Bright Side

[pfinn]

Look on the Bright side Tiger Fans, you're going to get a very good draft pick.

I love watching Richmond, Carlton, Collingwood, Brisbane lose but when it's happening in such fashion as last night it's no longer enjoyable. I feel for you guys and pray that the bombers are never in such a position.

 

[Showbag]

Here is something else from the thoughts of pfinn:

THE ETHICS OF WASTE
By Gay Hawkins

Paper Presented at The Institute of Humanities, University of Michigan November 2000

2001-08-16 | I’m going to begin my paper with some reflections on an image of rubbish. Hopefully, an image many of you may be familiar with. It’s the plastic bag scene from American Beauty: an extended video image of a plastic bag blowing around, dancing in the wind. The scene begins with the words ‘would you like to see the most beautiful thing in the world?’

I’m going to begin my paper with some reflections on an image of rubbish. Hopefully, an image many of you may be familiar with. It’s the plastic bag scene from American Beauty: an extended video image of a plastic bag blowing around, dancing in the wind. The scene begins with the words ‘would you like to see the most beautiful thing in the world?’

Watching this scene for the first time I was overcome by a wholly unexpected sadness. Not the sort of sadness and disappointment you feel noticing all the plastic bags washed up on the shore of an isolated, unsettled beach - which is a form of mourning purity - rather, I felt sadness for the bag.

Everyone I have spoken to about this film remembers this scene but they generally don’t describe it as ‘sad’; beautiful, yes, moving and profound, no. Yet for me this scene was haunted. As alive as the bag was, as lyrical as its dance with the wind was, it was still a plastic bag. It could not entirely escape its materiality or its semiotics. The bag seemed to carry the whole enormous weight of ecological crisis. The lightness of the bag, the emptiness of the bag, was in contrast with its burden as the penultimate sign of environmental catastrophe: a world drowning in plastic bags. A world in which we are constantly instructed to ‘say NO to plastic bags!’ In this scene the aesthetic resonances could not completely override the moral undertones. The bag was rendered beautiful but this didn’t make it good.

I have no doubt that my response was partially an effect of being rendered ‘environmentally aware’; all those years of public campaigns instructing me to resist the easy convenience of plastic bags, to do my bit for nature. This training does not mean that I have eliminated plastic bags from my life, far from it, but it has meant that my relations with them have become more complicated. Perhaps this is why the redemptive gesture that structures this rubbish scene was so troubling. For redemption here meant the absolutely worthless and trivial transformed into the absolutely beautiful; redemption without any concern for moral or ecological consequences. I am simply too ambivalent about plastic bags for this transformation to be completely successful. For me the bag signified much more than the beauty of ephemera, it signified a major environmental problem rendered sensuous and enchanted.

This scene invited me to change my affective relations with plastic bags, to delight in something I have been trained to hate. I think this could be why I found it so deeply unsettling. I think this could be why I felt sympathy for the bag.

It’s not often that we experience rubbish as beautiful, and I am sure some would find American Beauty’s aestheticisation of a major environmental problem grotesque. Yet, in this cinematic moment, the deliberative and prescriptive logic of much environmental education is profoundly disturbed. For the rubbish scene alludes to different ways of living with bags: to our various uses and experiences of them. It locates plastic bags in the realm of the sensual and the affective and it refuses the essentialising move in much moral judgement that renders rubbish always already bad, thereby denying paradox and ambiguity, let alone recognition of our shifting relational sensibilities with it.

 

[julzqld]

And if the Bummers beat the Pies, Eddie's mob will be bottom of the ladder?