Weekend Moral Dilemma
I love everything absolutely everything about this book, from its pink and black iterative cover to its quotableness, the people it makes me want to recommend it to, and especially its copyright. It was published in 1966 and all its articles date from the '30s-'50s.
I love reading anything totally outdated. Valencia Community College was throwing out tons of periodicals once. Being a teenage girl, I loved the 80s and I loved making collages, so I of course took the entire year of 1985 People Magazine. Great pictures and ads. Used these all through college for various things, including street art dream that still haven't materialized.
I also discovered that one of my teenage-girl loves was reading dated material. It was weird to read about celebrities, Vietnam war vets, US politics, etc from 20 years ago talked about like they were current events. It gave perspective. Everything we do is so fleeting and not as important as we think it is, and we have been struggling with the same exact social issues for two decades, and probably eternity. There is nothing new under the sun....
Anyway, I really really wanted to steal this book from Classical. I decided not to. It really isn't worth it. I loved those people magazine volumes, but I don't have them anymore. Eventually, I just digitized the best pictures and tossed them out.
The best part of the book was the writings on documentaries. For several years now I have wallowed in the pretentiousness of being someone who enjoys documentaries. These were written when the idea of "what is a documentary?" was still being formulated and hadn't been talked to death and distorted for various politically expedient motives and profit and post-modernist theses.
The essays on documentary hounded over and over again that in making a documentary, you had a social responsibility to make some kind of commentary on society. One that would produce feelings/emotions that made viewers sympathetic or affected by a plight or cause. "Especially in a time like ours," one documentarist quips.
Loved that. Especially loved that since that was 50+ years ago, and while documentaries are important and i think a little more widely viewed than they were then, I would not say that they have really affected change in any way. Even the super mainstream ones like an Inconvenient Truth or Waiting for Superman (incidentally, both directed by the same guy). Really adds to that 'perspective.' The things we demand are necessary, that we see as absolutely necessary or true, they may or may not be, or they may not really matter still, half a century later. Documentaries still affect very little. The cacophony of voices on the internet and worldwide hampers this, as do the fact that very few outside a certain set of films is seen by the vast majority of people. The quote that documentarians need to focus on social issues and social change "especially in a time like ours" implies that there is something they can do, or change. But there are still so many problems in the world, more even, and few have been solved. Vanity of vanities...
Anyway, to make this about me again, regardless of the futility or the necessity, I think my life would be incomplete if I never attempted to make a documentary or film of some kind. add that to The List.
