Daniel Garrett
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Daniel Garrett, a writer of essays, poetry, and fiction, has written extensive film commentary for the online film magazine Offscreen.
A longtime New York resident, Daniel Garrett first wrote for The Reporter, a student newspaper at Baruch College, publishing articles on poet Grace Schulman, a student strike at Medgar Evers College, and a march on Washington; and Garrett is a graduate of the New School for Social Research. Garrett was an intern at Africa Report, and published a review of Spike Lee’s School Daze for The Activist (DSA’s Youth Section Newsletter)—the film review was also printed in Black Film Review. He wrote articles on the visual artists Henry Tanner and Edward Mitchell Bannister for Art & Antiques, and covered environmental justice and other environmental issues for The Audubon Activist. Daniel Garrett’s work has appeared in The African, AIM/America’s Intercultural Magazine, AltRap.com, American Book Review, Black American Literature Forum, Changing Men, Cinetext.Philo, The City Sun, Frictionmagazine.com, The Humanist, Hyphen, Illuminations, Muse-Apprentice-Guild.com, Option, The Quarterly Black Review of Books, Rain Taxi, Red River Review, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, The St. Mark’s Poetry Project Newsletter, 24FramesPerSecond.com, UnlikelyStories.org, WaxPoetics.com, and World Literature Today. His book reviews, many of them appearing in World Literature Today, have focused on the work of Hal Bennett, Raymond Carver, Michael Frayn, Ivy Goodman, Anthony Hecht, Joseph Heller, Charles Johnson, Robert Lowell, James Merrill, Toni Morrison, Albert Murray, Carl Phillips, and Colson Whitehead, among others. His extensive “Notes” on culture and politics appeared on IdentityTheory.com, as did his essay on the inner life and social world in James Baldwin’s work—and The Compulsive Reader published Garrett's essay on James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room on its web site as well as his reviews of books by or on Louis Auchincloss and Nietzsche, and reviews of films such as Schultze Gets the Blues, Hitch, In Good Company, Casanova, Tristram Shandy, On the Waterfront, Accused, and Night and Fog. Garrett's response to Carl Dreyer's Joan of Arc and Spike Lee's Inside Man appeared on the web pages of Cinetext.Philo. In addition, IdentityTheory.com published Garrett's commentary on the films Lady and the Duke, Les Destinees, and Y Tu Mama Tambien, and on music by Tupac Shakur and Barbra Streisand. Garrett’s experience of the 2003 New York City blackout, “A Simpler Chaos,” appeared on TechnologyReports.net’s “Blackout Tales” page. His essay on the singer (and band) Sade appeared on AllAboutJazz.com, and PopMatters.com published his piece on Annie Lennox. Daniel Garrett's commentary on the films, music, and life of Diana Ross has appeared on Offscreen.com, as have his essays on Hotel Rwanda, Melinda and Melinda, Yes, Dogville, Father and Son, Woman Thou Art Loosed, Moolaade, Chronicles of Narnia, Harry Potter, Proof, Syriana, Paradise Now, Private, In The Cut, Yossi & Jagger, The Barbarian Invasions, Cold Mountain, Dirty Pretty Things, The Dreamers, Japanese Story, The Manchurian Candidate, Proteus, Saddest Music in the World, Walk on Water, Junebug, The Constant Gardener, and other films.
Daniel Garrett had an idea around 1983 for a discussion group that would explore both art and politics, and it wasn't until he started the Cultural Politics Discussion Group, which met first at ABC No Rio in Manhattan's lower east side and then Soho, that he fulfilled his vision of what such a group might be: and the group discussed a wide range of cultural forms and philosophy from 1989 to 1993. (The motto of the group was knowledge, discourse, friendship, and social responsibility.) Garrett has mentioned the Cultural Politics Discussion Group in various writings, including, briefly, his commentary on the films The Barbarian Invasions (January 2004) and Dogville (June 2004) and in an iconographic consideration of culture and social life (February 2006), all of three of which appeared on the web pages of Offscreen.
Garrett, interested in both form and content, has said, "Each piece of work is its own idea, its own form, its own reality" ("Notes," on life experiences, culture, and politics, written Winter/Spring 2000 and published in the early part of the decade by the web site IdentityTheory.com).
Daniel Garrett affirms the complexity of the human being when he says, "I do not believe in essences; I believe in change, choice, complexity, consciousness, and correction, though much of the world seems to prefer that character and existence be defined by certain common categories, such as age, appearances, attitude, class, gender, race, religion, and politics. Whether what one believes is substantiated by evidence and logic—and can be called then a fact or truth—is another matter; and even then, it may be difficult to know what has actually moved a man or woman to act" ("Human Conflict," Offscreen.com, February 2005).
MORE QUOTES FROM DANIEL GARRETT'S CULTURAL COMMENTARY:
(Below are fully attributed quotes, citing author, online publication, and the year of online posting of text.)
"Films come and come; and do so quickly enough that it’s hard to know if any of them are of much importance—before a decent, public conversation can occur, they’re gone. The great thing about so many films is that they form a banquet of colors, moods, philosophies, sensations, and situations—possibilities. There are times when the possibility of change is the only thing that makes life bearable—and some of us change because of the ideas and feelings we encounter, but some of us can only change when the environment in which we move changes and forces change upon us. We can exist as frozen selves, frozen possibilities, and come to think of the frost as a kind of glamour, and the chill as the ultimate cool, and the ice as being as valuable as water, though we cannot drink ice. Films allow us to feel mutable, as they move above and below our usual sense of what we are, melting the ice," was how Daniel Garrett began a 2004 Offscreen.com survey essay that discussed Hero, We Don’t Live Here Anymore, Vanity Fair, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, The Motorcycle Diaries, Kilometer Zero, Stage Beauty, Kinsey, Ray, Alfie, Birth, Alexander, and Closer.
Commenting on the 2006 web pages of Cinetext.Philo about Carl Dreyer's Joan of Arc, Daniel Garrett concluded that "the film La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc still seems a classic. For its subject, for its inventive technique, for its performances, and for the apparently timeless appeal of all these, the film is a superb standard. The explorations of history, law, and faith, of Joan of Arc's exalted participation in the war between the English and French, presented with Dreyer's inventive technique—the different angles for Joan and her judges, the close-ups, and the occlusion of anything extraneous to the main action and content of the story—remain admirable. The performances of the actors and the illumination of contradictory human nature, with its high ideals and low actions, with the endless struggle between individuality and society, remain moving."
In a film essay that considered Nietzsche's critique of philosophy and morality, while also referencing Andy Warhol, Garrett stated that "Inside Man is lean, propulsive work, with all its elements—cast and crew—working beautifully together, with care, conviction, and craft, but with the film’s end, which in many ways seems flawless, guiltless, shameless, lacking anything to give us doubt or worry, I am inspired to wonder about the experience and its meaning. Doesn’t human experience cost something, and not only to one person—such as a bank president, or rich man, who has made some of his money in very questionable ways? Doesn’t it cost something to the rest of us? Does accepting a crime, for whatever reason, have implications for our sense of morality? If a thief is stolen from, is the theft still a theft? Is injuring an immoral man an immoral act? Is reporting and gaining justice for one crime—an old crime—an acceptable substitute for the enactment and handling of a new crime? Can we accept that we are likely to leave Inside Man with the pleasure of a story well-told, and the pleasure at the film’s display of varieties of intelligence, rather than the old-fashion Hollywood pleasure that follows when all the criminals have been punished?" (Cinetext.Philo, 2006).
About Annie Lennox's Bare recording: "When I first heard Bare, I wasn't sure that I liked it: the songwriting seemed uneven, and a few of the rhythms seem borrowed (one song brought to mind a recent Mary J. Blige hit), and something about the album reminded me of a Michael Jackson album: passionate and polished, a mix of calculation and instinct. Listening to the album over and over, I was impressed with Annie Lennox's singing and thought of the recording as a singer's album, as Lennox's voice argues, confides, distances, explains, laments, nags, seduces, and stomps..."(Garrett, PopMatters.com, 2003).
"Life is rarely what we expect—and in order to embrace strange experiences we may need new perspectives and forms of storytelling. In Rocco and His Brothers, made and shown in Italy in 1960 and released in American the next year, by director Luchino Visconti, we have a story that is in some ways very old—as old as the betrayal between the brothers Cain and Abel—but this is also a story of what can happen when one moves from country to city, into the modern world. What is modernity? Access and use of the most sophisticated knowledge and technology of one’s own time—and willingness to leave tradition behind in chase of the new: thus “moderns” are celebrated as heroic or condemned as decadent. Rocco and His Brothers is told in individual chapters devoted to each brother, a form that allows for intimate exploration of each and which together generate a large view. The film has the detail of photography, the layered richness of painting, and the resonant recognition of a roving, individual perception as it explores ambition, desire, law and crime, money and poverty, and violence. The first scene begins with a look through the grille of a train station—the station itself signifies transition, modernity, and life lived among masses of people but the grille is like the bars of a jail cell. (Later a doomed woman character will say that life is a one-way street.) The southern Italian family—Rocco (Alain Delon), his brothers, and mother—arrive in Milan to be with Rocco’s elder brother Vincenzo (Spiros Focas), who moved there earlier. They first notice streetlights that make night like day—another aspect of modernity may be that it makes nature—the untransformed, the not man-made—less important," wrote Garrett in a commentary that first appeared in the year 2002 on 24FramesPerSecond.com and then in 2006 on the web pages of The Compulsive Reader.
About the film Private, directed by Saverio Costanzo, Daniel Garrett wrote, "In Private, the family whose home is taken over is in a state of crisis; and it is a crisis that becomes daily life. The cast of characters includes a father and a mother and their children of various ages, a woman neighbor, and Israeli soldiers. The actors featured include Mohammad Bakri, Areen Omari, Hend Ayoub, Karem Emad Hassan Aly, Lior Miller, and Tomer Russo. Private’s subject, Palestinian-Israeli relations, and its theme, the unfair difficulty of that relationship, and its story, the invasion of one family’s home, which is also a metaphor at once ordinary and resonant, are presented with believable characters, spoken lines, and actions, creating a dramatic atmosphere, proving the effective novelty of the work’s approach. Bakri plays the father, an educator, for whom what happens is a test of his commitment to reason and civility: and he insists the family remain in their home, as part of a non-violent protest, and to maintain their property and to keep his children’s heritage and respect. It’s probable that the most significant purpose of all human efforts is the increasing and sharing of human understanding and, possibly, consequently, ethics and skill in living. I think that Private contributes to that" (The Compulsive Reader, 2006).
In a thorugh critique of Blake Farina's episodic novel King of Cats, Daniel Garrett highlighted broader issues: "We are creatures of thought and emotion, instincts and impulses, and the relation of each to each is precarious—unpredictable and unstable—and, consequently, what it means to be human is continuously being discovered—or invented. That we can become conscious of our own natures and make choices about who we are and what we want to be, do, and say is a great part of whatever freedom we have. Choice is itself an affirmation of consciousness and mastery, though the absence of choice is sometimes seen as a marker of nature, of inevitability, as a force greater than thought or society. I see lack of choice as a marker of an amoral animality, at best; and at worse, as barbarism, madness, pathology, perversity, poverty, and stupidity. The danger of cultural relativism—which allows foreign cultures, primitive cultures, minority cultures, and outlaw cultures to have equal value with whatever is considered the most evolved dominant domestic culture, a cultural relativism that has become increasingly apparent in the west, in Europe and the United States of America, in the last forty years—is that unquestioned or questionable values and habits sustained in less dominant or less evolved cultures will be introduced into the dominant culture and will take on a new force and influence....I thought years ago that bisexuality was fundamental, and that homosexuality was a choice that could be made—after a feminist critique of gender, with an experimental grasp of desire, and out of social empathy, and for radical subversion, but, of course, homosexuality is as disappointing and limited as most social relationships. Homosexuality, which did not exist before the second half of the nineteenth century as an exclusive sexual or social category, remains an interesting phenomenon, partly because of the controversy it inspires and how it forces us to consider individual rights and civil liberties. However, other than this, and being currently bored with most of the easily available studies on the subject, I have a sense that academic books on homosexuality do not matter, that we live in a society determined to place human experience in categories and these categories are lies, in both concept and effect: human experience is too ambiguous and diverse" (The Compulsive Reader, 2006).
From a review about the singer Sade Adu and her band Sade: "I suspect that at the core of most personalities is mystery—a hunger for experience, a capacity for pleasure, a need for thought and purpose, a desire to love, and an appreciation of beauty, a life force, that knows itself and knows intuitively there is no object that satisfies, no object that is its natural or sole focus, though it may choose from among those it is aware of. The mystery of who we are and why we want what we want is something we glimpse in other people, and usually the closer we get to the mystery, the more strange people seem; and the farther we are from the mystery, then, the easier it is to accept clichés and conventions about who people are, and the more normal they seem. What’s interesting about Adu and her collaborators is that their work together remains the primary language through which her personality and concerns, and possibly even theirs, can be discerned (though the other members have performed without Adu in a band called Sweetback)" (Garrett, AllAboutJazz.com, 2003).
"Every culture has its rebels, every culture has its wise people, and for Native Americans the two are one in John Trudell. Political history and personal tragedy seem to have applied the pressure that produced this rough diamond: he is hard, rare, sharp, and immensely valuable, something attested to by his comrades, friends, and family—among them, Gary Farmer, Wilma Mankiller, Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt, Robert Redford, and Val Kilmer—featured in the documentary, Trudell, directed and produced by Heather Rae, a Cherokee who worked on the project for more than ten years," Garrett wrote in a piece that appeared in 2006 on the web sites of Native American Times and The Compulsive Reader.
Daniel Garrett began an icongraphy on cultural figures, ideas, and works by stating, "The intellectual’s responsibility is the making of his own mind, I have often thought; and all other duties—to write, to teach, to protest—are self-chosen" (Offscreen, 2006).
External links
Offscreen.com - *[link] TheCompulsiveReader.com - *[link] Cinetext.Philo.at - * [link]
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