Sunday, January 26, 2003

posted 7:06 AM
YEP, IT’S NIRVANA

Starring Christopher Lambert and a cast of dozens. And I suppose it is a bad film, in the ordinary sense of “a bad film”, but I would value it over innumerable conventionally better films on the basis of a mere handful of “moments”. Or perhaps because it somehow suggests a better film, perhaps even a better, or more purely “cyberpunk” film than we’ve yet seen. Or because, watching it repeatedly, I actually felt my own imagination come alive, something that seldom happens as I watch a really “good” film.

I wasn’t entirely alone in my reaction to NIRVANA, but don’t go to it expecting BLADERUNNER. You’ll either find it a very bad film indeed or a somewhat magical (if minor) experience. For me the really interesting ones are always like that.

STEPPIN’ LOCUST WRITES

“By stacking his cyberspace atop the oldest VR in the Book, readers recognize that we have always been living and operating in multiple virtual worlds simultaneously. When Mamoru Oshii takes hold of this trope, and torques its compounded strata to implicate the slightly more broad-band 'literacy' of the cinema, we recoil, stunned, that indubitably there are agencies of affect molding our layered presumptions as to the contemporaniety of reality.”

Well, shit, yes. What she/he said. I could actually recognize something like my best guess, in that post, at what it might be that I actually do when I write. Or part of what I do, anyway. But the closest I ever get to knowing that is when someone says something like this (and it’s truly remarkable, how seldom academics ever do). However, it’s probably best for me to avoid thinking in these terms, else I become self-conscious about torqueing my tropes in public.

WITH BORGES IN BARCELONA

Several weeks ago I attended Kosmopolis, a new literary festival in Barcelona, and explored, with Pat Cadigan, an extraordinary exhibition of Borgesiana entitled Borges And Buenos Aires. The most memorable (and disturbing) aspect of this exhibition was the technology employed in the display of manuscripts, photographs and first editions: they were arranged beneath glass treated in such a way that the viewer’s experience of the object duplicated the condition of Borges’ encroaching blindness. The field of vision narrowed radically; each artifact was visually available in utmost clarity, but tightly framed in a pale and featureless fog, each visitor becoming “the blind librarian”.

I had forgotten Borges, though one never does, really. As the English gloss of the exhibition’s program has it, “There is a place we all know, no less, which we will never reach, and there is a place that tends to be forgotten, where we always are.”

Honk if you love Borges.

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