Update on Celtic Spirituality and Radical Activism Immersion Experience August 2010

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Hi folks - just to let you know that we're deep in preparation for the Celtic Spirituality and Radical Activism Immersion Experience, taking place in just over two months in my home of Northern Ireland.  Unfortunately, due to unforeseen and unavoidable circumstances my co-facilitator and good friend Ian Cron has had to withdraw from the retreat; but I'm very happy to announce that I'll now be joined by Carl McColman as co-facilitator. Carl will tell you more about the retreat/immersion experience here.  Good news: if ten or more people sign up in the next week, we may be able to reduce the cost by up to $200 per person.  So please do click on the link to Carl's blog, read about the retreat, and let us know if you're interested: places are limited and we hope to fill them soon...

Celtic Spirituality and Radical Activism Gathering

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We're making some final plans for the Celtic Spirituality and Radical Activism Event - a week in Northern Ireland in August, leading up to Greenbelt.  There are still some places left, but we need to make some decisions this week about numbers - so if you're interested we need to hear from you very soon.  More details on the event here - if you're interested in participating, let us know...

Letting Go...Some Thoughts on 'Lost'

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Of course many of us saw, are still thinking, and want to talk about 'Lost'.  I'm no expert (that appelation belongs to good folk like Chris Seay), nor even that much of a fan, but I have followed the show, in good times and bad.  My brief thoughts on the implications of how it ended and why I liked it: 1: It does what good conclusions always do: allows for us to go back and watch from the start with enhanced enjoyment.

2: It genuinely lets characters breathe, and despite the surreal contexts of the narrative, do things that real people actually do, which makes it better than almost anything else currently screening on network television.

3: It ends up being more like a film that I never considered a progenitor until last night ('The Last Temptation of Christ') than its most obvious grandfather ('Star Wars').

4: It earned the right to attempt serious points partly because it was always able to laugh at itself.  ('Christian Shephard?  Really?')

5: It suggests something hugely significant about our current popular culture: the narrative of personal transformation dominates, and the link between facing your own death and making a good life is front and centred.  John O'Donohue always said that the greatest privilege of working in a pastoral context was helping people to die well; in that sense, at its best, 'Lost' is like a meta-level good priest, a comforting myth, a reassurance that every moment allows for the possibility of miracles: the miracle of human beings in conflict forgiving each other, the miracle of lives well lived, and the miracle perhaps most underthought, that of the ability to choose.

But before we get too excited and announce the Second Coming of Tolstoy, there's a shadow side:  I think part of why the ending of a show like 'Lost' affects people is because we're all longing for lives that seem as rich as the characters in good fiction; or, frankly, we want to have lives as rich as the lives of people who work in television seem.  Of course this is to collude in a myth that is ultimately oppressive: while we may be thoroughly enjoying and learning from 'The Sopranos', 'The Wire', 'Six Feet Under', 'Battlestar Galactica', 'Lost', and now 'Treme', we're also paying for it by sitting through advertising, or buying Dharma Initiative branded lasagna; more than that, we're subject to the temptation to confuse reading directions with climbing mountains (how many young men saw themselves in Neo, were inspired to re-evaluate their lives and sense of vocation, made emotional commitments to living subversively, and fleshed this out primarily [or exclusively] by purchasing the Playstation 2 game?)  The map is not the city.  'Lost' is over.  It's time to let go.

Summer Hours

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Jeremie Renier, Juliette Binoche, and Charles Berling,

looking happier than they often feel in 'Summer Hours'

The premise that underlines Olivier Assayas’ film ‘Summer Hours’ couldn’t be more unfamiliar: elderly matriarch dies, her three adult children have to decide how to split up her estate, the Musee D’Orsay gets involved because said estate includes a lot of art and objets d’art, and some teenagers have a party in the rambling French country pile that has given the family shape for a generation. The end.

Given that I don’t have a) any objets d’art, b) a rambling French country pile, or c) contacts at the Musee D’Orsay, ‘Summer Hours’ nails what my old sociological colleagues would call ‘the condition of postmodernity’, and in that sense, ‘the condition of my life’ as if it were written about me. You might feel that way too, especially if you’re a middle class Westerner (in an ironic example of the limits of globalisation, that particular marker of non-diversity probably accounts for most of the readers of this blog, as well as the writer). ‘Summer Hours’ manages to make me think about be utterly compelling, to entertain and provoke, to suggest the contours of the world in which we currently live, and to suggest that its characters have existed before the film started, and will go on once it’s done.  A film of moments, because it knows life's biggest gravities often look tiny or even invisible when they're happening.  Trust me - as I look back over the past five years of my life, it seems to me entirely true that the most important thing I did was to spend fifteen minutes picking raspberries in New Zealand with my best friend.  All the external 'success', money, 'spectaculars' that may have happened are easily filed away into 'do not resuscitate' - they won't sustain me.  To sustain me in a sense of well-being, peace, and the possibility that I might do less harm to those around me?  Picking raspberries in a field in New Zealand.  That'll do.

(As for 'Summer Hours' moment of moments?: It's a close call between the protagonist (who dies in the first quarter of an hour - and that's not a spoiler) unpacking a new telephone, a 75th birthday gift that becomes something like the most heartbreaking metaphor you could imagine; or the way the camera lures itself up to Juliette Binoche’s face, and the sound rises as the camera closes in, and she weeps as her boyfriend leans toward her offering the relational closeness that the film is grieving.)

It’s a film about what drives the world, what family is, the role of art in living well, what the past means, the interconnection and fragmentation of the things; it creates a fully realised setting that I felt I could watch forever, partly because the way of life it is describing is itself becoming a museum piece.

Criterion releases ‘Summer Hours’ on DVD and Blu-Ray next week - gorgeous transfers as usual, and a pretty decent long interview with Assayas accompanies an essay by Kent Jones and making of documentary. It’s a magnificent film - one of the best of the past few years.