If they are forced out, they might bolt back home, throwing their rider off their back, sometimes trampling them. A barn sour horse will resist being taken from its stable, often violently. Or maybe it leads to another slightly larger holding tank that is just fine.īarn sour, an equestrian term, describes a domesticated horse who doesn’t want to leave its home. Or maybe when I see this situation as ridiculous, and I’ve accepted a certain kind of banality, that’s when I’m out of tune with the world as it actually is. Maybe those feelings are out of scale, out of tune with the world as it actually is. But I resist: I don’t like being told what to feel, and if I do feel something like mourning, maybe I’m a fool. Like the fish, I feel the force of the cues at play -for them, it’s water pushing one way for me, it’s the music’s command to FEEL! PATHOS NOW!, which also has the ironic overlay of saying how silly it is, to feel that. ![]() Sometimes I notice the way the tumble of the fish’s bodies looks like a Renaissance etching of sinners tumbling into hell sometimes I notice the bearded man’s camo pants sometimes I notice the confused pathos of the man who leans out to touch the knot of disoriented trout-and I feel, like him, the terror of the fish, and sadness for them. It has a total of 110 views as of February 1, at least ten of which are mine. I’ve returned to this video repeatedly since I first saw it last year. You can really feel this circulation when you’re watching it-feel the way your own feeling turns into its apparent opposite, and back. This extension of time allows for multiple and layered juxtapositions of grand and banal. ![]() It creates space for an aesthetically sensible movement between the video’s contradictory tonal cues. But then it goes on for almost eight minutes? Just as Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” becomes a gorgeous and resigned dirge when slowed down ( recommend), something about the dilation of time changes the tonality of White’s video. At first, the video seems like a funny TikTok-grand music, slo-mo, grainy vertical footage, silly suburban fish situation. The video’s appeal is its constant oscillation between tragedy and, well, bathos. White sets the video’s banal footage to Arvo Pärt’s solemn “Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten,” complete with periodically tolling bell. The video, by the artist Barrett White, borrows its grand title-“Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Will”-from Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks and letters, in which that phrase describes the coexistence of apparently contradictory orientations to the world. Neighbors (I presume) have gathered to watch the process-children are filming, a lone man reaches out piteously to stroke the clots of confused fish through the tube, and a goldendoodle’s fluffy head bobs in and out of the frame. They get stuck they struggle they clog the tube they swim, weakly, upstream and eventually men in aprons (the fish stockers?) pick up the tube and force the last fish out. ![]() A long, transparent inflatable tube runs the fish from a truck across a lawn and into the lake. ![]() What is this video? A plot summary might run something like this: A low-quality cell phone records, in slow motion, a small suburban lake being stocked with fish. Detail from the title sequence of Peter Chung’s Æon Flux.
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