Björk

I saw her for the first time in the film Dancer in the Dark in 2000. Although I haven't seen her anywhere except some photos since then, her image imprinted in the movie was strong enough for me to remember her until today. This musical drama, which is gloomy unlike other musical movies, deals with a poor immigrant who is half blind and keeps her love for music until the last second of her life in prison. There is a story--sad one--but it is relatively forgetful in comparison to the emotional tension that she drives even to the last second of her death row. The moment when she cried out in her isolated room is extremely intense. She couldn't bear it not because she was afraid of her doomed death but because it was too quite, so came to finally find some rhythm from water pipes in the building.

After watching her music video of All is Full of Love in class, I looked through some of her photos and am currently listening to her music. She, I think, doesn't have certain qualities that can easily appeal to the main stream. Her appearance is not close to Madonna's. She has a childlike face and figure in fact. Her way of singing is not like Celine Dion's. Her voice might even irritate some folks. She, however, seems to overthrow such stereotypes by producing provocative images and music. If we take it seriously that we become who we are partly through images we see and identify with ourselves in mass media, coming across her images as alternative female/artist representations within the ocean of media cannot be overemphasized.

In blogging now, I am trying to be rational and reasonable enough to analyze her as an artist who breaks conventional banality, but feeling not succeeding. But does it matter as long as she makes us feel something different? My brain storms when I encounter something new.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Bassist Stanley Clarke

Trio! Stanley Clarke, Bass Béla Fleck, Banjo Jean-Luc Ponty, Violin ...at Chicago Symphony Center A week ago, I told my friend that it was not easy for me to appreciate the bass itself because the tone tends to be very low and never predominant. But today, I need to change what I said. Most of all I haven't seen a more wonderful picture of a man with a bass than tonight. The big instrument always seemed to suspend the player in an awkward position. But Mr. Clarke dominates the instrument and plays with it. The gigantic instrument sometimes becomes a drum with trembling strings or sometimes becomes a guitar which seems to be passed onto a Spanish flamenco music player. All the time he looks much more passionate than any flamenco dancer. I am deeply impressed that one can explode such dynamic sound and rhythm from the bass. Mr. Ponty also presents violin sound which I never heard before. It seems that he doesn't care making beatiful melody and he likes to go beyond the tone withi...
Read more

The Sociology of Education in Canada

Wotherspoon, Terry. (2004). 2nd Ed. Don Mills, ON: Oxford University Press. Sociology, which was first used by the French writer Compte in the nineteenth century to read the rapidly changing society after the Industrial revolution, is foremost a study of society and is divided into diverse fields which are determined by the perspective each study takes. Three major perspectives are structural functionalism--focusing on the orderly social structure, like a living organism, thus fundamentally aiming to stablize the structure by identifying and removing harmful elements in the social structure--interpretative analysis--emphasizing a micro level human interactions and social symbols on the basis that the world is socially constructed and the reality exists only through the member's relationship with other members, language, knowledge, etc--and critical sociology--as seen in Marxism and feminism, analyzes fundamental structural inequality of the society and aims to subvert the underlyin...
Read more

A History of Violence

Directed by David Cronenberg (2005) Cronenberg had left me a sensation of nauseating horror from "Videodrome" and "Crash". (I am just amazed that he also directed "M. Butterfly", which is quite different from his other works.) Just out of curiosity about how he described violence, I went to a theatre on a rainly Saturday afternoon. The film begins with such a weary dialog between two murderers. The car slowly moves and so does the camera, then it reveals three murdered bodies uniquely. First is from the murderer's eyes when he entered the room, second is after his pushing an object in front of the camera, then the third is by taking a shot of a gun. This prelude, which could be an independent short movie, sets fire on this film. Tom Stall(by Viggo Mortensen), who is a business owner of a small restaurant in a small town, has those two murderes in his restaurant and comes to kill them to protect others. This somewhat secretly reserved guy becomes a nati...
Read more