Daily Archives: December 22, 2013

Cinema and Television, Humanities, World History

Hannah Arendt

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Winter                                                                       Winter Moon

Hannah Arendt.  Here’s a movie that will challenge you.  It takes a particular moment in the life of this famous philosopher, the moment when she reported on the trial of Adolf Eichmann for the New Yorker, and opens it out into the massive controversy that followed.

It was in her coverage of the Eichmann trial that she coined the term “the banality of evil” based on her observations of Eichmann as an ordinary man.  The controversy that embroiled her ensued with the publication of the New Yorker Article.  It contained 10 pages in which she points to Jewish leadership as implicated, by omission, in the Holocaust.  She was damned as a self-hating Jew and a blamer of victims.

This movie shows her as a courageous, thoughtful and brave intellectual, unafraid to speak her own truth and unflinching in her analysis.

A difficult movie in some ways and certainly not thrilling, but important.  I recommend it.

Art and Culture

Those Odd Days Toward the End of the Year

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Winter                                                   Winter Moon

Looked at my calendar and found basically nothing on it until after the first of the year. I like that.  In times past it would have caused some consternation, not now.  Now I see it as fertile time that I can use as I need.

Doesn’t match my feeling of the moment, however, which is, ho hum, let’s watch a movie. Which I just may do.  We got Hannah Arendt in the mail Thursday and I haven’t seen it yet.

The Winter Solstice has come and gone, followed by this period of little to do as everyone goes about holiday and end of year scurrying.  A while back I discovered the Maya considered the five days at the end of the year as bad days, days when it was best to do nothing since the omens weren’t auspicious.  I modified that and decided to use these last days for idiosyncratic projects, things I might not do otherwise.

(Edouard_Manet The_Reader)

One thing I have planned is additional organizing of all the image files I’ve collected over the years.  This will include pulling some files off an old hard-drive and getting them on this computer as well as creating new files where old ones have become too full.  An example would be the file, Art French.  In this file I have Bonnard, Chardin, Poussin, Manet and several others of note.  Early on I created Art Monet, Art Cezanne, Art Gauguin and Art Matisse and now I have enough files to create separate files for each of these other artists, too.

(William-Adolphe Bouguereau “Art and Literature” 1867.)

This work will include some primary pics posts featuring my favorite images.  I love looking at these images and this is a good excuse to dive into them.

There’s a sort of torpor that descends on me at this time of year, a sense that the old year has grown fainter and fainter with the vigor of the new year still to come.  I try to have fun with it.