January 21, 2003
B!X, who has traded in his personal weblogging shoes to focus on thinking/writing globally and acting/writing locally, sends me this link to a piece in salon.com about A new film from "Slacker" director Richard Linklater [that] offers a daring, crackpot vision for the World Trade Center memorial…
In the 20-minute film, "Live From Shiva's Dancefloor," Manhattan walking-tour guide Timothy "Speed" Levitch posits that the site should be turned into a park full of free-roaming American bison, popularly known as buffalo. "Sixteen acres of blazing green grass, a place for togetherness, healing out loud, and spontaneous culture," says Levitch. "And in the middle of the park, the memorial should not be an inanimate slab of stone, but should have a heartbeat." Thus, the buffalo…..”
“You will learn a lot about America's subconscious expectations for its future in what we finally decide to build on that sacred ground," Levitch continues. "And I say that subconscious expectation should be the lost sages of North America brought back to the existential front-and-center of America, so that the new Americans will not be interested in slaughtering the buffalo but in learning from the buffalo, and not view the buffalo as a strange beast and an icon on a flag but as a living, breathing soul that also has moments of cosmopolitanism."
"We're serious about this," says Linklater of the park. "It's kind of playful but that's the point." It is unlikely that "Live From Shiva's Dancefloor" will move a committee of bureaucrats to take the bison idea seriously. The hope is that the film will spawn new thinking on a greater scale, change the scope of thought and vision on a fatigued subject. "Even if it doesn't actually happen," Levitch says, "there is triumph in just having people imagine it."
My feeling exactly.
Comments now powered by HaloScan. Click here to read this entry's comments (if any), or to post one of your own.
Old Comments (0)