Just lovely. It reminds me of a friend I had at college. I was critical of The Killing Fields. A movies about Khmer Rouge through the eyes of some journalists. It is a very powerful film, but I disliked how the drama of the white journalist from the US somehow came out on a part with the societal disaster in Cambodia. Those scenes, following him, seemed clunky to me and, well, sort of narcissistic. His concern about a Cambodian journalists fate seemed of greater importance than the Cambodian jounalists fate and, well, the human disaster. Agency and herorism and the tragedy somehow lived in the American reporter's body. Maybe I was right, maybe I was wrong, but that's what I experienced.wtf wrote: ↑Sun Jan 08, 2023 8:15 amI thought I'd take a run at watching your video. In the very first second you pick your left ear with your left index finger. This gesture seems to evoke the ancient source of mathematics, namely pointing. When you point, you indicate "one," or "that one." It's a primal act of selection. From there to the abstraction of the number one is but a brief evolutionary step.roydop wrote: ↑Thu Dec 29, 2022 10:31 pm Mathematics is not the path of Truth, but of delusion
https://youtu.be/YU1_FKx_XH0
But more than that. You did not just point at your ear. You did definitely pick your ear, as if there is something in there. What? A flea? My cat often sticks her paw in her ear to attend to an itch. Nothing mathematical about that. Perhaps you simply had an itch, and this was not a proto-mathematical gesture at all.
Then you removed your finger from your ear, exclaimed, "Ok!", and smiled wryly. Meaning that without picking your ear, you could not begin. And that having now picked your ear, and with evident success and an expression of joy uncharacteristic of your usual dour countenance, you are able to begin.
I should add that this ear-picking gesture is in no way incidental to the video. Coming at the very first second of recording, it could easily have been edited out, or the recording restarted to omit it. But no. This gesture is deliberate. We are made to see the ear picking, to experience it, to unconsciously absorb its raw physicality. Indeed, it's revealing that physical considerations, physical demands, physical necessities, physical urges, impose themselves upon your verbal flow in spite of yourself. Not unlike the accidental (or deliberate) hilarity of the knocked-over whiteboard in the other video. You try so hard to present an image of pure intellectuality, yet you are inevitably betrayed by the physical world around you, and your own body's needs. And you want us to see that. Rest assured I did see that, and was struck by the nonverbal message even before your words began.
Well that's enough deep analysis for tonight. I was going to speed-read Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, but this is better.
Now, my friend acknowledged that those scenes were clunky. However....he said that was on purpose. That the filmmakers intentionally did that to mock the Hollywood tendency to make other people's lives important only because they aid in the drama development of the white hero. I still don't know how tongue in cheek he was being. I mean, this would entail them saying things like 'OK, you're acting too well in these scenes. Be a bit more stiff and unreal.' And intentionally weakening those scenes, openly. At the very least with the film editor. I don't think anyone consciously does this. But.......
Why take the conscious parts of people as the only agents in making the film. We certainly don't when it comes to the good stuff. Motifs the directors or authors only notice themselves years after their works are distributed and published.
Why not take Roydops failures or 'failures' as the organism of Roydop managing to critique himself and present a vastly more interesting ironic story with more value then he realizes, even, perhaps a value that he would consciously abhor?
Now this may seem like my naively taking your post at face value, but upon rereading my own post here (this one) I can see the errors in there and know that actually I am not naive (nudge, nudge, wink, wink, say no more).
Jeez, now I don't even know what I've ended up saying...so....
I loved that post of yours. Smartest thing I've seen in years in discussion forums.