Smarter than you

Woody Guthrie didn’t just want to sing about justice; he didn’t just want to “inspire his listeners” or get them to raise their voices in the spirit of peace or whatever it is that we usually think folk singers do; he was trying to imagine a music so powerful that it would actually bring justice into the world; he wanted to strum justice into existence; wanted an art that wouldn’t just be in the service of revolution, but that would itself be the completed revolutionary act. And that’s exactly what Tarantino gives us at the end of the movie: “This movie screen kills fascists.” That fantasy—the fantasy of a fully revolutionary art—turns out to be very old. As early in the 1590s, some English poets were trying to write plays that not only depicted revenge, but actually achieved it; they were trying to imagine plays that could actually kill corrupt courtiers and oppressive princes, as though blank verse could actually draw blood. Or if we flash-forward to 1969, we will find Amiri Baraka writing these lines, in a poem called “Black Arts”:

We want ‘poems that kill.’
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead

Tarantino, Nazis, and Movies That Can Kill You - Christian Thorne.

Wowowow this is really good and it’s not even what it’s about! The conclusion is a lot like how I felt when I saw the movie but this article is really excellent and surprisingly relevant to the way I think about making art, the idea of inhabiting something terrible to expose its flaws.

(via sympathyfortheartgallery)

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    Wowowow this is really good and it’s not even what it’s about! The conclusion is a lot like how I felt when I saw the...
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  10. hatethefuture said: Holy shit this guy taught two of my favorite college courses—18th Century Lit and Gothic Theory. He’s a maniac.
  11. hungryghoast posted this