Hey, it's the serious bit!
Udi Aloni rocks my world. Local Angel is so good - in turn breath-takingly poetic, politically incisive, and theologically/spiritually fascinating -it's enough to make me consider buying a DVD player. More on the screening/talk with Aloni and Slavoj Zizek at the ICA last night to come, but I wanted to mention one of the highlights of the discussion.
Responding to the suggestion that by including a Palestinian hip-hop group in the film, he was just exoticising an alien youth culture (he's not, in fact he's friends with and tours with the band in question), Aloni said this:
"The problem with the old Left is that they think everything that's beautiful must either belong to the Right, or be a form of exoticism."
Which I think is a damning and accurate critique of the mindset that plagues a whole generation of radical thought. How else do you explain the kneejerk suspicion of any form of creativity that isn't didactic (ie, functional)? The innate distrust of popular culture that testifies to an inability to accept that, while hegemonies exist, the populace retains the ability to enjoy art for its own sake? Not for the first time, it strikes me that there's a hell of a lot of leftover Puritanism and Protestantism in certain 'radicals'. The struggle is serious business, it is work. Fun is for decadent capitalists. Art or music that is only beautiful for its own sake (eg, the simple melody of the pop song) is at best a distraction, at worst an unacceptable indulgence.
How else do you explain why when the 'Left' produce their own art, it's so often clumsily preachy, obvious and without grace or joy? How else do you explain Chumbawumba*?
Of course, there are other radical approaches to art... Let's come back to this.
*'Tubthumping' excepted: it's shit, but doesn't quite fit the pattern, obviously.
Udi Aloni rocks my world. Local Angel is so good - in turn breath-takingly poetic, politically incisive, and theologically/spiritually fascinating -it's enough to make me consider buying a DVD player. More on the screening/talk with Aloni and Slavoj Zizek at the ICA last night to come, but I wanted to mention one of the highlights of the discussion.
Responding to the suggestion that by including a Palestinian hip-hop group in the film, he was just exoticising an alien youth culture (he's not, in fact he's friends with and tours with the band in question), Aloni said this:
"The problem with the old Left is that they think everything that's beautiful must either belong to the Right, or be a form of exoticism."
Which I think is a damning and accurate critique of the mindset that plagues a whole generation of radical thought. How else do you explain the kneejerk suspicion of any form of creativity that isn't didactic (ie, functional)? The innate distrust of popular culture that testifies to an inability to accept that, while hegemonies exist, the populace retains the ability to enjoy art for its own sake? Not for the first time, it strikes me that there's a hell of a lot of leftover Puritanism and Protestantism in certain 'radicals'. The struggle is serious business, it is work. Fun is for decadent capitalists. Art or music that is only beautiful for its own sake (eg, the simple melody of the pop song) is at best a distraction, at worst an unacceptable indulgence.
How else do you explain why when the 'Left' produce their own art, it's so often clumsily preachy, obvious and without grace or joy? How else do you explain Chumbawumba*?
Of course, there are other radical approaches to art... Let's come back to this.
*'Tubthumping' excepted: it's shit, but doesn't quite fit the pattern, obviously.
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