“I’m looking forward to new ways,” he said. “It’s just, I got as far as this. And that’s what I do. That’s it. And if I could just muster up the energy, God willing, to make a couple more, one more maybe, and that’s it, okay? That’s as far as I got. You keep going until you can’t. But what I mean is that you gotta rip it out of your skull and your guts. To find out what the hell you really…what do you really feel should be said at this point in life by you? You gotta say something with a movie. Otherwise, what’s the point of making it? You’ve got to be saying something.”Comments closed
Category: quotes
Comments closedHe hardly realised that he was going down, falling, the green water rocking him and the sharp edges of the rocks had already torn him apart. Fossil lances.
I AM THE BROTHER OF XX, Fleur Jaeggy trans. Gini Alhadeff
FOR WITTGENSTEIN, this new program was also reflected in the formal shape of his philosophizing. He was no longer concerned with pouring his own thought into the rigid, hierarchically structured, and rigorously demonstrative form of a treatise. His philosophizing had much more in common with the genre of the commonplace book or the notes of a flâneur in equal measure astounded and fascinated by detail. Wittgenstein set off on this path in 1929. And by consistently following it, he completed his Philosophical Investigations in 1945. It is a collection, as he writes in the preface, of remarks “like a number of sketches of landscapes that were made in the course of these long and involved journeyings.” Travel pictures, then, thought-pictures, produced in the course of an exploration of the diversity of human speech itself: “The same points or almost the same points,” Wittgenstein goes on, almost in the spirit of Benjamin the flâneur, “were always being approached afresh from different directions, and new sketches made … so that you could get a picture of the landscape. Thus this book is really only an album.”
TIME OF THE MAGICIANS
For some reason, this quote gave me furiously to think at the weekend, and has stayed with me all week. Sometimes a piece of writing will for no reason nudge me over on to a different track, sometimes one I’d left years ago, and I pick up the pursuit of that thought from the point I left it. If that makes any sense.
One CommentComments closedWittgenstein wasn’t some obscure returning Cambridge student. On the contrary, from 1911 until just before the outbreak of the First World War, he had studied there with Russell and had quickly become a cult figure, known for both his obvious brilliance and his waywardness. “Well, God has arrived, I met him on the 5:15 train,” John Maynard Keynes wrote in a letter dated January 18, 1929.
TIME OF THE MAGICIANS
Comments closed‘I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use – silence, exile and cunning’.
James Joyce
Comments closedIn addition to the traditional piano player, each (film) theatre in Saragossa was equipped with its explicador, or narrator, who stood next to the screen and “explained” the action to the audience. “Count Hugo sees his wife go by on the arm of another man,” he would declaim. “And now, ladies and gentlemen, you will see how he opens the drawer of his desk and takes out a revolver to assassinate his unfaithful wife!” It’s hard to imagine today, but when the cinema was in its infancy, it was such a new and unusual narrative form that most spectators had difficulty understanding what was happening. Now we’re so used to film language, to the elements of montage, to both simultaneous and successive action, to flashbacks, that our comprehension is automatic; but in the early years, the public had a hard time deciphering this new pictorial grammar. They needed an explicador to guide them from scene to scene.
if you want a picture of the future, imagine humans having to face watching reboots – for ever.Comments closed
As the ambient noise of sixties culture grew louder around him, the more he desired to block it out and hear only himself; the more he went inward.
COLTRANE: THE STORY OF A SOUND, Ben Ratliff
Comments closedComments closedI’ve always believed that the imagination is a spiritual quality that, like memory, can be trained and developed.
Comments closedOur minds are full of things that are dead and yet that we live for and couldn’t live without.