#religion hypocrisy Vatican City

[lezliefaithwade]

Faith, Hope & Charity

At Vatican City, I overheard two American tourists with distinctly southern dialects discussing the beggars asking tourists for change.

“You’d think they would do something about it,” the man said to the woman, who nodded in agreement while admiring her recently purchased crucifix.

Visitors waiting for their designated museum times can sit in the square or stroll through any one of a dozen souvenir shops that sell religious artifacts for exorbitant amounts of money. Things that generally sell on Kijiji or Amazon for next to nothing are priced three or four times higher in the square. And these tourists beside me had opted to give their money to thieves in suites rather than beggars in rags. Interesting. I have to assume they were religious; hence, why the crucifix? True, it could have been a gift for someone else, but even so, it seemed so biblical, me sitting at the Vatican beside two reasonably well-dressed people who were loudly condemning the poor.

I’m not against people with a belief. I’ve known some incredibly kind Christians and some indecent ones too. I’ve dated Jews, Greek Orthodox, Coptics, atheists, and agnostics. Sometimes I meet people who tell me they’re spiritual, and I take that to mean that they believe in a higher power but not an organized religion. The thing about organized religion is how desperate they are to recruit you. I’ve made the mistake a few times of accompanying a friend or boyfriend to their church or temple of choice only to be cross-examined at “friendship hour” afterwards.

“Don’t forget to sign the registry” “Be sure to leave your e-mail?” “How did you like the service?” “

I’m always so tempted to say, “I didn’t like the service at all. I thought the little speech in the middle was boring as hell. In the theatre, you’d never be able to get away with so little effort.” In fact, during a few of those boring lectures, I’ve actually wondered what it would be like to review them. Can a person be a homily critic?

Last Sunday at St. Thomas Episcopalian, Reverend Porter spoke on the story of the Good Samaritan in what can only be described as a futile effort to instill any empathy whatsoever. His monotone delivery showed no sign of excitement or interest in the very subject of which he spoke, and his overuse of gesticulation could be better served as choirmaster. I highly recommend any churchgoer avoid this Liturgical season until Easter, when things will hopefully become a bit livelier.

I’ve often made the mistake of expecting more from those who claim to believe. After all, the general consensus (and I don’t think I’m going out on a limb here) is that someone who follows the word of God is most likely going to practice kindness, love, compassion, forgiveness, and understanding.  It’s like a person who boasts of being a great chef and then serves you store-bought pasta with a lumpy Béchamel. “I don’t wish to offend,” you might say, “But do you really expect me to swallow this crap?” If Catholic school taught me anything, it was how rarely one saw the word of God put into practice. Not that everyone was mean, but the “Do unto others…” doctrine wasn’t generously applied. Sadly, more often than not, I’ve often been disappointed by those who claim to be followers of Christ. I think, if Jesus were around today, He’d be disappointed too. Sometimes I imagine Christ with a Twitter account and millions of followers towards whom He’d constantly have to correct in a never-ending stream of tweets like:

“I cannot be held responsible for everything the prophets said,” or “I didn’t even know Leviticus.”

People who have no religious beliefs whatsoever can also be surprisingly horrible. I’m always slightly taken aback when they denounce religion taking the stance that this makes them somehow better than everyone else. I’m easily tricked into thinking they are, then let down when they behave just as badly. These are the people who fight for climate control while driving an SUV. They’re firmly against bullying, then bully you when you disagree with them. I kind of subscribe to the whole: Let he without sin cast the first stone. As advice goes, it’s pretty good.

My belief system runs somewhere between Spiritual Deism with a side of Christianity and a strong desire to be Jewish.  My Jewish boyfriend for seven years reminded me of what it meant to be part of a family, something I always wanted.  I looked forward to Friday Shabbat dinners where we’d gather over brisket and discuss important issues like the colour of the car Bernie was going to buy.

“It’s red.” He’d nonchalantly say while savouring the dinner.

“Red?” his Mother would announce. Fork down, dinner halted. “You’re not a red car sort of guy.”

“What does that mean?” Bernie would ask, oblivious to where this was going.

“You’re a blue car or a gold car-- not red. You’re brother here; he’s a red car driver. Mr. Flashy. Mr. Look-at-Me. But you…you’re definitely not red.”

“I can be flashy!”

“Never!”

“Sure, I can.”

“Not going to happen.”

“There are plenty of times when I’ve been flashy.”

“Name one?”

“Aunt Zelda’s birthday party?”

“Aunt Zelda’s birthday party? What are you talking about?”

“I did that impersonation of Lenny Bruce.”

“Oy vey. Shut up and eat your brisket. And tomorrow, change the colour of your car.”

My first husband’s father, Ezzat, was completely the opposite. A proud Egyptian, he’d grill me over dinner with questions like, “Do I or do I not ALWAYS ask you about your father?” to which I’d cautiously reply, “Well…I wouldn’t say always.” The next thing I knew, I was being called a liar, and he’d refuse to cross the threshold of my home. Once, while I was still suffering from dry sockets after having my wisdom teeth removed, he blended lamb, lentils and carrots together in what can only be described as vomit. It was a lovely gesture, but he was deeply offended when I couldn’t drink/eat it. I offended him a lot. Looking back on old journals, it strikes me now that no fiancé in the history of the world was more disliked. At night I’d pray, “Dear God, what have I done to make everyone hate me?” And all I heard back was, “Who’s everyone?”

Christian or not, it isn’t easy being a good person. When people run a stop sign, then give me the finger when I honk, I’m apoplectic, ruminating all day on what an asshole they are. If someone cheats me or slights me or makes me the subject of a lie, I brood and stew, giving away too much power to those who wish to hurt me. I aspire to be most like my father, who was always kind and courteous. Walking down the street in his later years, he would say hello to everyone and mean it. He was genuinely interested in people. I was grateful that he didn’t seem to notice women blanch when he called them “dear” or, after exchanging pleasantries, would leave someone with a “God bless you.” As his dementia grew worse, he appeared to become more and more beatific. Whether playing monopoly or eating a sandwich, he relished every moment accepting his fate with grace. As I sat beside his hospital bed and watched him pass from this world to the next, I believed he was embraced by something.

I think about my friends who have been oppressed yet still find the ability to forgive, celebrating at Baptist churches with a kind of joy I rarely see anywhere. I have learned a lot from my Black friends, and colleagues about what it means to be, if not Christian, then Christian like. I’m humbled by the love I’ve received when I probably didn’t deserve it.  

Hollywood would have you believe that Christians are either assholes or saints, and regardless of which category you fall into, you’ll suffer in the end. The assholes are hoisted on their own petard, and the saints are martyred.  I have a famous writer friend in L.A. who once said to me, “It was easier to come out as gay than Christian in Los Angeles.”

When I was seven, I saw the movie Song of Bernadette based on the true story of a young girl visited by the Virgin Mary. As a result of her miraculous visitations, Bernadette is rewarded with tuberculosis of the bone, suffers terrible pain and eventually dies—all while being persecuted by a nun who is jealous of her visions. At seven, I put two and two together. If that’s what happens to you when you’re humble and devout, then count me out. The last thing I wanted was for God or Mary or Angels to appear before me. And it wasn’t just Bernadette. Saint Afra, Saint Aggripina, Saint Basilissa, Saint Cecilia, Saint Dymphna, Saint Eurosia, Saint Susanna, Saint Juthwara, Saint Noyala, and Saint Winifred were all decapitated for their faith. To make matters worse, Faith was my middle name. What was my Mother thinking when she saddled me with a Christian moniker?  From what I could tell, since the basis of sainthood appeared to be suffering under horrible circumstances, I was eager to abandon the idea of being good altogether.  As long as I had a little larceny in me, I could stave off being burned at the stake or decapitated.  When misbehaving, my Mother would ask, “Why are you so bad?” And I would answer, “So I don’t become a saint.” I could see no situation in which becoming pious was worth it.

Back in the Vatican museum, I stood beneath the Sistine Chapel ceiling with hordes of other tourists feeling a bit like I was in purgatory waiting for judgment. Guards constantly chastised us to be quiet as we craned our necks to catch a glimpse of God. “There’s so much nudity,” I heard someone say, “God doesn’t look like that.” I was tempted to say, “It’s not a photograph. It’s an interpretation.” But I wisely kept my mouth shut. As I stared at the Delphic Sibyl, I remembered the legend: …born between man and goddess, daughter of sea monsters and an immortal nymph; she became a wandering voice that brought to the ears of men tidings of the future wrapped in dark riddles. It sounds like Sibyl might be pretty busy these days. Finally herded outside, most of the people around me had already put Michelangelo’s frescos out of mind. It was just one more thing to cross off their bucket list. Instead, their attention was now on the line-up at the Vatican pizzeria where for 10 Euros you could have a slice with cheese. 2 more Euros, and you could have water add an extra Euro and you could have it blessed.

As my time to visit St. Peter’s Basilica drew near, I lined up like a good little pilgrim to enter the “Holy Door” and passed into the atrium. I didn’t feel the presence of God there, just tourists who couldn’t resist a good selfie in front of the Pieta. Michelangelo’s sculpture masterpiece conveys the sorrow of the Virgin Mary, her right hand clutching her dead son while her left-hand falls limp at her side, resigned. I was contemplating the gesture when the woman beside me asked her friend,

“What do you suppose it means?”.

“Maybe she dropped her cellphone,” her companion quipped, and they laughed. It echoed shrilly through the chamber like hyenas. I sometimes feel the same way about women as I do about Christians. I expect them to be better and disappointed when they aren’t. I’m sure they feel the same way about me.

[harrisonarchive]

George Harrison, 1992; photo by Stephen Shepherd.

Song spotlight: “P2 Vatican Blues (Last Saturday Night) —

“I felt then that there was some hypocrisy going on, even though I was only about eleven years old. It seemed to be the same on every housing estate in English cities: on one corner they’d have a church and on the other corner a pub. Everybody’s out there getting pissed and then just goes in the church, says three Hail Marys and one Our Father and sticks a fiver in the plate. It felt so alien to me. Not the stained glass window or the pictures of Christ; I liked that a lot, and the smell of incense and the candles. I just didn’t like the bullshit. After Communion, I was supposed to have Confirmation, but I thought, ‘I’m not going to bother with that, I’ll just confirm it myself.’” - George Harrison, The Beatles Anthology (2000)

“[George] embraced the essence of all religions although he had little patience for organized religions or dogma that espoused guilt, sin or mystery. For George, there was no mystery, and he would gladly spend hours discussing God with an interested person — and some not so interested!” - Olivia Harrison, Harrison (2002) (x)

[istanbulboatours]

An ancient tale of little meaning

To the artist both are an ancient tale of little meaning, though the words are strong. He who loves curios ’ is blind too often to the sunsets on the Campagna. And he who copies inscriptions is deaf to the music of the people in the Piazza Navona, or the evening Angelus rung out from a hundred steeples. All nations, all professions, all creeds jostle each other in Rome, as they did in the age of Horace and Juvenal; and they pass by on the other side with mutual contempt for each other’s interests and pursuits. But to the historical mind all have their interest, almost an equal interest, and their combination and contrasts form the most instructive lesson which Europe can present.

We have had whole libraries about Rome pictorial, Rome ecclesiastical, Rome artistic, Rome antiquarian; about classical, mediaeval, papal, cinque-cento, rococo, modern Rome. There is still room for a book about the city of Rome as a manual of history; about the infinite variety of the lessons graven on its stones and its soil; about its contrasts, its contradictions, its immensity, its continuity; the exquisite pathos, the appalling waste, folly, cruelty, recorded in that roll of memories and symbols. Such a book would gather up the thoughts which, as he strolls about the Eternal City, throng on the mind of every student of human nature, and of any historian who is willing to read as one tale the history of man from the Stone Age down to Pope Leo XM customized tour bulgaria.

Of all places on earth, Rome is the city of contrasts and paradox. Nowhere else can we see memorials of such pomp alongside of such squalor. The insolence of wealth jostles disease, filth, and penury. Devoutness, which holds whole continents spell-bound, goes hand in hand with hypocrisy and corruption. What sublime piety, what tender charity, what ideal purity, what bigotry, what brutality, what grossness ! Over this convent garden pensive mysticism has thrown a halo of saintliness: it is overshadowed by a palace which has one black record of arrogance. There, some tomb breathes the very soul of spiritual art; beside it stands another which is a typical monument of ostentation. Here is a fragment worthy of Praxiteles, buried under costly masses of rococo inanity. Works that testify to stupendous concentration of power stand in a chaos which testifies to nothing but savagery and ruin. The very demon of destruction seems to have run riot over the spot that the very genius of beauty has chosen for his home.

Human civilisation

The eternal lesson of Rome is the war which each phase of human civilisation, each type of art, of manners, of religion, has waged against its immediate predecessor: — the fury with which it sought to blot out its very record. When Rome became Greek in thought, art, and habits, it destroyed almost every vestige of the old Italian civilisation which was the source of its own strength; and recent excavations alone have unearthed the massive walls, the pottery, bronze and gold work of the ages before Rome was, and also of the ages of Servius, Camillus, and Cincinnatus. Imperial Rome pillaged Greece, Asia, Africa, and heaped up between the Quirinal and the Vatican priceless treasures of an art which it only understood well enough to covet and to rob.

When the Gospel triumphed over Imperial Rome, it treated the palaces of the Caesars as dens of infamy, and their monuments as blasphemous idols and offences to God. When the Anti-Christian Revival was in all the heyday of its immoral rage after beauty, it treated the Catholicism of the Middle Ages as a barbarous superstition. Popes and cardinals destroyed more immortal works of beauty than the worst scourges of God; and the most terrible Goths and Vandals that the stones of Rome ever knew were sceptical priests and learned virtuosi. Nay, in twenty years the reformers of the Italian kingdom have wrought greater havoc in the aspect of Papal Rome than, in the four centuries since Julius II., popes and cardinals ever wrought on Classical and Mediaeval Rome.

[foodistanbul]

An ancient tale of little meaning

To the artist both are an ancient tale of little meaning, though the words are strong. He who loves curios ’ is blind too often to the sunsets on the Campagna. And he who copies inscriptions is deaf to the music of the people in the Piazza Navona, or the evening Angelus rung out from a hundred steeples. All nations, all professions, all creeds jostle each other in Rome, as they did in the age of Horace and Juvenal; and they pass by on the other side with mutual contempt for each other’s interests and pursuits. But to the historical mind all have their interest, almost an equal interest, and their combination and contrasts form the most instructive lesson which Europe can present.

We have had whole libraries about Rome pictorial, Rome ecclesiastical, Rome artistic, Rome antiquarian; about classical, mediaeval, papal, cinque-cento, rococo, modern Rome. There is still room for a book about the city of Rome as a manual of history; about the infinite variety of the lessons graven on its stones and its soil; about its contrasts, its contradictions, its immensity, its continuity; the exquisite pathos, the appalling waste, folly, cruelty, recorded in that roll of memories and symbols. Such a book would gather up the thoughts which, as he strolls about the Eternal City, throng on the mind of every student of human nature, and of any historian who is willing to read as one tale the history of man from the Stone Age down to Pope Leo XM customized tour bulgaria.

Of all places on earth, Rome is the city of contrasts and paradox. Nowhere else can we see memorials of such pomp alongside of such squalor. The insolence of wealth jostles disease, filth, and penury. Devoutness, which holds whole continents spell-bound, goes hand in hand with hypocrisy and corruption. What sublime piety, what tender charity, what ideal purity, what bigotry, what brutality, what grossness ! Over this convent garden pensive mysticism has thrown a halo of saintliness: it is overshadowed by a palace which has one black record of arrogance. There, some tomb breathes the very soul of spiritual art; beside it stands another which is a typical monument of ostentation. Here is a fragment worthy of Praxiteles, buried under costly masses of rococo inanity. Works that testify to stupendous concentration of power stand in a chaos which testifies to nothing but savagery and ruin. The very demon of destruction seems to have run riot over the spot that the very genius of beauty has chosen for his home.

Human civilisation

The eternal lesson of Rome is the war which each phase of human civilisation, each type of art, of manners, of religion, has waged against its immediate predecessor: — the fury with which it sought to blot out its very record. When Rome became Greek in thought, art, and habits, it destroyed almost every vestige of the old Italian civilisation which was the source of its own strength; and recent excavations alone have unearthed the massive walls, the pottery, bronze and gold work of the ages before Rome was, and also of the ages of Servius, Camillus, and Cincinnatus. Imperial Rome pillaged Greece, Asia, Africa, and heaped up between the Quirinal and the Vatican priceless treasures of an art which it only understood well enough to covet and to rob.

When the Gospel triumphed over Imperial Rome, it treated the palaces of the Caesars as dens of infamy, and their monuments as blasphemous idols and offences to God. When the Anti-Christian Revival was in all the heyday of its immoral rage after beauty, it treated the Catholicism of the Middle Ages as a barbarous superstition. Popes and cardinals destroyed more immortal works of beauty than the worst scourges of God; and the most terrible Goths and Vandals that the stones of Rome ever knew were sceptical priests and learned virtuosi. Nay, in twenty years the reformers of the Italian kingdom have wrought greater havoc in the aspect of Papal Rome than, in the four centuries since Julius II., popes and cardinals ever wrought on Classical and Mediaeval Rome.

[turkishhamam]

An ancient tale of little meaning

To the artist both are an ancient tale of little meaning, though the words are strong. He who loves curios ’ is blind too often to the sunsets on the Campagna. And he who copies inscriptions is deaf to the music of the people in the Piazza Navona, or the evening Angelus rung out from a hundred steeples. All nations, all professions, all creeds jostle each other in Rome, as they did in the age of Horace and Juvenal; and they pass by on the other side with mutual contempt for each other’s interests and pursuits. But to the historical mind all have their interest, almost an equal interest, and their combination and contrasts form the most instructive lesson which Europe can present.

We have had whole libraries about Rome pictorial, Rome ecclesiastical, Rome artistic, Rome antiquarian; about classical, mediaeval, papal, cinque-cento, rococo, modern Rome. There is still room for a book about the city of Rome as a manual of history; about the infinite variety of the lessons graven on its stones and its soil; about its contrasts, its contradictions, its immensity, its continuity; the exquisite pathos, the appalling waste, folly, cruelty, recorded in that roll of memories and symbols. Such a book would gather up the thoughts which, as he strolls about the Eternal City, throng on the mind of every student of human nature, and of any historian who is willing to read as one tale the history of man from the Stone Age down to Pope Leo XM customized tour bulgaria.

Of all places on earth, Rome is the city of contrasts and paradox. Nowhere else can we see memorials of such pomp alongside of such squalor. The insolence of wealth jostles disease, filth, and penury. Devoutness, which holds whole continents spell-bound, goes hand in hand with hypocrisy and corruption. What sublime piety, what tender charity, what ideal purity, what bigotry, what brutality, what grossness ! Over this convent garden pensive mysticism has thrown a halo of saintliness: it is overshadowed by a palace which has one black record of arrogance. There, some tomb breathes the very soul of spiritual art; beside it stands another which is a typical monument of ostentation. Here is a fragment worthy of Praxiteles, buried under costly masses of rococo inanity. Works that testify to stupendous concentration of power stand in a chaos which testifies to nothing but savagery and ruin. The very demon of destruction seems to have run riot over the spot that the very genius of beauty has chosen for his home.

Human civilisation

The eternal lesson of Rome is the war which each phase of human civilisation, each type of art, of manners, of religion, has waged against its immediate predecessor: — the fury with which it sought to blot out its very record. When Rome became Greek in thought, art, and habits, it destroyed almost every vestige of the old Italian civilisation which was the source of its own strength; and recent excavations alone have unearthed the massive walls, the pottery, bronze and gold work of the ages before Rome was, and also of the ages of Servius, Camillus, and Cincinnatus. Imperial Rome pillaged Greece, Asia, Africa, and heaped up between the Quirinal and the Vatican priceless treasures of an art which it only understood well enough to covet and to rob.

When the Gospel triumphed over Imperial Rome, it treated the palaces of the Caesars as dens of infamy, and their monuments as blasphemous idols and offences to God. When the Anti-Christian Revival was in all the heyday of its immoral rage after beauty, it treated the Catholicism of the Middle Ages as a barbarous superstition. Popes and cardinals destroyed more immortal works of beauty than the worst scourges of God; and the most terrible Goths and Vandals that the stones of Rome ever knew were sceptical priests and learned virtuosi. Nay, in twenty years the reformers of the Italian kingdom have wrought greater havoc in the aspect of Papal Rome than, in the four centuries since Julius II., popes and cardinals ever wrought on Classical and Mediaeval Rome.

[istanbulwinter]

An ancient tale of little meaning

To the artist both are an ancient tale of little meaning, though the words are strong. He who loves curios ’ is blind too often to the sunsets on the Campagna. And he who copies inscriptions is deaf to the music of the people in the Piazza Navona, or the evening Angelus rung out from a hundred steeples. All nations, all professions, all creeds jostle each other in Rome, as they did in the age of Horace and Juvenal; and they pass by on the other side with mutual contempt for each other’s interests and pursuits. But to the historical mind all have their interest, almost an equal interest, and their combination and contrasts form the most instructive lesson which Europe can present.

We have had whole libraries about Rome pictorial, Rome ecclesiastical, Rome artistic, Rome antiquarian; about classical, mediaeval, papal, cinque-cento, rococo, modern Rome. There is still room for a book about the city of Rome as a manual of history; about the infinite variety of the lessons graven on its stones and its soil; about its contrasts, its contradictions, its immensity, its continuity; the exquisite pathos, the appalling waste, folly, cruelty, recorded in that roll of memories and symbols. Such a book would gather up the thoughts which, as he strolls about the Eternal City, throng on the mind of every student of human nature, and of any historian who is willing to read as one tale the history of man from the Stone Age down to Pope Leo XM customized tour bulgaria.

Of all places on earth, Rome is the city of contrasts and paradox. Nowhere else can we see memorials of such pomp alongside of such squalor. The insolence of wealth jostles disease, filth, and penury. Devoutness, which holds whole continents spell-bound, goes hand in hand with hypocrisy and corruption. What sublime piety, what tender charity, what ideal purity, what bigotry, what brutality, what grossness ! Over this convent garden pensive mysticism has thrown a halo of saintliness: it is overshadowed by a palace which has one black record of arrogance. There, some tomb breathes the very soul of spiritual art; beside it stands another which is a typical monument of ostentation. Here is a fragment worthy of Praxiteles, buried under costly masses of rococo inanity. Works that testify to stupendous concentration of power stand in a chaos which testifies to nothing but savagery and ruin. The very demon of destruction seems to have run riot over the spot that the very genius of beauty has chosen for his home.

Human civilisation

The eternal lesson of Rome is the war which each phase of human civilisation, each type of art, of manners, of religion, has waged against its immediate predecessor: — the fury with which it sought to blot out its very record. When Rome became Greek in thought, art, and habits, it destroyed almost every vestige of the old Italian civilisation which was the source of its own strength; and recent excavations alone have unearthed the massive walls, the pottery, bronze and gold work of the ages before Rome was, and also of the ages of Servius, Camillus, and Cincinnatus. Imperial Rome pillaged Greece, Asia, Africa, and heaped up between the Quirinal and the Vatican priceless treasures of an art which it only understood well enough to covet and to rob.

When the Gospel triumphed over Imperial Rome, it treated the palaces of the Caesars as dens of infamy, and their monuments as blasphemous idols and offences to God. When the Anti-Christian Revival was in all the heyday of its immoral rage after beauty, it treated the Catholicism of the Middle Ages as a barbarous superstition. Popes and cardinals destroyed more immortal works of beauty than the worst scourges of God; and the most terrible Goths and Vandals that the stones of Rome ever knew were sceptical priests and learned virtuosi. Nay, in twenty years the reformers of the Italian kingdom have wrought greater havoc in the aspect of Papal Rome than, in the four centuries since Julius II., popes and cardinals ever wrought on Classical and Mediaeval Rome.

[istanbulsy]

An ancient tale of little meaning

To the artist both are an ancient tale of little meaning, though the words are strong. He who loves curios ’ is blind too often to the sunsets on the Campagna. And he who copies inscriptions is deaf to the music of the people in the Piazza Navona, or the evening Angelus rung out from a hundred steeples. All nations, all professions, all creeds jostle each other in Rome, as they did in the age of Horace and Juvenal; and they pass by on the other side with mutual contempt for each other’s interests and pursuits. But to the historical mind all have their interest, almost an equal interest, and their combination and contrasts form the most instructive lesson which Europe can present.

We have had whole libraries about Rome pictorial, Rome ecclesiastical, Rome artistic, Rome antiquarian; about classical, mediaeval, papal, cinque-cento, rococo, modern Rome. There is still room for a book about the city of Rome as a manual of history; about the infinite variety of the lessons graven on its stones and its soil; about its contrasts, its contradictions, its immensity, its continuity; the exquisite pathos, the appalling waste, folly, cruelty, recorded in that roll of memories and symbols. Such a book would gather up the thoughts which, as he strolls about the Eternal City, throng on the mind of every student of human nature, and of any historian who is willing to read as one tale the history of man from the Stone Age down to Pope Leo XM customized tour bulgaria.

Of all places on earth, Rome is the city of contrasts and paradox. Nowhere else can we see memorials of such pomp alongside of such squalor. The insolence of wealth jostles disease, filth, and penury. Devoutness, which holds whole continents spell-bound, goes hand in hand with hypocrisy and corruption. What sublime piety, what tender charity, what ideal purity, what bigotry, what brutality, what grossness ! Over this convent garden pensive mysticism has thrown a halo of saintliness: it is overshadowed by a palace which has one black record of arrogance. There, some tomb breathes the very soul of spiritual art; beside it stands another which is a typical monument of ostentation. Here is a fragment worthy of Praxiteles, buried under costly masses of rococo inanity. Works that testify to stupendous concentration of power stand in a chaos which testifies to nothing but savagery and ruin. The very demon of destruction seems to have run riot over the spot that the very genius of beauty has chosen for his home.

Human civilisation

The eternal lesson of Rome is the war which each phase of human civilisation, each type of art, of manners, of religion, has waged against its immediate predecessor: — the fury with which it sought to blot out its very record. When Rome became Greek in thought, art, and habits, it destroyed almost every vestige of the old Italian civilisation which was the source of its own strength; and recent excavations alone have unearthed the massive walls, the pottery, bronze and gold work of the ages before Rome was, and also of the ages of Servius, Camillus, and Cincinnatus. Imperial Rome pillaged Greece, Asia, Africa, and heaped up between the Quirinal and the Vatican priceless treasures of an art which it only understood well enough to covet and to rob.

When the Gospel triumphed over Imperial Rome, it treated the palaces of the Caesars as dens of infamy, and their monuments as blasphemous idols and offences to God. When the Anti-Christian Revival was in all the heyday of its immoral rage after beauty, it treated the Catholicism of the Middle Ages as a barbarous superstition. Popes and cardinals destroyed more immortal works of beauty than the worst scourges of God; and the most terrible Goths and Vandals that the stones of Rome ever knew were sceptical priests and learned virtuosi. Nay, in twenty years the reformers of the Italian kingdom have wrought greater havoc in the aspect of Papal Rome than, in the four centuries since Julius II., popes and cardinals ever wrought on Classical and Mediaeval Rome.

[istanbulpalaces]

An ancient tale of little meaning

To the artist both are an ancient tale of little meaning, though the words are strong. He who loves curios ’ is blind too often to the sunsets on the Campagna. And he who copies inscriptions is deaf to the music of the people in the Piazza Navona, or the evening Angelus rung out from a hundred steeples. All nations, all professions, all creeds jostle each other in Rome, as they did in the age of Horace and Juvenal; and they pass by on the other side with mutual contempt for each other’s interests and pursuits. But to the historical mind all have their interest, almost an equal interest, and their combination and contrasts form the most instructive lesson which Europe can present.

We have had whole libraries about Rome pictorial, Rome ecclesiastical, Rome artistic, Rome antiquarian; about classical, mediaeval, papal, cinque-cento, rococo, modern Rome. There is still room for a book about the city of Rome as a manual of history; about the infinite variety of the lessons graven on its stones and its soil; about its contrasts, its contradictions, its immensity, its continuity; the exquisite pathos, the appalling waste, folly, cruelty, recorded in that roll of memories and symbols. Such a book would gather up the thoughts which, as he strolls about the Eternal City, throng on the mind of every student of human nature, and of any historian who is willing to read as one tale the history of man from the Stone Age down to Pope Leo XM customized tour bulgaria.

Of all places on earth, Rome is the city of contrasts and paradox. Nowhere else can we see memorials of such pomp alongside of such squalor. The insolence of wealth jostles disease, filth, and penury. Devoutness, which holds whole continents spell-bound, goes hand in hand with hypocrisy and corruption. What sublime piety, what tender charity, what ideal purity, what bigotry, what brutality, what grossness ! Over this convent garden pensive mysticism has thrown a halo of saintliness: it is overshadowed by a palace which has one black record of arrogance. There, some tomb breathes the very soul of spiritual art; beside it stands another which is a typical monument of ostentation. Here is a fragment worthy of Praxiteles, buried under costly masses of rococo inanity. Works that testify to stupendous concentration of power stand in a chaos which testifies to nothing but savagery and ruin. The very demon of destruction seems to have run riot over the spot that the very genius of beauty has chosen for his home.

Human civilisation

The eternal lesson of Rome is the war which each phase of human civilisation, each type of art, of manners, of religion, has waged against its immediate predecessor: — the fury with which it sought to blot out its very record. When Rome became Greek in thought, art, and habits, it destroyed almost every vestige of the old Italian civilisation which was the source of its own strength; and recent excavations alone have unearthed the massive walls, the pottery, bronze and gold work of the ages before Rome was, and also of the ages of Servius, Camillus, and Cincinnatus. Imperial Rome pillaged Greece, Asia, Africa, and heaped up between the Quirinal and the Vatican priceless treasures of an art which it only understood well enough to covet and to rob.

When the Gospel triumphed over Imperial Rome, it treated the palaces of the Caesars as dens of infamy, and their monuments as blasphemous idols and offences to God. When the Anti-Christian Revival was in all the heyday of its immoral rage after beauty, it treated the Catholicism of the Middle Ages as a barbarous superstition. Popes and cardinals destroyed more immortal works of beauty than the worst scourges of God; and the most terrible Goths and Vandals that the stones of Rome ever knew were sceptical priests and learned virtuosi. Nay, in twenty years the reformers of the Italian kingdom have wrought greater havoc in the aspect of Papal Rome than, in the four centuries since Julius II., popes and cardinals ever wrought on Classical and Mediaeval Rome.

[historicalistanbul]

An ancient tale of little meaning

To the artist both are an ancient tale of little meaning, though the words are strong. He who loves curios ’ is blind too often to the sunsets on the Campagna. And he who copies inscriptions is deaf to the music of the people in the Piazza Navona, or the evening Angelus rung out from a hundred steeples. All nations, all professions, all creeds jostle each other in Rome, as they did in the age of Horace and Juvenal; and they pass by on the other side with mutual contempt for each other’s interests and pursuits. But to the historical mind all have their interest, almost an equal interest, and their combination and contrasts form the most instructive lesson which Europe can present.

We have had whole libraries about Rome pictorial, Rome ecclesiastical, Rome artistic, Rome antiquarian; about classical, mediaeval, papal, cinque-cento, rococo, modern Rome. There is still room for a book about the city of Rome as a manual of history; about the infinite variety of the lessons graven on its stones and its soil; about its contrasts, its contradictions, its immensity, its continuity; the exquisite pathos, the appalling waste, folly, cruelty, recorded in that roll of memories and symbols. Such a book would gather up the thoughts which, as he strolls about the Eternal City, throng on the mind of every student of human nature, and of any historian who is willing to read as one tale the history of man from the Stone Age down to Pope Leo XM customized tour bulgaria.

Of all places on earth, Rome is the city of contrasts and paradox. Nowhere else can we see memorials of such pomp alongside of such squalor. The insolence of wealth jostles disease, filth, and penury. Devoutness, which holds whole continents spell-bound, goes hand in hand with hypocrisy and corruption. What sublime piety, what tender charity, what ideal purity, what bigotry, what brutality, what grossness ! Over this convent garden pensive mysticism has thrown a halo of saintliness: it is overshadowed by a palace which has one black record of arrogance. There, some tomb breathes the very soul of spiritual art; beside it stands another which is a typical monument of ostentation. Here is a fragment worthy of Praxiteles, buried under costly masses of rococo inanity. Works that testify to stupendous concentration of power stand in a chaos which testifies to nothing but savagery and ruin. The very demon of destruction seems to have run riot over the spot that the very genius of beauty has chosen for his home.

Human civilisation

The eternal lesson of Rome is the war which each phase of human civilisation, each type of art, of manners, of religion, has waged against its immediate predecessor: — the fury with which it sought to blot out its very record. When Rome became Greek in thought, art, and habits, it destroyed almost every vestige of the old Italian civilisation which was the source of its own strength; and recent excavations alone have unearthed the massive walls, the pottery, bronze and gold work of the ages before Rome was, and also of the ages of Servius, Camillus, and Cincinnatus. Imperial Rome pillaged Greece, Asia, Africa, and heaped up between the Quirinal and the Vatican priceless treasures of an art which it only understood well enough to covet and to rob.

When the Gospel triumphed over Imperial Rome, it treated the palaces of the Caesars as dens of infamy, and their monuments as blasphemous idols and offences to God. When the Anti-Christian Revival was in all the heyday of its immoral rage after beauty, it treated the Catholicism of the Middle Ages as a barbarous superstition. Popes and cardinals destroyed more immortal works of beauty than the worst scourges of God; and the most terrible Goths and Vandals that the stones of Rome ever knew were sceptical priests and learned virtuosi. Nay, in twenty years the reformers of the Italian kingdom have wrought greater havoc in the aspect of Papal Rome than, in the four centuries since Julius II., popes and cardinals ever wrought on Classical and Mediaeval Rome.

[oldcityistan]

New Post has been published on

An ancient tale of little meaning

To the artist both are an ancient tale of little meaning, though the words are strong. He who loves curios ’ is blind too often to the sunsets on the Campagna. And he who copies inscriptions is deaf to the music of the people in the Piazza Navona, or the evening Angelus rung out from a hundred steeples. All nations, all professions, all creeds jostle each other in Rome, as they did in the age of Horace and Juvenal; and they pass by on the other side with mutual contempt for each other’s interests and pursuits. But to the historical mind all have their interest, almost an equal interest, and their combination and contrasts form the most instructive lesson which Europe can present.

We have had whole libraries about Rome pictorial, Rome ecclesiastical, Rome artistic, Rome antiquarian; about classical, mediaeval, papal, cinque-cento, rococo, modern Rome. There is still room for a book about the city of Rome as a manual of history; about the infinite variety of the lessons graven on its stones and its soil; about its contrasts, its contradictions, its immensity, its continuity; the exquisite pathos, the appalling waste, folly, cruelty, recorded in that roll of memories and symbols. Such a book would gather up the thoughts which, as he strolls about the Eternal City, throng on the mind of every student of human nature, and of any historian who is willing to read as one tale the history of man from the Stone Age down to Pope Leo XM customized tour bulgaria.

Of all places on earth, Rome is the city of contrasts and paradox. Nowhere else can we see memorials of such pomp alongside of such squalor. The insolence of wealth jostles disease, filth, and penury. Devoutness, which holds whole continents spell-bound, goes hand in hand with hypocrisy and corruption. What sublime piety, what tender charity, what ideal purity, what bigotry, what brutality, what grossness ! Over this convent garden pensive mysticism has thrown a halo of saintliness: it is overshadowed by a palace which has one black record of arrogance. There, some tomb breathes the very soul of spiritual art; beside it stands another which is a typical monument of ostentation. Here is a fragment worthy of Praxiteles, buried under costly masses of rococo inanity. Works that testify to stupendous concentration of power stand in a chaos which testifies to nothing but savagery and ruin. The very demon of destruction seems to have run riot over the spot that the very genius of beauty has chosen for his home.

Human civilisation

The eternal lesson of Rome is the war which each phase of human civilisation, each type of art, of manners, of religion, has waged against its immediate predecessor: — the fury with which it sought to blot out its very record. When Rome became Greek in thought, art, and habits, it destroyed almost every vestige of the old Italian civilisation which was the source of its own strength; and recent excavations alone have unearthed the massive walls, the pottery, bronze and gold work of the ages before Rome was, and also of the ages of Servius, Camillus, and Cincinnatus. Imperial Rome pillaged Greece, Asia, Africa, and heaped up between the Quirinal and the Vatican priceless treasures of an art which it only understood well enough to covet and to rob.

When the Gospel triumphed over Imperial Rome, it treated the palaces of the Caesars as dens of infamy, and their monuments as blasphemous idols and offences to God. When the Anti-Christian Revival was in all the heyday of its immoral rage after beauty, it treated the Catholicism of the Middle Ages as a barbarous superstition. Popes and cardinals destroyed more immortal works of beauty than the worst scourges of God; and the most terrible Goths and Vandals that the stones of Rome ever knew were sceptical priests and learned virtuosi. Nay, in twenty years the reformers of the Italian kingdom have wrought greater havoc in the aspect of Papal Rome than, in the four centuries since Julius II., popes and cardinals ever wrought on Classical and Mediaeval Rome.

[bookingistanbul]

An ancient tale of little meaning

To the artist both are an ancient tale of little meaning, though the words are strong. He who loves curios ’ is blind too often to the sunsets on the Campagna. And he who copies inscriptions is deaf to the music of the people in the Piazza Navona, or the evening Angelus rung out from a hundred steeples. All nations, all professions, all creeds jostle each other in Rome, as they did in the age of Horace and Juvenal; and they pass by on the other side with mutual contempt for each other’s interests and pursuits. But to the historical mind all have their interest, almost an equal interest, and their combination and contrasts form the most instructive lesson which Europe can present.

We have had whole libraries about Rome pictorial, Rome ecclesiastical, Rome artistic, Rome antiquarian; about classical, mediaeval, papal, cinque-cento, rococo, modern Rome. There is still room for a book about the city of Rome as a manual of history; about the infinite variety of the lessons graven on its stones and its soil; about its contrasts, its contradictions, its immensity, its continuity; the exquisite pathos, the appalling waste, folly, cruelty, recorded in that roll of memories and symbols. Such a book would gather up the thoughts which, as he strolls about the Eternal City, throng on the mind of every student of human nature, and of any historian who is willing to read as one tale the history of man from the Stone Age down to Pope Leo XM customized tour bulgaria.

Of all places on earth, Rome is the city of contrasts and paradox. Nowhere else can we see memorials of such pomp alongside of such squalor. The insolence of wealth jostles disease, filth, and penury. Devoutness, which holds whole continents spell-bound, goes hand in hand with hypocrisy and corruption. What sublime piety, what tender charity, what ideal purity, what bigotry, what brutality, what grossness ! Over this convent garden pensive mysticism has thrown a halo of saintliness: it is overshadowed by a palace which has one black record of arrogance. There, some tomb breathes the very soul of spiritual art; beside it stands another which is a typical monument of ostentation. Here is a fragment worthy of Praxiteles, buried under costly masses of rococo inanity. Works that testify to stupendous concentration of power stand in a chaos which testifies to nothing but savagery and ruin. The very demon of destruction seems to have run riot over the spot that the very genius of beauty has chosen for his home.

Human civilisation

The eternal lesson of Rome is the war which each phase of human civilisation, each type of art, of manners, of religion, has waged against its immediate predecessor: — the fury with which it sought to blot out its very record. When Rome became Greek in thought, art, and habits, it destroyed almost every vestige of the old Italian civilisation which was the source of its own strength; and recent excavations alone have unearthed the massive walls, the pottery, bronze and gold work of the ages before Rome was, and also of the ages of Servius, Camillus, and Cincinnatus. Imperial Rome pillaged Greece, Asia, Africa, and heaped up between the Quirinal and the Vatican priceless treasures of an art which it only understood well enough to covet and to rob.

When the Gospel triumphed over Imperial Rome, it treated the palaces of the Caesars as dens of infamy, and their monuments as blasphemous idols and offences to God. When the Anti-Christian Revival was in all the heyday of its immoral rage after beauty, it treated the Catholicism of the Middle Ages as a barbarous superstition. Popes and cardinals destroyed more immortal works of beauty than the worst scourges of God; and the most terrible Goths and Vandals that the stones of Rome ever knew were sceptical priests and learned virtuosi. Nay, in twenty years the reformers of the Italian kingdom have wrought greater havoc in the aspect of Papal Rome than, in the four centuries since Julius II., popes and cardinals ever wrought on Classical and Mediaeval Rome.

[istanbulsguide]

An ancient tale of little meaning

To the artist both are an ancient tale of little meaning, though the words are strong. He who loves curios ’ is blind too often to the sunsets on the Campagna. And he who copies inscriptions is deaf to the music of the people in the Piazza Navona, or the evening Angelus rung out from a hundred steeples. All nations, all professions, all creeds jostle each other in Rome, as they did in the age of Horace and Juvenal; and they pass by on the other side with mutual contempt for each other’s interests and pursuits. But to the historical mind all have their interest, almost an equal interest, and their combination and contrasts form the most instructive lesson which Europe can present.

We have had whole libraries about Rome pictorial, Rome ecclesiastical, Rome artistic, Rome antiquarian; about classical, mediaeval, papal, cinque-cento, rococo, modern Rome. There is still room for a book about the city of Rome as a manual of history; about the infinite variety of the lessons graven on its stones and its soil; about its contrasts, its contradictions, its immensity, its continuity; the exquisite pathos, the appalling waste, folly, cruelty, recorded in that roll of memories and symbols. Such a book would gather up the thoughts which, as he strolls about the Eternal City, throng on the mind of every student of human nature, and of any historian who is willing to read as one tale the history of man from the Stone Age down to Pope Leo XM customized tour bulgaria.

Of all places on earth, Rome is the city of contrasts and paradox. Nowhere else can we see memorials of such pomp alongside of such squalor. The insolence of wealth jostles disease, filth, and penury. Devoutness, which holds whole continents spell-bound, goes hand in hand with hypocrisy and corruption. What sublime piety, what tender charity, what ideal purity, what bigotry, what brutality, what grossness ! Over this convent garden pensive mysticism has thrown a halo of saintliness: it is overshadowed by a palace which has one black record of arrogance. There, some tomb breathes the very soul of spiritual art; beside it stands another which is a typical monument of ostentation. Here is a fragment worthy of Praxiteles, buried under costly masses of rococo inanity. Works that testify to stupendous concentration of power stand in a chaos which testifies to nothing but savagery and ruin. The very demon of destruction seems to have run riot over the spot that the very genius of beauty has chosen for his home.

Human civilisation

The eternal lesson of Rome is the war which each phase of human civilisation, each type of art, of manners, of religion, has waged against its immediate predecessor: — the fury with which it sought to blot out its very record. When Rome became Greek in thought, art, and habits, it destroyed almost every vestige of the old Italian civilisation which was the source of its own strength; and recent excavations alone have unearthed the massive walls, the pottery, bronze and gold work of the ages before Rome was, and also of the ages of Servius, Camillus, and Cincinnatus. Imperial Rome pillaged Greece, Asia, Africa, and heaped up between the Quirinal and the Vatican priceless treasures of an art which it only understood well enough to covet and to rob.

When the Gospel triumphed over Imperial Rome, it treated the palaces of the Caesars as dens of infamy, and their monuments as blasphemous idols and offences to God. When the Anti-Christian Revival was in all the heyday of its immoral rage after beauty, it treated the Catholicism of the Middle Ages as a barbarous superstition. Popes and cardinals destroyed more immortal works of beauty than the worst scourges of God; and the most terrible Goths and Vandals that the stones of Rome ever knew were sceptical priests and learned virtuosi. Nay, in twenty years the reformers of the Italian kingdom have wrought greater havoc in the aspect of Papal Rome than, in the four centuries since Julius II., popes and cardinals ever wrought on Classical and Mediaeval Rome.

[mthvn]

Truth and simulacrum: whose timeline is it? — Maja Bogojević on Possessed

Factuality itself depends for its continued existence upon the existence of the nontotalitarian world (Hannah Arendt)

Possessed, the latest film made by Metahaven—the collective name of artists and designers Vinca Kruk and Daniel van der Velden—in collaboration with documentary filmmaker Rob Schröder, takes their radical aesthetics and progressive politics a step further from their previous film The Sprawl: Propaganda about Propaganda. Their new hybrid artwork revisits the themes of contradictions and paradoxes of multiple realities, geopolitical landscapes, new technologies, power discourse and ensuing alienation in the age of “post-truth.” Similarly to The Sprawl, this film is not easy to categorise, as it explores the notions of consumer discourse, privacy, secrecy, transparency, surveillance, veiling and unveiling, the impact of social media networks and anarchic utopianism of the internet architecture on our individual and collective lives. Through a documented collage, blending a series of drawings, photographs, animated graphics, documentary footage and fictional reconstruction, it refers to various socio-historical narratives and their processes of subordination, power and inequality, commented upon by a single but multi-fold voice-over in a non-linear narrative, which breaks and fragments in order to not only reflect the fragmentation of multi-layered realities we live in, but also to challenge them.

Possessed begins with the images of burning smart phones, war-devastated cities and landscapes, and a water spring flowing over large dark stones, overlapping with the opening narrated question:

“Would you believe?”

These first spoken words trigger a series of questions relating to the search not of the ultimate truth, but of potential truths amidst fakeness and a fixed set of beliefs regardless of the information overload diversity. The answer is, inevitably, “no”. 

But the answer to the question “Would you believe in angels?” is, in the age of cynicism and hypocrisy, a surprising “yes”. This abruptly shifts the initial dystopian tone, foreshadowing the underlying final humanistic message of the film, although “there is no hope” (“what for?”) and there is no answer to the question “would you love?”, followed by the sound of a human breathing next to a smartphone. In this prologue, before the opening credits unfold, Possessed suggests in medias res that the centre of the human universe is a smartphone. The next image shows more clearly a girl lying on a bare mattressed bed, in a ruined house devoid of any furniture, with the presence of only one object—a smartphone. She greets the viewers with the words—both vocal and written—“welcome to the modern age”, followed by:

“You may think that this is a house. But there is no house. You may think that this is a girl. But there is no girl. Don’t ask me who I am.” 

Examining the complex mutual relationship between the socio-political context and the work of art which documents the historic period it emerged in, the words are intercut with film negatives of houses, a helicopter, the ‘invisible’ humans (“you never noticed me, I wouldn’t be missed”), a footage of Pope Francis, all accompanied with smartphone selfies made with a raised arm in front of the masses of people and monuments.

 “When I was young, I was quiet, I didn’t talk with the others, we never talk, we message… All tenderness is radical in a broken world”… “I want to know, what is a devil today? Do you want to hear the truth? Let the suffering speak. I am a breathing fragment of nothingness. Who lives or dies to care for me.”

This verbal segment is intercut with the images of the cross and a drawing of a hand collaged with the real human arm holding a smartphone, as the new disease to be cured of (by exorcism) seems to be—the reality. The raised arm holding a smartphone becomes the pervasive film symbol—it is present in Vatican, over the heads of a faceless mass, in restaurants, in shopping centres, in our empty homes, in the streets, it is everywhere—questioning the beliefs of people. Religion becomes a kind of superstition, because no matter what people ‘know’ in the information age, they still interpret the world and the reality according to their pre-existing fixed set of beliefs.

As Hannah Arendt puts it (in The origins of totalitarianism): “The true goal of totalitarian propaganda is not persuasion, but organization of the polity. ... What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part of”.

Reconstructing artefacts of the recent and not-so-distant past, the film combines images, videos, TV, satellite/drone footage and an original narration into a seemingly incoherent and fragmented filmic reality, with many (meta)textual/discourse references, including videos of: Pope Francis in Rome, ruined Vukovar, Cologne, Aleppo, US soldiers’ flash mob dance in Afghanistan, Dubai fire and sandstorms, hurricane Katrina, migrant lines in Slovenia, queues of people in urban centres, glacier bridge collapse, statue of Liberty etc. Images of war-torn countries show demolished buildings, torn books, deserted homes with personal belongings left behind, posters hanging on the walls, newspapers, religious symbols etc. 

The multiplication of simultaneously run narratives and realities and fragmentation of both the individual and the collective are reflected in the film along the axis of mainstream media/state/corporate structures vs. people/media users/consumers, conveying the notion that our agency in the information process is taking less and less responsibility. The more fake news we are served, the more the ‘truth’ becomes important: the mainstream media (and political leaders) have never been more obsessed with it, insisting in their marketing slots that they are all “telling the truth”, echoing Hannah Arendt’s visionary words: “Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow.”

And:

“The danger is not actual despotic control but fragmentation—that is, a people increasingly less capable of forming a common purpose and carrying it out. Fragmentation arises when people come to see themselves more and more atomistically, otherwise put, as less and less bound to their fellow citizens in common projects and allegiances.” (The origins of totalitarianism)

But because of the new media interface, there is a new level of complex fragmentation along the axes privacy/secrecy/transparency/surveillance and control/enslavement, causing a ‘mental implosion’, in Baudrillard’s terms—“simulacrum has been brought to perfection in the 21st century thanks to media interface.” The collaged images of face recognition software, smart phone pervasiveness, the statue of Liberty, war-devastated buildings, torn books, “god land” with a Vodafone tower in the background suggest that mainstream media and dominant consumer discourses tailor their surveillance methods according to the selling/consuming axis or what they perceive as fit for their consumers’ needs. What the overload of information has brought is the illusory display of capitalist consumers’ choices (various kinds of coffee, carrot cakes, brownies, smoothies), but there are no nuances in interpretation of cultural texts, and this precisely helps to sustain the capitalist order. As corporate profit dictates consumers’ privacy, Baudrillard’s “mental involution” (a phone is melting like a brain could be melting) is bound to materialise, leading to the loss of the autonomy of the agency, the collapse of subjectivity. The imaginary enemy is ‘identified’, the crisis is created, and innocents die as a result. 

“The truth?”, the narrator asks and answers: “Let the suffering speak”.

Metahaven’s concept of black transparency is reminiscent of Baudrillard’s concept of simulacrum “Simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth, but the truth conceals that it’s not there. Simulacrum is true.” One fact can arise from many models simultaneously and this anticipation and confusion between the fact and its model leaves space for all possible interpretations, even the most contradictory ones.  This is how the politically anomalous - what was regarded as political aberration – can become normalcy.

Hypocrisy, carnage of profile, masked identities, faceless multitudes…

“I grew up in a city of great wealth and beauty” – these words, as it is made clear by subsequent images, allude to the baroque town of Vukovar, destroyed in the Yugoslav war - the first majorly destroyed European town in a battle since World War 2.  A sign reads “18. 11. 1991 - Vukovar, sjecate se?” (“do you remember?”), with a series of images of a ghost town, with decaying, deserted streets, demolished buildings and houses, dead bodies, streams of survivors fleeing… reminiscent of today’s devastated Syria. The authenticity of such footage images evokes the importance of the responsibility of the human race in the face of war crimes and atrocities committed by humans.

Possessed, therefore, wants to remind of and challenge human indifference. The shots show rooms empty of furniture but full of books and papers from the period of the existence of Yugoslavia (which was also the leader of the non-aligned movement of the so-called  third-world countries): Marxism, Kumrovecki zapisi, Danas: Jugoslavija, samoupravljanje, svijet, Class struggle and socialist revolution etc. These and images of “red” books bargains, Mao posters, Russian symbols, accompanied by the sound of a Croatian traditional song (“Spavaj spavaj diticu”, to make a clear reference to the war in Croatia), are a testimony to the recent European past, as well as a statement against general amnesia that has marked both post-industrial and post-communist societies.

But, “the war is always somewhere else”. The photo of a passport is aligned next to the photos of war tanks, weapons and military airplanes. Footage shows US soldiers rejoicing and dancing to the sampled “music” of gunshot sounds in Afghanistan.

 The ‘others’ imply that their bodies are more disposable and mortal, and the pain of ‘others; seems to be peripheral to the human masses, in spite of the power of  photography and media. We have face recognition software, but what and how much of human suffering do we recognize in a photo/image? We get an easy automated response to our (consumer tailored) needs (Siri, hello?), but show no reactions to others. We appear to have google maps that locate everything, but there seem to be no ‘maps for human suffering’. “As one can become habituated to horror in real life, one can become habituated to the horror of certain images,” states Susan Sontag in Regarding the pain of others.

Statements such as “we obey a fictional eye” and “our faces were attuned to a watchful eye—to adjust to being seen and shared” question and interpellate the capacity of reason and observation, even ‘common sense’ of the uniform masses, as well as the authority of god.

Indifference ‘to the pain of others’ is underscored by the repeated images of selfies and posing smilingly for selfies with a stick – a prolonged arm for the phone, restaurant images of food and drinks and a supply of a crane for “the ultimate selfie” in order to share the ultimate happiness with the world. Thus, we have cranes for photos to be shared on social media and drones for more arrogant photos and bombs. In parallel realities, innocent people die and disappear in wars, but we insist on more of our presence around the globe, offering our joy to the world.

But is this happiness fake or real? If it is real, how real is it? Do we know we are happy or do we act by orders? “Smile, be happy.” The collapse of the subject in post-modern age of neo-totalitarianism, post-truth and post-Trump?

In The origins of totalitarianism, Arendt stated decades ago: “In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. ... Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement  was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness”.

As the mutations of the image follow the shifts of historical narratives, so the collapse of the subject as well as networks seems to be imminent. A pamphlet-like verbal segment declares: “Delete your own self, the networks collapse… the screen is crushed, instagram and facebook collapse”, raising a new set of questions: have smartphones become more clever than our brains? Do we base our knowledge on networks? Will our subjectivity collapse with the collapse of networks? Will our arm break together with the stick for selfies?

 “The arrogance of the camera. This helicopter won’t come to the rescue. It will patiently film my killing”.

These words echo Susan Sontag’s statement that “the shock can become familiar: the ultra-familiar, ultra-celebrated image—of an agony, of ruin—is an unavoidable feature of our camera-mediated knowledge of war”. By analogy, they also mirror Glauber Rocha’s famous words that “the camera is a lie” or Jean-Luc Godard’s that “film is a reflection of the reality or the reality of reflection?” 

The irony and powerlessness of the proliferation of narratives and realities can be demonstrated further by another example (not shown in the film): the phenomenon of Ron Haviv’s photo taken during the Bosnian war in March 1992, and used by Jean-Luc Godard in his video masterpiece Je vous salue, Sarajevo (1993), which pictures the Serbian soldier Srdjan Golubovic treading over a Bosnian female victim’s head; Srdjan Golubovic later became a famous DJ Max performing in various night clubs in Serbia, until he was arrested in 2012 not as a war criminal, but for possession of drugs. 

“Good citizen, happy citizen, legal citizen, undocumented person, see-through person… I travelled here from far… I tried to forget what happened to me before I fled. No one believes me.  I have to be the evidence. I’m my own document”

This verbal narrative is intercut with the images of identity papers shown at borders, finger print scan check at airports, and “Ausländer” signs & grafitti, showing that, in spite of techno advances in industrial capitalism that might signal the arrival of a cyborg citizenship, the Western context, actually, reflects the return to hierarchy of white capitalist patriarchy, struggling with transculturality (which is one of the most significant influences of late post-modernity in Europe) and becoming more homogenous, closed and insecure at a time of increasing fascism and racism.

“You were quiet, you never talked”. “I” becomes “you” as an older “I” (the new generation) speaks to “you” in the future “that you never saw coming”. 

“Will it be enough to love yourself?”

Contradictions and paradoxes of technology suggest that human bodies have become a source of maximum exploitation in the visual age: is it the end of the image, the end of knowledge, of imagination? Is the future foreseeable based on facebook, instagram and twitter? New forms of expression and representation are needed to reflect the changing and challenged subjectivity in the process of becoming autonomous agents of knowledge.

As the film title suggests, we are all ‘possessed’ by multiple master narratives: by technological advances, corporate structures, general amnesia, by the collapsed subject, beliefs that border on superstition, by our “shared” need to broadcast our lives to the world, selfies, fake smiles, illusory happiness (“the device did one thing really well – it made us always smile”), fake choices, fake needs created by fake consumerist capitalist discourse, by our own voyeurism and exhibitionism, by insanity and monstrosity of political leaders, powerful consumerist discourse, by our own powerlessness and indifference, failure to take responsibility, by the absence of empathy and love (“love yourself”), possessed by our own negligence to use our ‘cultural mirror’ in the midst of the collapse of the notions of self, knowledge and truth. We have timelines, but no time in the age of multiplication of signifiers and the collapse of the signifieds. 

“If I had all faith, but have no love, I am nothing. Love is patient and kind, it doesn’t envy or boast, it’s not arrogant or rude… it rejoices with the truth.”

The acknowledgement of the ‘fact’ that we forgot how to love adds a new ontological dimension to Metahaven’s visual research, a more hopeful one than most current sci-fi dystopian narratives, as the present reality we live in, not the imaginary future, is already dystopian.  In other words, the imaginary of the social and technological can be equally democratising and constraining, but if approached responsibly, it will rather be the former.

By analogy to Alain Badiou’s Eloge de l’amour (2009), this new neither/nor space, which is not free of imperfections, but is free of estranging social confines and prohibitions, can work as an “angel of love”, a new imaginary space for a human encounter that may never occur, but could create a new unrestrained space of love and empathy.

Such an ending, in spite of the detached, almost robotic youthful voice-over, may offer a much needed disalienating, humanistic message, simultaneously subversive and self-authenticating, as the technological and hyper-rational advancements don’t necessarily imply human progress - to paraphrase Hemingway’s words: the invention of an airplane doesn’t mean that we move faster than a horse. An alternative to this ending is the return to pre-social, pre-linguistic, pre-discursive and – pre-technological, as the final images show warehouses in ruins, desolate lands and several masked women, wearing scarves to hide faces (with emojis, stickers & comic strip captions, designed by Metahaven), whispering inarticulately with their black shadows and holding big stones instead of smartphones.

Finally, in a call to challenge the structure of subjectivity, socio-political relations and the social imaginary that supports it, Possessed transforms the current debate of the binary opposition truth/facts and lies into questions of interpretation and epistemology, contextualising them, further, to not only how something is interpreted but who it is interpreted by (are we ‘preaching’ only to the converted?), who are the agents of knowledge and how newly gained knowledge serves to justify the existing beliefs of the masses. In other words, whose timeline is it? 

This is, of course, only one of possible interpretations of the multilayered filmic reality.•

Maja Bogojević (PhD) is a freelance film theorist/critic, founder and editor-in-chief of the first Montenegrin film magazine, Camera Lucida, founder and President of the Fipresci section of Montenegro, and a member of FEDEORA and UPF. She has been, until recently,_ _film theory professor and Dean of Faculty of Visual Arts at Mediteran University Podgorica, and, previously, the Dean of Faculty of Arts at the University of Donja Gorica.

[erik595]

Sacredness.... . . . . . #gerhardhaderer #haderer #sketch #sketchoftheday #cartoon #comics #vignetta #illustration #reflections #bedifferent #priests #church #catholicchurch #catholic #religion #evil #hypocrisy #omerta #religions (presso Vatican City) https://www.instagram.com/p/B7oOZZwIo8Y/?igshid=1nolybwztzxss

[eeveelutionsforequality]

stopmakingliberalslookbad said "I totally get what you were saying and Zionism definitely isn't only about religion. I'm agnostic and I see it as more of an ethnic thing."

Thank you :D Yeah, exactly, I think it can be a combination of it being a site sacred to a religious community, part of the heritage of an ethnic group who've been displaced and oppressed historically (and now), politics in the region (Israel is more progressive than some other nations in the surrounding area, for example), and so on - and different people have different reasons for being a Zionist, just like different people have different reasons for being a republican. So when somebody says that they're a Zionist generally we really don't know all that much about why they feel that way, and we don't know much about the kind of state that they even want, aside from that in some capacity it's Jewish, which makes the asks even more ridiculous - they could be accusing somebody of wanting something comparable to Vatican City, or basically America with a higher Jewish population and the birthright of Jewish people to go there, and those are completely different concepts, meaning that some people would agree with the latter but oppose the former, but neither is something that you could reasonably "call someone out" for unless you'd also "call someone out" for supporting the existence of the comparable examples... at which point you're calling people out for political opinions and not actually bad things. So anon is basically going around accusing people who haven't made dumb "call outs" of making dumb call outs, and most of those people are like "I don't even know what Zionism is" - all for the sake of apparently trying to cause some kind of drama. If somebody is for returning land to Native Americans, which most people on the left seem to be for, then logically they should also be for Israel's existence, and it's a big hypocrisy in the mainstream left here, in my opinion.

Hey just giving a heads up. If you ever get an ask like this ignore it. It’s just some a-hole trying to cause unnecessary drama with my followers and people that I follow. This is the second person to get it and I had never even heard of the word Zionist till this popped up.

[telavivcity-blog]

The Finger and the Moon 1 e 2 - short demo

https://telavivcity.co.il/?p=5701&utm_source=SocialAutoPoster&utm_medium=Social&utm_campaign=Tumblr The City that never sleeps The Finger and the Moon 1 e 2 - short demo https://telavivcity.co.il/?p=5701&utm_source=SocialAutoPoster&utm_medium=Social&utm_campaign=Tumblr This one channel demo comes from The Finger and the Moon #1 and The Finger and the Moon #2 two channel videos THE FINGER AND THE MOON PROJECT All religions are like fingers pointing to the moon. What's important is to not look merely at the finger This project is about Religions and Tolerance:it reflects on man's quest for the Infinite and on tolerance for every form of creation, but it also reflects on the hypocrisy of intolerance and on the danger of fanaticism. PREVIOUS STEPS Liuba had been working on this project since 6 years. She already made two interactive art performances for this project and two videoinstallations. The Finger and the Moon #1 was performed at the Opening of the Venice Biennial in 2007 The Finger and the Moon #2 was performed at S. Peter's Square, Vatican City, in 2009. The performance consists in praying with all the main religions' prayers dressed as a religious woman looking like a nun. A nun in the Vatican is a normal figure, but seeing a nun who prays in other religions ways is not... Liuba worked with two hidden cameramen recording both the performance and people's reactions to it. Then she edited and created video artworks with shootings coming from the performances. Performing in real life situations and environments involves unpredictability of reactions and events. There had been many kind of interactions from people and they are all part of the interest of the work. The Vatican performance had been seen live in different parts of the world, thus symbolically connecting them all together: Amsterdam, Beijing, Belem (BR), Chicoutimi (CA), Jerusalem, Mashteuiatsh (Innu community, CA), Milan, Modena (I), Montreal, New York, Paris, Pesaro (I), Piacenza (I), Rome, San Francisco, Saint Petersburg, Tel Aviv, Tourin, Tokio, Venice and Zurich. A specific website (www.thefingerandthemoon.net) has been realized for this project and for the streaming. A new blog section is going to be ready soon. THE NEW GOAL: "THE FINGER AND THE MOON #3" The work is conceived to be executed with people of different religious beliefs in the italian city of Genoa, in May 2012. Liuba and anthropologist Barbara Caputo will spend time in Genoa investigating the human geography, searching for various religious communities in town, visiting them and explaining the project to them, in order to recruiting people who wish to perform with Liuba. The anthropologist Barbara Caputo will trace a map of cultural and religious groups settling in Genoa. The process of meeting and involving people in the performance is part of the piece and it will be documented by photos, videos and essays. The performance will be held in the suggestive XIII century St. Augustin Gothic Church on May 12, 2012 We believe that art needs to go out of museums and galleries, and it must become an integral part of the fabric of our society. for more informations on this upcoming project: http://www.indiegogo.com/The-finger-and-the-moon?a=334154 Likes: 1 Viewed: 409 source #1 #2 #demo #Finger #Moon #Short #telavivbeach #telavivmap #telavivmuseum #telavivweather #tel-aviv TEL AVIV - THE CITY THAT NEVER SLEEPS #museum #Uncategorized