Title: The Unbea­ra­ble Light­ness of Being
Direc­tor: Phi­lip Kauf­man
Review: A mag­ni­fi­cent and epic tale of love, being in love and how to stay in love. Set in Pra­gue during the era of the Soviet inva­sion, this tale puts an inno­cent and quirky young woman with a char­ming sex acti­vist and sees them through free­dom, marriage, inva­sion, aban­don­ment and Rus­sian dic­ta­torship; always lon­ging to change, to be happy and loved alone. Really an ama­zing movie with fine acting from all invol­ved, par­ti­cu­larly Juliette Binoche who is so beau­ti­ful and Daniel Day-Lewis who carries an air about him­self. 8/10 and a must see.

I and my neigh­bor have been ran­domly pic­king out movies from my collec­tion and watching them. It’s odd that this film should echo a phrase I heard only once before a few days prior thanks to the Shi­ning album: “In the king­dom of kitsch you will be a mons­ter”. When the film finished I deci­ded to read up about this phrase to find it’s ori­gins. Sur­pri­singly neither goo­gle or ans​wers​.com had any infor­ma­tion about the par­ti­cu­lar phrase, but I did find some inte­res­ting infor­ma­tion about the word “kitsch”. Quo­ting wikipedia:

“Kitsch is a term that has been used to cate­go­rize art that is con­si­de­red an infe­rior copy of an exis­ting style. The term is also used more loo­sely in refe­rring to any art that it is pre­ten­tious or in bad taste, and also com­mer­cially pro­du­ced items that are con­si­de­red trite or crass.

Because the word was brought into use as a res­ponse to a large amount of art in the 19th cen­tury where the aesthe­tic of art work was con­fu­sed with a sense of exag­ge­ra­ted sen­ti­men­ta­lity or melo­drama, kitsch most clo­sely asso­cia­ted with art that is sen­ti­men­tal, maw­kish, or maud­lin; howe­ver, it can be used to refer to any type of art which is defi­cient for simi­lar rea­sons whether it tries to appear sen­ti­men­tal, cool, gla­mo­rous, thea­tri­cal, or crea­tive, kitsch is said to be a ges­ture imi­ta­tive of the super­fi­cial appea­ran­ces of art. It is often said that kitsch relies on merely repea­ting con­ven­tion and for­mula, lac­king the sense of crea­ti­vity and ori­gi­na­lity dis­pla­yed in genuine art.”

It also men­tio­ned that the world of pop cul­ture is essen­tially enti­rely “kitsch”, all com­mer­cially pro­du­ced music, movies and art falling under this cate­gory. My inter­pre­ta­tion of the ori­gi­nal phrase “In the king­dom of Kitsch you will be a mons­ter” is that the king­dom is essen­tially pop cul­ture or pre­ten­tious art and the object of the phrase appears ‘mons­ter’ like to those who live within the Kitsch realms. i.e. To someone that enjoys the sim­pli­fied “kitsch-art”, true art would seem like a disas­trous horri­ble mon­tro­sity. Much like trying to intro­duce a fan of Will Smith to the poig­nant work of foreign lan­guage indie cinema. Also; “The term “kitsch” was selec­ted in June 2004 by a Bri­tish trans­la­tion com­pany as one of the ten English words that are har­dest to trans­late.”. My new favou­rite word.

An online acquain­tance sug­gest I check out Yahoo’s cus­to­mi­za­ble music radio sta­tion. I was highly unenthu­sias­tic about this, I being a loather of all Yahoo pro­ducts and ser­vi­ces, their policy of cove­ring things with adverts, the busy pages, the fire­fox crashing non-compatible codes etc… . But today, a cou­ple of weeks later, in my free time, I deci­ded to check it out. After filling out forms, regis­te­ring a yahoo account and yadda yadda, I lis­te­ned to my own per­so­nal sta­tion. I chose a few of my favou­rite artists to inc­lude at the start, Eva Cas­sidy, Nick Drake, Elliott Smith. My very first song was some upco­ming teen-bopper lovey­do­vey piece of shit which made my skin crawl, I rated it 1. Some more songs follo­wed, Por­tishead, Mas­sive Attack, Moby, all fairly stan­dard songs I could hear a lot of other pla­ces. I wasn’t too impres­sed at this point. Rather than give up and move on, upon hea­ring a Nick Drake tune (from Gar­den State OST) I felt com­pe­lled to make this great. I scan­ned my Audiosc­rob­bler and iTu­nes for my fave songs and artists and I rated all of them. Now I am at 300 ratings with an Enthu­siast user ran­king and my sta­tion has deve­lo­ped a firm sense of ALL my tas­tes. Just now it pla­yed a local band “Sunna” follo­wed by my favou­rite track from the Vir­gin Sui­ci­des sound­track, “Dead Bodies” by Air. It suc­cess­fully covers my need for rag­time, blues, rock, indie, rap and orches­tral in one har­mo­nious place. If anyone wants to lis­ten to my radio sta­tion, PLEASE PLEASE do, you can find it here:
FofR’s LAUNCH­cast; click this to lis­ten to what I lis­ten to