httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0P_3sDnh44&feature=related
It’s the end of Gay Pride Week, so here’s The Marriage of Maria Braun by German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945-1982).
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=poW6oop8iug
The conclusion of the “experimental” (that is, disastrous) 1974 film adaptation of Steppenwolf
Today is Hermann Hesse‘s birthday (1877-1962).
Frye in Notebook 44:
When I was in Japan I visited a Buddhist temple, several buildings all dignified, rather sombre, and in exquisite taste. At the top of the hill it was on was a Shinto shrine, incredibly gaudy, as though it were made of Christmas candy, the bushes around having rolled-up prayers tied to every twig, like women with their hair in curlers. My immediate feeling was that it was good-humored and disarming: I had no hostile or superior feelings about it all. So why did hostile and superior words, like “superstitious” and “vulgar” start crowding into my mind? Did God tell me he thought it was superstitious and vulgar?
I was reminded of this when I started reading Steppenwolf. I started that in the sixties, when every fool in the country was trying to identify with Steppenwolf, and abandoned it after a few pages. I couldn’t stand the self-pitying whine of someone totally dependent on middle-class values but trying to develop his self-respect by feeling hostile and superior to them. I was hearing the whine all around me at the time. The next stage, also obvious in Hesse’s text, is when you try to raise your opinion of yourself by despising yourself. Like the wrestler: “I got so fuckin’ tied all up I could see was a big arse in frunna me, so I takes a bite out of it, and, Christ, it was me own arse.”
*
Footnote on Steppenwolf: what I said about it over the page [para. 437] was utter crap, and I didn’t abandon it after a few pages. I read it through, and, as my marginal notes show, with appreciation. Funny how screen memories work: I resented the student hysterics so much in the sixties, and some of them (at Rochdale, e.g.) made a cult of Hesse. So the remark about the wrestler biting his own arse comes home to roost. Not that I think now that Steppenwolf is really a great or profound book, but he’s aware of his own irony. (CW 5, 197-99)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-w2o3B2kF8
Ricky provides what is probably the best cold open of the entire series
Trailer Park Boys may be the funniest show to come out of Canada, and maybe even the most innovative. It, along with Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, was one of the first improvised comedy series (a story outline with ad-libbed dialogue rather than a script). Thanks to this innovation, situation comedy has changed for the better over the last decade — made smarter, more daring, more naturalistic — and the trend promises to get stronger.
On a Friday that’s also Canada Day, we deserve no less than the best.
Frye on Canadian culture and identity in relation to Great Britain and the U.S. in the “Conclusion to the First Edition of Literary History of Canada“:
The simultaneous influence of two larger nations speaking the same language has been practically beneficial to English Canada, but theoretically confusing. It is often suggested that Canada’s identity is to be found in some via media, or via mediocris, between the other two. This has the disadvantage that the British and American cultures have to be defined as extremes. Haliburton seems to have believed that the ideal for Nova Scotia would be a combination of American energy and British social structure, but such a chimera, or synthetic monster, is hard to achieve in practice. It is simpler merely to notice the alternating current in the Canadian mind, as reflected in its writing, between two moods, one romantic, traditional, and idealistic, the other shrewd, observant, and humorous. Canada in its attitude to Britain tends to be more royalist than the Queen, in the sense that it is more attracted to it as a symbol of tradition than as a fellow nation. The Canadian attitude to the United States is typically that of a smaller country to a much bigger neighbour, sharing in its material civilization but anxious to keep clear of the huge mass movements that drive a great imperial power. The United States, being founded on a revolution and a written constitution, has introduced a deductive or a priori pattern into its cultural life that tends to define an American way of life and mark it off from anti-American heresies. Canada, having a seat on the sidelines of the American Revolution, adheres more to the inductive and expedient. The Canadian genius for compromise is reflected in the existence of Canada itself. (CW 12, 344-5)