Sunday, March 28, 2004
A going away surprise. More...
So Auscillate has been down for the past two weeks. Spaceship.com, my excellent host, moved their computers while I was away in Europe and I didn’t get the chance to start setting up my domain service again until a week after I returned. And then it turned out that my registrar had been bought or something by another company, so I had to wait for them to get back to me with the info I needed to be able to access my account. And then this and then that and then, well, here we are. Tada. Jack Miller over at Spaceship has been incredibly helpful through this, so I must send his way a huge public thanks. Thanks!
So.
I’m back from Europe (obviously). That’s really the only Josh-related news of note. Some photos will come online shortly, including some fabulous monkey shots. At this point, everyone I see on a regular basis who cares has heard the highlights, so I won’t go over them again right now. AMODA had a Digital Showcase the Tuesday after I returned, including an awesome set by Richard Divine. And I utterly ignored SXSW, out of exhaustion and just a bit of boredom about the whole affair. To be honest, Austin doesn’t have any dearth of live music during the other 51 weeks of the year, and I’d just as much prefer to avoid all of the hassles that come along with SXSW. If I didn’t live here, I’m sure I’d love it, but, well. You know. Anyway, I got my music fest bug out at the CMJ Music Marathon last October. Their line-up was much more to my tastes. And then exactly a week ago, Saturday night, I played a set at Trey Smith’s place, a.k.a. Rancho Relaxo. I was pretty sick that night, unfortunately, so my punk-rock ass laptop-rocked out with a hot chocolate and a cookie. Instead of the usual the usual beer and fig newton filled with concentrated loathing. A couple people who listened closely to the set said some really good things, though, which made me happy.
Anyway. The title makes reference to how I spent my Saturday evening: Curiousity finally got the better of me so I checked out The Passion of the Christ. Not being especially religious, I don’t know the full story of the Passion very well. In fact, most of what I did know before this film I learned at the Easter service at my grandparents’ church in Pennsylvania last spring. So. I did enjoy learning a little more about the story of the Christ. Which leads me to my main criticism: With all of the flaying and cross-bearing and extended scenes of rather uncomfortable brutality, not much of his story could actually be told. It’s one very tight snapshot that contains a great deal of sensory detail, but very little actual story.
On the other hand, I felt it tried to give to the audience the experience of the death of the Christ as if to say, You think you know the horrors of what happened to this man because of some lines of text in a book, but here’s what it really means to punish someone in this way. And to try to deliver such an experience takes time and money — and filmmakers do not have an unlimited supply of either. In this way, the film reminded my of Irreversible (which, coincidentally enough, also starred Monica Bellucci). Irreversible tried to unpack the horrifying reality of the word “rape” that most of us only know so casually. Both of these films also included scenes of such realistic and brutal violence that I had a hard time keeping my eyes on the screen.
Yeah. My two cents. I’d recommend it.
