the Isengard Olympics
Jul. 29th, 2012 11:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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bullmoonhearthIn general I neither know nor care all that much about the Olympics, but we happened to be at a friend's house (a friend who donated her copious kitchen space to Peachapalooza 2012, out of the kindness of her heart and for the small bribe of some ginger-peach jam and peach chutney) and the opening ceremonies were on her DVR.
Wow, I'm glad I saw those, or I would never have appreciated the extent to which Boyle celebrated London by depicting it as a horrifying blight on the earth. At first I thought I was just projecting my crunchy-granola aesthetic onto what the color commentators kept reassuring me was "a celebration of progress and industry," but by the time the *giant smokestacks* came up and they *forged an actual ring,* I was pretty sure they just had to cut the Uruk-Hai for time.
It was actually a genuinely moving piece with fantastic music -- once the Olympics' copyright goblins get bored and go away, you should try looking for it on YouTube if you didn't see it the first time through. One of the things I like about Britain is its general lack of jingoism -- I'm sure this is an oversimplification, but they seem much more able than Americans generally are to accept that it's reasonable to have discomfort and grief and frustration about your country and still love it in many ways. That just seems like a very adult way of loving anything: not blindly, because does anyone really want to be loved blindly more than they want to be loved by someone who really sees them?
Surely it isn't possible to have a genuinely mature and loving relationship with the land if we can't include both our deep loyalty to it and our ambivalence, grief, and anger over the enormity of our impact on it.
Wow, I'm glad I saw those, or I would never have appreciated the extent to which Boyle celebrated London by depicting it as a horrifying blight on the earth. At first I thought I was just projecting my crunchy-granola aesthetic onto what the color commentators kept reassuring me was "a celebration of progress and industry," but by the time the *giant smokestacks* came up and they *forged an actual ring,* I was pretty sure they just had to cut the Uruk-Hai for time.
It was actually a genuinely moving piece with fantastic music -- once the Olympics' copyright goblins get bored and go away, you should try looking for it on YouTube if you didn't see it the first time through. One of the things I like about Britain is its general lack of jingoism -- I'm sure this is an oversimplification, but they seem much more able than Americans generally are to accept that it's reasonable to have discomfort and grief and frustration about your country and still love it in many ways. That just seems like a very adult way of loving anything: not blindly, because does anyone really want to be loved blindly more than they want to be loved by someone who really sees them?
Surely it isn't possible to have a genuinely mature and loving relationship with the land if we can't include both our deep loyalty to it and our ambivalence, grief, and anger over the enormity of our impact on it.