blivet radio
The Radio weblog of Hal Rager

Sunday, March 10, 2002

About an hour ago, we watched the trailer for Episode II, The Attack of the Clones. It looks like it could be very good. 10:19:05 PM    comment   trackback []

The future is not for sissies... Forgive me while I digress. In No picnic, Jonathon mentions Picnic at Hanging Rock, a favorite movie of mine. "Though it's a long time since I watched Picnic at Hanging Rock, Steve's essay [Dreaming our way into the new world at onepotmeal --ed.] brought the film back to me afresh -- particularly the attempts of the newly-arrived settlers to make the Australian landscape conform to their European memories." [Jonathon Delacour, No picnic] Which got me to thinking about some things I hadn't thought about in a while. So I went over to Steve's essay and fell in... "Last night, I watched Peter Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock, based on the true story of the disappearance of some Australian schoolgirls and their governess while on a picnic in 1900. The film follows the months after the disappearance in the lives of the remaining girls at Appleyard College, the headmistress Mrs. Appleyard, and the two young men who were the last to see the girls as they hiked up to the rock and disappeared. The film unfolds in a mythopoetic dreamstate, tying it to a long thread in Australian storytelling linking the bushranging ghosts of Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson to the emotionally stranded bourgeoisie of Patrick White, and the collective historical memories of Thea Astley, and Richard Flanagan - a tradition of storytelling which Weir (along with Nicholas Roeg and others) carried into film. "Australia, like the United States, is a country largely defined by its wilderness tradition, and in Weir's film the English in Victoria think of the bush as a safe, relaxing picnic spot suitable for schoolgirls and retired colonials alike, and it is only when some of their own are taken by the wilderness that they come to examine it as something more. At the heart of it is the question faced by all conquerers, colonists, and tourists then as now: What do we do the morning after the invasion? Waking up in a strange place in which we must now make a home, temporary or permanent, without knowing the names of trees, mountains, or streets (and often arrogantly renaming what already has names), and sometimes not knowing the language is almost a dream state in itself: drifting untouched and unattached through a place where we have no ties and that has no hold on our lives or our pasts. The jarred, jolted feeling that gripped me the first night I camped on the edge of the Australian bush embodied itself in a dream of wandering lost in a boundless rust-colored desert, surrounded by tall, ghost-like figures in wooden masks (and, ultimately, ending in a boat chase with me and Charlie Sheen, for some reason) and after waking from that vision I felt more at ease, and more familiar, in my new landscape. It is only within dreams, perhaps, that we can engage something so new to our lives that we don't even have the words or comparisons to makes sense of it yet. Or in art that arises from dreams and the dream state: in The Art of the First Fleet are pictures of the flora and fauna of Australia drawn by men (exclusively, as far as I can tell) with no frame of reference in which to contain a kangaroo, resulting in kangaroos so far from our current mental image of them as to seem ridiculous. But it isn't ridiculous, it's our minds slowly making sense of the new, and filtering what we see through dreams and memories and visions. At the museum of South Australia once, I spent a long time looking at a collection of children's drawings, all images of how they perceived the bunyip of nightmares and fear. I can't explain why those images resonated so strongly for me, but they did: I recognized somewhere the fears and dreams of the children who drew those bunyips, and felt those same fears and dreamed those dreams as I became more and more aware of a landscape to which I did not belong. "That the film takes place in Australia is important, but the story could be told in other settings and maintain many of its meanings: Apocalypse Now (and Heart of Darkness) comes to mind, as does The Sheltering Sky. The schoolgirls who disappear have embraced the unfamiliar wilderness and its dreamy, hazy world, and when they slip off into it is in a fugue state of sorts, a giving over of themselves. The one girl who doesn't disappear complains her way through the hike, and never fully lets go of the English-style school she pines for. The man who finds one of the lost girls only manages to do so after losing himself in the bush, relying on another to find him. All the while, the headmistress, Mrs. Appleyard, works to maintain the rituals and minutia of England, and in the films most revealing scene longs drunkenly for 'dependable, unchanging Bournemouth'. That scene, and one of a tails-and-tophats garden party at the Colonel's house, reminded me of stories I was told by friends of their families burning yule logs under a roof draped with rolls of artificial snow during the hot, summery Christmas of Australia. Mrs. Appleyard struggles throughout the story against her unlikely nemesis, the orphan Sara who is the only girl not allowed on the picnic - struggling, in fact, against both Sara and against her own desire to abuse Sara, the tragic but compassionate flaw at the heart of the character. Sara, as an orphan from the gold rush town of Ballarat, represents everything Mrs. Appleyard (like any colonist, invader, or nostalgic tourist) doesn't want to accept: the subject slipping from her grasp. Sara is an orphan, currently under Mrs. Appleyard's watch, but she represents a new Australia and a new world guaranteed to buck what Mrs. Appleyard holds dear, an Australia not of Botany Bay and convicts, but of goldminers and self-determination. An Australia embracing and coming slowly to terms with wildness and wilderness, and merging it's mock-English world with the world of its dreams." [Dreaming our way into the new world at onepotmeal] Every moment we're thrust into a New World of change ("The 10,000 things die and are born again each instant." --Lao Tsu) and we can never go back to the 'England' of our past. I know it sounds trite, but we can't be anyplace other than where we are. I tell myself that frequently. Deserts bring out the 'otherness' (for me at least) better than any other sort of place. I certainly hadn't noticed the theme of resisting change in Picnic, but it seems like a good excuse to watch it again. I try to tell myself that we can depend on is change when the fear of change waltzes around in my monkey mind. Steve's view of Picnic at Hanging Rock very thought provkoing, enough so that this little narrative wants to go off in several directions at once, so I'll stop here for now. I recommend this movie highly if you haven't seen it. 9:09:05 PM    comment   trackback []

Targeted patch foraging took place today at some multi-national temples of commerce. We got practical stuff like jeans and underwear, Ian got some cute baby stuff. 8:49:52 PM    comment   trackback []

There are three new Ian pictures linked to from his page at blivet. [update: fixed the urls] 8:42:42 PM    comment   trackback []