Land/Millenium/etc.

[barbara nagler <birena>]

    Ed-- Good point about people having to pay for their e-mail volume.
I don't, and it's too easy to forget, or just not be aware of because
you've never had it brought to your attention.

     I haven't seen Millenium (being essentially TV-less) and therefore
can't really comment on the use of Land in it.  I wonder, is the overall
thrust of Millenium "through the tunnel and into another world" or is it
more that sort of fashionably-decadent wade a little into the tunnel but
essentially stay on the safe side ... which I don't find in the spirit of
Land, myself.  I see that as a beautiful piece of chaos that has a
positive overall direction and suspect I might agree w/Mitch.  It's not
safe, it does not flinch away from the real terrors of a birth/transition,
but it's still positive.  Though all of this is very simplistic-- one
thing I love about it and Patti's more free-form work in general is the
oceanic multiple layers of it all, which cannot be easily encompassed in a
sentence or two any more than "the ocean that humanity is".

    I know one thing-- I'm increasingly irritated with Hollywood or others
that have access to having their visions widely distributed through the
media capitalizing sensationally on the real misery of others who don't
have such a voice.  And/or sentimentalizing. They'd better be damn good to
justify it.   I maybe shouldn't mouth off
unless I find out whether they're donating proceeds to giving some real
practical help, but I rather suspect not.  Re-- movies like Outbreak,
about a disease that is very real-- and now, not a hundred
years ago-- aimed at titillating
numbed-out North Americans, etc. That is beneath tacky.   I don't know if
Millenium falls into
that category or not and won't comment on it unless I ever do see it.
What I've heard so far about it sounds clever, like
juxtaposing the lounge music with the family collapsing.  But-- we're
lucky to have the luxury of stimulating or soothing our nerves over these
issues at that kind of intellectual distance, when a lot of people are
really *living* the stuff in the physical world.   I don't deny that these
films etc. may actually have motivated some people in a practical way, but
filmmaking and high-quality TV are very expensive, and someone is making a
lot of money off this that I suspect is mostly going into already-deep
pockets.

      Irena