Damien Hirst is so inspiring!!

I know the titles for posts shouldn't give in to irony in its many cynical and soul-sapping forms, but, Damien Hirst does demand it.

I’ve heard Hirst in the last few days saying, repeating, presumably in response to vague, repeated, insinuations about the contrast between the personal, immediate worth of his art and its monetary value, how he “tries” to make art for people in the future. Two hundred years’ time appears to be the destination of these remarkably accurate future-directed moments of vision + imagination + craft.

ie. When today’s benighted (sober?) plebs and their hastily-briefed journalistic representatives question one’s greatness, one’s response is to slyly discount their responses and the content of those obviously too-hasty briefings: you lot don’t know what you’re talking about; posterity will serve me better. (Having been thinking about DFW, but finding very little adequate to say about his suicide, I remember his stated intent to locate himself between writers he described as "avant-garde ... writing just for other writers" and those who produced "crass cynical commercial fiction", believing that both were driven by "contempt for their audience"…)

Even though the following idea is sort of a lá bent brilliance of Book of Dave and I suppose something to do with the straight brilliance of Wall-E, and not at all to cast the aspersions Hirsty so brilliantly provokes on his Self-ness or the Pixar lot, I wouldn’t have posted it had it not been for all this shite.

Here goes: Wouldn’t it be funny if the below (proof of a certain moment of vision + imagination + considerable craft, surely) was the one remaining vestige of our civilization, found in some form in, say, two hundred years’ time, along with the cockroaches and general air of misdirected-congratulation which will inevitably linger heavy in the earth’s atmosphere, built up over a couple of millennia of putting on monuments and in screens and considering beautiful the lives of emperors, politicians, artists who take themselves v v seriously and have never quite been told to their faces but rather given the repeated, fearful gifts of vaguely insinuating, deferential interviews, moments of congratulation for work which has no appropriateness to itself let alone its moment, did not need to be done.

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Great times, boys, interesting times.

Wall-e as Jesus, briefly

Doubtless I’ve been filling my train rides with too much reading about literature in the light of recent Christological debate and thinking about how serious fiction can ‘dust off… the scandalousness and the intimacy - the human nature - of the long iconized, sanitized story of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection’, doubtless. Doubtless Wu Tang were always wrong, as I am here, to quote themselves. Doubtless.

There’s a bit in Pixar’s latest where the eponymous robot echoes the self-sacrifice of Jesus; that the remaining human race might have a future, he holds open this machine which is about to crush this plant which is their hope of getting back to Earth. For a moment, it looks like he’s done for. No amount of solar-charging is going to bring him back. Then Eva, the girl robot with whom it’s got less than (more than?) Platonic, gives him a distressed nuzzle. Come back to life, her distressed, metal forehead-to-metal forehead nuzzle says. And back to life he comes.

God.

And the human race is going to have a future, but it wouldn’t have if he hadn’t done the thing in the machine with the plant, the self-sacrificing gesture.

It’s dramatic, I tell you.

And I was there in the cinema, in the afterwards of a big thing of popcorn plus a Sprite bigger than Kent, in the during of the film’s magnificent comedic force - mainly unverbal, all very Jacqeus le Coq physical theatre style, all timing and small robotic grunts and gestures - and I wondered this: is there anyone else here in the cinema with me who is conscious like I am of this echo? Jesus projected on the projection. Is there anyone here not conscious of it but anyway affected by it - how true is it to say that stories like those in the Bible, so dominant in shaping Western creativity in the last fifteen hundred years, echo and echo and echo? In the narrative of postmodernism - which says the few, wide and parallel boulevards of cultural history have become beehive-like, unrelated, many, leading nowhere let alone directly from previous stories to present stories - ie. so many people watch the movies and the TV nowadays and don’t have Greek, Latin or know folk tales and myths - is it right? Are cultural questions like this - where you take your own thought and think are others thinking them - ever either quantitative, qualitative or worth asking?

What I should do is work for Steven Spielberg’s press department. Steven Spielberg and me, we get it, but we really don’t get it. I wonder what Steven Spielberg had for lunch today.