JEWS.. (JEW = JUICE) GET JEW ME A BEER... (uhmm.. nevermind).
...
Bring me a microphone... Bring me a topic... I'll be able to make things happen.
...
Back in the day it was a dream to have a group of friends together. It was more of a dream to have a rap group together and have the ability to put together a few tracks. Having the opportunity to get in front of the [soon-to-be-famous local bands] at random venues and spit a few lyrics was one of the best experiences of my life.
Having the confidence to show up in a Minivan in a ghetto club when you're the only white guy there and the MC scratches the microphone on purpose when you are introduced... [everyone in the crowd gives the "kill whitey" look]...
.. and then freestyling (while nearly pissing your pants).. and totally destroying one of the locals expecting an easy pass on the first round...
Everyone in the crowd instantly shows you some respect. Because you can go on for a few verses.. include the color of his hat.. incorporate his last diss on you.. and, you are creative on the microphone.
...
As a last word, and in all seriousness... calling someone a Jew isn't offensive. If you think it is, you have a fucked up view of reality. Saying the N-word, even academically, IS offensive. Listening to NPR recently, I heard it said over and over again as part of academia.
So...
I GO TO KFC.. ORDER A BIG BUCKET OF CHICKEN... ANY GIRLS AROUND THAT I CAN STICK MY DICK IN? OH SNAP I'M SO FUCKING FRESH... BURN THE MICROPHONE LIKE DAVE KORESH...
“What is true art” is a problematic question…much more so than seeking the identification of art itself: in relation to the object, what is it about that object that exalts it above everydayness into its carrying the signature of human intentionality, and thus, the attachment of meaning to its frame. An object can have both intentionality and meaning and still not be art. So let’s take an object that has both intentionality and meaning, and make it beautiful…is it art then? Well, a wall clock can be all of these things, but it is most of the time not art, it’s a craft, though perhaps an artfully made craft. We are now thrown into the relative world of opinion, where there are no rules, only the spherical thoughts and proclamations of well intentioned individuals, both artist and not.
Henceforth, there is something extra that art needs to be art. It is this and only this: power. Art is a discourse, one whose identity is constantly changing due to the machinations of curators, critics, collectors, theoreticians, students, and artists themselves. The reality of art is a consensual reality within which all of these people often passively agree to a collective hallucination. It is inauthentic to say “art is this” or “art is that.” As is any discourse, the discourse of art, and thus its definition, is changing moment to moment.
Power as a concept has been articulated best by Nietzsche, and under his influence, the philosopher Michel Foucault went further. Foucault proposed a model for power by giving us an image: the Panopticon. The Panopticon is a multi-sided prison, shaped much like a hexagon or some such thing. At each side there is a prison cell, and at the top of the building there is a prison tower which cannot be seen by cells at the ground floor. Prisoners inhabit these cells, and they never know whether they are being watched or not. Therefore, there is no need of a guard since the prisoners police their own behavior. Such as it is with discourse…I am a mental patient because of psychiatric discourse. I am an artist because I am shaped by the discourse of art. Under the watchful eyes of those that shape the discourse of art, I respond to art as a discourse and modify my own behavior, whether that means accepting the publicly sanctioned truth of art or rejecting it. Even those that supposedly define the discourse of art are shaped by it; the power of art transcends its discursive legions.
Truth in art lies in power. What art is, what art is “true”, is sanctioned by a schema of arbiters. Curators, critics, and collectors are the gate keepers. They decide whether a work of art is authentic, exciting, and worthy of exposure to a supposedly knowledge hungry public.
However, apart from this, how can we ask what true art is without getting lost in a sea of opinion? The answer is easy, but also harrowing. Foucault was asked once that since he believed that power was inescapable, how can one possibly transcend it? Predictably, he answered that it is impossible to escape power’s influence, but none the less, one must resist for resistance’s sake. It is the same for art I believe. The institution of art martials its power to fix the definition of what is “true” about art, and it is up to those who have been marginalized by it to step up and shake the foundations of said institution, even given the fact that all that they do will simply also be marginalized and incorporated into a new and “truer” art carcass. A professor of mine proclaimed that art school was a prison, thus equating professors with prison guards and students with prisoners. However, next to the prison lay a river, and it was the ever flowing and ever changing meaning of art…life giving and annihilating, as it is a river that can cleave through mountains. Even if all we can do is stare at the water through our prison bars, we can know that freedom exists out there somewhere, and that without our struggle it could never exist at all.
My friend, collaborator, and artist Steven Leyba has been interested in searching out a collective definition as to what art "is" by posing the question to an array of different practitioners. In his film What is Art? Inside the Mind of the Artist as They Speak the Truth, he interviews such legendary figures as David J of Bauhaus, Genesis P'orridge of Throbbing Gristle, and H.R. Giger. Check out the trailer below.
If you're interested, the film can be purchased here on DVD for $15. Steven will also be creating a book on the theme of what constitutes true art, and the above text is my submission to its collection of articles.
Yes. Many in the art world regard him as a joke, nuisance or a vandal. Well they probably got the vandal part right. Society today is spattered with musicians and other artists that are on the edge that will probably never go mainstream but if they do we will still support them. Two that come straight to mind are Gogol Bordello and Henry Rollins. They are doing what they love for the love of it. How many bands have official after-party lists that sell that many records? John Waters had this as a theme at his talk at Coachella this past weekend. His point was that many of the fringe artists that he grew up with and worked along side would now be able to flourish in today’s connected society. This only gets better over time. If some magic is happening at a punk show in Rhode Island it is on YouTube that night. Yes, there is a lot of schlock out there but if you dig seep enough you can get to the good stuff.
On that note Banksy was in SF and I feel privileged to have finally seen his work up close. The work that he does incorporates it’s surroundings and speaks volumes that it is one block from Bank of America’s headquarters. Among my favorites is his work done in the Gaza Strip. Children floating with balloons or paradise just on the other side of the 20ft concrete wall. He is willing to put his life on the line for his art. How many can say the same?
Rene Magritte's classic painting states "This is not a pipe." With the inception of semiotics, fine artists from all over the world became obsessed with pointing out the difference between referring to an object in written or verbal language, versus one in three dimensional space, as in installation or sculpture, text about something in a painting, an object in a photograph, etc. What does a painting of a pipe have to do with a real pipe? There's a entire class at the San Francisco Art Institute entitled "Visual Translations" that deals with this topic. Martha Rosler brought the issue into video art with her Semiotics of the Kitchen in 1975. Here it is below for your reference, if at least for a minute:
This is not, however, a bankrupt line of reasoning, but rather a fascinating and even psychedelic discourse that has occupied me throughout my time in art academia, at least in cursory glance to the ideas of Jacques Derridas, but most recently I've become aware of the contributions that the filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini has made to the world of semiotics, at least tangentially via film theory. Pasolini was always a semiotician who was almost thoroughly rebuked by other theorists, his contributions to the field being disregarded at the time of his writing, though in recent times he has had at least some acknowledgement for them outside the field of film theory. I'll priviledge you with a quote from his seminal text Heretical Empiricism:
"Let us consider: in a film a shot of a boy with black curly hair and black laughing eyes, a face covered with acne, a slightly swollen throat, like that of someone hyperthyroidal, and an amusing, festive expression which emanates from his entire being. Does this shot of a film perhaps refer to a social pact made of symbols, which cinema would be if defined by analogy to "langue" (written language)? Yes, it does refer to this social pact, but this social pact, not being symbolic, cannot be distinguished from reality."
This is a very controversial, if not somewhat ambiguous, statement of the nature of the signifier in cinema. If "a pipe" in written language refers to an actual pipe, what does, in cinema, a shot of a pipe refer to? This next quote, also from Heretical Empricism, further illustrates the issue, at least in cinematic terms:
"Let us consider a pure sequence shot: that is, the audiovisual reproduction, taken from a subjective point of view, of a fragment of the infinite succession of things and actions which I could potentially reproduce. Such a pure sequence shot would be constituted by an extraordinarily boring succession of insignificant things and actions. What happens to me and appears before me in five minutes of my life would become, when projected on a screen, something absolutely without interest, completely irrelevant. This does not occur in reality, because my body is living and those five minutes are five minutes of vital soliloquy by reality with itself."
Well, in the 1960s, Structuralist cinema took on just this boring task. While not necessarily sharing Pasolini's exact concerns, Structuralist filmmakers such as the Canadian Michael Snow set out to question the fundamentals of film language, atomizing it down into its components, such as the shot, the dolly, the zoom, etc. Michael Snow's Wavelength consists of a twenty minute zoom across a room into a postcard, of, well, waves (sea waves). During the filming, people enter and exit the room, seemingly unaware of the camera's presence. It is just as Pasolini describes... that a real experience could be reduced to a boring and meaningless cinematic experience. Such experiments did however consequently make viewers more aware of cinematic space versus real space, because they would inevitably get bored and start looking around the theater, looking at the other viewers faces to see how they were reacting to the work, and generally becoming very aware of how different this film was compared to, I don't know, being hypnotized by the Wizard of Oz or something. Here, check out Wavelength for just a minute to see what I mean:
Inevitably, as Pasolini states, we get to the "various conscious ceremonial acts; from the archaic magic ones to those established by the norms of good behavior of contemporary bourgeois culture. And finally, and always imperceptibly, reaching the various symbolic but not sign-dependent languages of humanity: the languages in which man, to express himself, uses his own body, his own form. Religious representations, mimes, dances, theatrical productions belong to THESE TYPES OF REPRESENTATIONAL, LIVING LANGUAGES. And so, too, cinema."
So, the "social pact" of the array of signifiers of a young italian boy's face is "not symbolic," and therefore "cannot be distinguished from reality." They are cinematic signs, not symbols, and therefore they cannot be distinguished from reality, and perhaps can be more real in their realtion to the real than the word "pipe." But, at the same time, cinema is one of the various "symbolic but not sign-dependent languages of humanity." So, which is it? Is it a network of visual signifiers or symbols? A symbol has a message, a history, a metonymic identity. A signifier has an object in reality. Pasolini makes both of these contentions in the same text, and not only that, but within two pages of eachother. His message is therefore ambiguous at best, but it does lead me to reflect on my own opinions. He contends that film has a special relationship to reality because cinema is like "writing on burning paper." You can describe a sequence of actions on a page, but once you decide to film that sequence of actions, you now have to consider that this sequence will now be rendered within time due to the nature of the medium. Written language is to a certain degree fixed, but the cinema can capture something as it unfolds in time. Pasolini therefore extends the notion of the written text to a cinematic text: the text of action, of behavior. This is not even meaningless if you are dealing with a still shot of a pipe, because it may appear to be still, and therefore timeless as in a photograph, but it is not. It is being filmed in the fourth dimension... as the recording of it is being projected, you may be fooled into thinking that nothing is happening, but there indeed is something happening, the pipe is existing in time. Does this have a priveledged relation to reality over, say, a painting of a pipe, or a photograph of one, or a written description of a pipe? All good questions. Clearly, the action of objects or bodies on the screen can exist as texts, as visual signifiers, as symbols. They can be all three at the same time, and more. It's really just a matter of conscious experience in relation to the medium. Pasolini himself in his film Mamma Roma experiments with these different modes. He restages the last supper in the first scene in a wedding feast, unfolds the symbolically Freudian dream of an Italian prostitute (its subject being her son and his father), and mocks up the said Prostitute's son's death visually in the mode of the crucifixion. The following film of mine deals with the "still" in relation to industrial environments, and it will be important for you to watch this, as it contextualizes the rest of this article. Try to watch the whole thing, will you? Chris Marker's Le Jetee, a narrative film made entirely of cinematic stills, was inspirational with respect to this work of mine. It's called The Circle to Vanish:
Why do I even bother with these ideas? Well, it's not a long story, with it's real life duration being about one year, while I've been immersed in my graduate level art studies. Last year I took a class called Style Wars that dealt with different theories of style in general. As a final project, I chose to deal with Industrial Music style. In searching for images for my presentation, I ran across such items as this:
Clearly, Goth and Industrial subculture has opted to appropriate the gas mask as a symbol. It has a rich history: gas warfare and the subsequent societal paranoia of being gassed. Pasolini himself tries to break down the components of cinematic laguage into its respective parts. Not just down to the shot, but down to the objects in a shot, just as one would break down a one sentence description of a real life situation into its component words and even syllables. Want to portray a teacher teaching a class? Obviously, you don't place a college professor in front of a firing range. Well, you could. It would be an unorthodox college course, but you could. Anyway, you put him in a lecture hall in front of a blackboard. The objects of the shot are its signifiers, and so too, symbols, and their network constitutes Pasolini's "social pact." A real life situation is described and given meaning. The social pact of a goth girl wearing a gas mask cashes in on the gas mask's social history as symbol and signifier. The social pact of the below picture elicits a different meaning:
Pretty trippy, huh? Dogs in gas masks, a soldier at ready in his. The gas mask in this shot is not just signifier, but it is history being made, and its placement within the matrix of the photograph constitutes a different world. You can place the object in different contexts and exploit its history, make it mean different things, and not just describe an objective situation. The punks did this with fashion in the 1970s. Safety pins were no longer used for sewing, and bondage gear was no longer used for sexual sadism. These things were worn in absurd relation. Bruce Conner did it with found footage, and the Surrealists did it with collage. Negativland would be and is proud.
So, anyway, in my work I usually set out to portray and poeticize abandoned, industrial, and post-apocalyptic environments, as you saw in the previous film. Last semester I was working on it, and I wanted to introduce into to it a unique symbology. A grouping of symbols in a symbolic situation that would serve to enhance the industrial qualities of the images that I was presenting on screen. Industrial in the sense that I was invoking the various themes laid out within say, this early Industrial Records image that really inspired me... the association of the body with an industrial environment, or in the case of the next film I'll show you, the body in relation to an environment symbolizing death:
For me, even if it is not apparent, death was in some way a thematic in The Circle to Vanish. So, industriality, the circularity of life and death, and the introduction of the "play" of symbols within the text of my film. Half asleep some months earlier, I thought to film a friend of mine hula-hooping in the Piedmont, Oakland graveyard wearing a gas mask. So, we shot the thing, and incidentally she decided to wear a school-girl outfit for it too. Well, the footage didn't fit with the film of mine that I just showed you. I showed the hula-hooping footage to one professor, who said it was campy and useless. Then months later, I showed it to another, and he said it was just flat out absurd. Still, I wanted to use it. A friend of mine had the idea to maybe de-campify it by cutting it together with more serious footage. Well, in my dedication to using the material, that's what I did. What is a gas mask's purpose? To protect a soldier or citizen from poison gas during warfare or the conditions of a war. So, working with found footage, I sought to ground or stabilize the image of the gas mask with found footage that explored its history as both symbol and signifier, and thus the history of gas warfare. After cutting the film together, I showed it to the second professor again. The effect was entirely different. He was moved by the hula-hooping, gas mask wearing school girl. The graveyard setting, made relevant by its relation to the death imbued footage of two world wars, ceased to be simply a cliche'd student filming location. The footage worked. So, Pasolini, gas masks, Magritte, et al. In the past few weeks, all of these seemingly unrelated things sort of came together for me. I was looking for a way to present yet another film and theoretical text on this blog, so here you have it. I apologize if it isn't phD quality, if I've misused and misquoted the theoreticians in the article, misunderstood their ideas, and if my logic is utterly illogical and if it is overwhelmed by holes. Well, I try, I really do. Feel free to contact me with your condemnations. Anyway, you want to see the film, right? It's entitled The Eternal Recurrence. I named it that after the philosophical concept of the same name introduced by Nietzsche. It was his own version of reincarnation in a sense. When we die, we become again, and we live the same life that we lived before, if not exactly the same. For him also, warfare has always had a forming relation on culture. I thought that war in general seems to have a circularity to it, and a certain absurdity. Hence, the hula-hoop. So, not to delay things any further, the film...
Smithee 
