What a pefect blog day to admit that I cried at Bend It Like Beckham yesterday. Combination fantasy of being integrated / wholly oneself with one’s family, and a joyful kind of athleticism. That one thing can spiritually “match” another thing despite an essential difference of containers.
Also realized yesterday that I’m ready to cry the minute the lights go down. I’m on cue with the movie. Just give me one bar of music, even! I was geared up to cry at the trailers and strangely disappointed when they were scary. That swimming pool movie.
Have been trying to type about popular culture / reception / giving oneself over to drivel. No good. Tired. Time for bed – but, Kasey, although I’m probably too flexible with the term in my own thinking, I think there IS something to your stoned version of negative capability. Isn’t simultaneous critical reception of an image or movie or song and being knocked over by it emotionally a kind of negative capability? There’s something in there about giving into or swimming out into the ocean of drivel without fearing that it may ‘contaminate’ a purely critical response. i.e. not being afraid of it! a kind of orgiastic response to the medium of the culture itself instead of standing outside/(above) and critiquing it. This sounds an awful lot like something I hate, writers who live through something for ‘experience’ and then cut out early to write about it. But I don’t think that’s exactly it. I also find a particular value in living at least partly through whatever historical/cultural moment I may find myself in. Which circles around, again, to the problem of the church. Being “in the world but not of it.” Can’t get away from that phrase this year. How the modern protestant community in the U.S. has ended up creating imitations / point by point substitutes for the popular icons it tries so hard to avoid. Some idea of cultural purity. This is also the problem of being a consumer, period. And it’s definitely the problem of Las Vegas, which I’m not going to figure out in a night, even if I stay up too late.
June 30, 2003 * 11:32 pm
