dirtywrite by Dimitri Mittens

introduction to asspresionism

noreply@blogger.com (dirtywrite) — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 00:57:00 +0000

Could I look at, say, Emma Watson, and see her as a donkey would? Not immediately, no; but with practice and moderate research...

Could I then apply this skill to my perception of Stephen Hawking, hay, and water?

In time, with further studies and experiments, might I stumble upon ways to engage equus asinus aesthetically? Might I even make myself into a serviceable donkey artist? Perhaps even a notable one?

Would that not constitute an extraordinary achievement for any ape, I am asking you Guggenheim curator Carmen Gimenez?

My talents would then have found the winning audience they deserve.

salgamos a volar, querida mia

noreply@blogger.com (dirtywrite) — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 07:07:00 +0000

Institute unflinching beat to keep good cheer from leaking out. Take me homeward, to the lyrically and carnally bluegrass a la Kharkov de Perestroika. Dreamy be your unbroken English and unstoppable its charms.

Insinuate nomadic disposition of the romantic, then let me ascribe frivolous meanings to your frivolity.

Passions unsettle; then deepen in the unsettled, cyclonically.
Feelings grow on vectors; vector fields yield nectar.
Ping-pong envies our hyper-receptive, viper-reflexive interplay.

wandering round the ping-pong table
singing ja, ja, yippee, yippee, ja
stars

blank swan

noreply@blogger.com (dirtywrite) — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 03:01:00 +0000

I love our society for its perfectionism. When a baseball player does not run out a groundball, he is booed mercilessly by the fans. If the doors of a department store are still locked one minute after its scheduled opening time, some righteous shopper starts knocking. If a doctor does as little as amputate the wrong extremity, the capricious patient is sure to run crying to a lawyer.

To my chagrin, we tolerate laziness and incompetence in writing more so than in other activities. Even prestigious publications regularly release utter garbage into the public domain. Let me share with you the highlights of a piece I recently read in the New Yorker: a film review of Black Swan – a movie I haven’t seen – composed by veteran scribe David Denby.

Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan is a luridly beautiful farrago — a violent fantasia that mixes the tensions of preparing a new production of Swan Lake with sex, blood, and horror-film flourishes.

It’s immediately evident that Mr. Denby is a skilled wordsmith: production value here is quite high. However, fancy lingual choreography makes for a sparse garden of letters if it is not interwoven with a clear and consistent thinking process, ability to verbalize one’s findings and emotions, and knowledge of the subject.

Mr. Denby writes:

The film is often ridiculous, yet there are startlingly beautiful sequences; right at the beginning, Nina dances, under a spotlight, in a white tutu against a vibrant black background.

What does the critic have in mind when calling the film as a whole “often ridiculous” (whatever that means): the plot, the setting, the characters, the dialogue, or all of the above? Such sweeping judgments served without explanation are just name calling; they do not inform readers about the movie.

“The film is often ridiculous, yet there are startlingly beautiful sequences”: why are the ridiculous and the beautiful viewed as inherently conflicting? There can be much beauty in the absurd; this idea has been explored so much in the last century and a half of literature and art that it has become a cliché.

Off the dance floor, however, Black Swan is trashy and incoherent. Aronofsky, for all his gifts, is a gaudy maestro, opportunistic and insecure as an artist.

“Opportunistic as an artist”: what does this tell us? Artistry emanates from curiosity and hunger, so an artist is by definition opportunistic. This expression is either tautological or incoherent, and its negative connotation is puzzling.

Saying that Aronofsky is insecure as an artist while offering no basis for this claim is just “trashy”, to use one of Denby’s mots des critique. Presumably the next sentences in the review are meant to shed light on Mr. Denby's psychological prowess:

Almost every sequence is shot with a handheld camera, and poor Nina can’t go anywhere — not even down a corridor — without the camera stalking her. Aronofsky keeps us in a state of anxiety from beginning to end.

Heavy use of a handheld camera is not even a metaphor for a director’s personal insecurity as an artist – it is its indicator. It is absurd, and not beautiful.

Black Swan is a pompous, self-glorifying, and generally unpleasant interpretation of an artist’s task.

And Shakespeare's Macbeth, for example, is unassuming and self-effacing?!

Mr. Denby uses “general pleasantness” (whatever that means) as a criterion for aesthetic judgment. That rules out Goya and Van Gogh, Dostoyevsky and Kafka, Bach and Coltrane – to name a few almost universally admired artists.

Funny I mentioned Shakespeare:

The picture is too bizarre to be a desecration of Swan Lake, which is as indestructible as Macbeth.

Let me see if I got it. If the picture were less bizarre (whatever that means), it would have succeeded as a desecration of Swan Lake, but not as its destruction.

Saying that one celebrated and relentlessly staged and re-staged classic - Swan Lake - is equally indestructible (whatever that means) as another - Macbeth is akin to saying that one cucumber is as friendly as another cucumber.

One phrase reveals the shocking aesthetic immaturity of its author: “This flick is too bizarre!” is a take one might expect from a sugar-frothed middle-schooler, but I had higher hopes for a person in one of the most coveted jobs available for a professional film critic.

Seeing new interpretations of classic productions as potentially desecrating and destructive bespeaks such a comprehensive lack of awareness of the art of the past two centuries that I can't help peeing into my figurative pants from righteous fury.

Mr. Denby's review of Black Swan is in turns meaningless and incoherent, and filthy rich in idiotic angles, all the while maintaining a high production value. It’s bad, bad, degenerate writing.

Unfortunately, this article in one of the most respected cultural publications in the US is not an exception from the norm. If you rarely notice laziness and logical contradictions, I invite you to challenge yourself to read and listen more actively and critically. Feel free to get as pissed at pretentious garbage published in your favorite magazine as you do when you favorite baseball player does not run down a groundball.

romeo assange

noreply@blogger.com (dirtywrite) — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 06:18:00 +0000

What stolen secrets shouldn't be released into the public domain?

If the answer is an empty or near-empty set, is that a good thing? A community with no secrets and no privacy - where a thought committed to non-volatile memory is potentially open source - stipulates safe thinking. How is unconditional transparency conducive for free ideation?

noreply@blogger.com (dirtywrite) — Sat, 27 Nov 2010 19:58:00 +0000

Moderation is often deployed as a risk management tactic when we sense that our knowledge of an issue is incomplete, yet we can't help stating a position. (Sometimes the motivation for such behavior is more sinister.) Successfully executed, this maneuver leads to us making peace with our ignorance and growing in misguided confidence. Before long we are caught in a positive feedback loop.

Hold no view in moderation; take a hypothesis (or a technique) to the extreme - that's how you discover its merits and limitations.

Rinse and repeat.

noreply@blogger.com (dirtywrite) — Sat, 13 Nov 2010 22:11:00 +0000

I adore you, Natalie Imbruglia - as a man, a father, and as a couple. As a scientist, I don't object to your earthly timbres.

towards understanding art

noreply@blogger.com (dirtywrite) — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 00:31:00 +0000

Mathematics ... is not a spectator sport. To understand mathematics means to be able to do mathematics ... to solve mathematical problems.

The wolf that understands the lamb is lost, will die of hunger, will not have understood the lamb, will have been wrong about the wolf - and almost everything remains for it to learn about being.

noreply@blogger.com (dirtywrite) — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 07:06:00 +0000

Blanchot's most impenetrable paragraphs and Musil's narrative stalemates as masterclasses in contesting virtuosity.

noreply@blogger.com (dirtywrite) — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 06:23:00 +0000

Why is it that the writing that puts itself in the hands of its ability to beguile emotions so rarely deals with them with notable creativity or depth?

noreply@blogger.com (dirtywrite) — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 22:30:00 +0000

Future one-liners moved to http://twitter.com/dirtywrite

noreply@blogger.com (dirtywrite) — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 01:56:00 +0000

one-night concession stand in the shadows of love

noreply@blogger.com (dirtywrite) — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 15:59:00 +0000

the handbag the stronger personality

noreply@blogger.com (dirtywrite) — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 04:25:00 +0000

songwriter-singer: monkey see, monkey do

noreply@blogger.com (dirtywrite) — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 23:36:00 +0000

a game one could stay ahead of is a drill

noreply@blogger.com (dirtywrite) — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 02:04:00 +0000

- i love you
- i love you punditto

(i have doubts about whether this is comprehensible; usually that's a reason to continue rewriting. however, this time there are reasons to comment outside:

obviously, it's a reification of the unavoidable lovetalk pattern
too equals ditto
pun is here to propose a view of i love you too as not only a cliche reply but also a wordplay/variation of the initial declaration.
finally, somewhere in the background there is pundit entailed from pun bandit - a tonal proposition if nothing else)

noreply@blogger.com (dirtywrite) — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 01:43:00 +0000

baroccoli

noreply@blogger.com (dirtywrite) — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 01:06:00 +0000

roundtable tannis racket

topographical features of good intentions

noreply@blogger.com (dirtywrite) — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 16:03:00 +0000

the high road is paved for high horses on high hills

poet in white, volume 5

noreply@blogger.com (dirtywrite) — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 05:12:00 +0000

locomotif Potemkin
moonwheels self-propelled along the tango tracks

appointive piantao, piantao
battleship manilow in pentimento

noreply@blogger.com (dirtywrite) — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 17:26:00 +0000

the happy weapon is the face (of the monkey on the back) of the intellectual arsenal

to dan brown

noreply@blogger.com (dirtywrite) — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 03:07:00 +0000

Theme Parking Lotto San Pietro

sniper

noreply@blogger.com (dirtywrite) — Sun, 17 May 2009 03:35:00 +0000

think the box

pathologically explosive lettuce and tomato salad

noreply@blogger.com (dirtywrite) — Sat, 09 May 2009 19:51:00 +0000

Credits:

noreply@blogger.com (dirtywrite) — Fri, 08 May 2009 16:58:00 +0000

echo friendly Average Beverage - potable simplicity in an infinite self-recycling loop

noreply@blogger.com (dirtywrite) — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 01:15:00 +0000

Fiction, like travel, traffics incessant change of scenery, and lateral confinement that accompanies it. Even an extraordinary journey is also a petrifying misadventure.