grindhouse

i saw grindhouse on monday and i wonder a few things: did tarantino screw daryl hannah's stand-in during the filming of kill bill? or did he want to?

pomo movies. do we need plots anymore? all elements of this double feature existed outside of all narrative. narrative generic devices (cliches? odes? allusions?) were still necessary, at least formally. cars needed blazing car crashes. zombies needed oozing pustules. but the joke of "reel missing" is that in fact it doesn't matter for these two films if plot elements are deleted. and perhaps rodriguez and tarantino are saying that for b genre films plot was never necessary, but i think they do a disservice to filmmaking by so offhandedly doing away with the nuances of narrative such as character development, etc. i wonder if i'm the only one who thinks this.....

community murals

i've been volunteering at treasure city thrift store for a few weeks, and i think i'm in love with all the people who volunteer there. tcts is a community project invented as a fund-raising experiment for other grass-roots community projects in the area, especially in austin's east side.
but more to the point: there is this mural on the side of the building. it features maya angelou, angela davis, bob marley, and richard pryor. the mural itself is a detourned mt rushmore of famous black folk. and although they make sense enough as a passel of folk heroes, there has been something nagging at me since i first saw the mural. and i was unable to identify the source of the nag, until recently. i realized that all four are famous for enterprises in the arts, writing/music/comedy, except for angela davis. davis's claim to fame, from my perspective, is primarily as a political activist.
and so i wonder what it means to claim activism as an "art" of the same ilk as the arts that angelou, pryor, and marley engage in. (and i don't mean to imply that angelou, pryor, and marley did not have politically motivated aspects to their art-making.) i just wonder if anyone would call davis an "artist." were the media events that davis helped organize as a panther and then her prison writings the fruits of a creative mind? certainly yes. but, was artistry her main concern? probably not. and yet we can all agree, i think, that she has affected the terrain of american consciousness as much as the other three. so in the end, the question is, "how do we recognize an 'art'?" is it by the consciousness it raises? by the new forms it deals in? by some other marker?

i like the idea of activist as artist. i just wonder if i'm the only one who ever thought of the two as two distinct functionaries.