My mother tells this story that when I first went to school, I thought I was going to help the teachers. I didn’t realise I was going to get educated.
Moon Unit Zappa
Archive for the 'Quotable' Category
It is difficult to explain what makes any great work great, and particularly difficult with movies, and maybe more so with Citizen Kane than with over great movies, because it isn’t a work of special depth or a work of subtle beauty. It is a shallow work, a shallow masterpiece. Those who try to account for its stature as a film by claiming it to be profound are simply dodging the problem - or maybe they don’t recognise that there is one. Like most of the films of the of the sound ear that are called masterpieces, Citizen Kane has reached its audience gradually over the years rather than at the time of release.
Pauline Kael, Raising Kane, 1971.
Note: Spinvox initially transcribed Citizen Kane as Sits in the game. I fucking love that.
The poetry of these children is born from the fact that we find in them all the problems, all the sufferings of the adults, who remain offstage. These children affect us because in a certain sense they are monsters: they are the monstrous infantile reductions of the all the neuroses of a modern citizen of the industrial civilisation
Umberto Eco writing about Peanuts by Charles M Schulz.
Quotation dictated via Spinvox - hell of a time saver.
That’s where I’d borrow the bullets I needed.
I’d get them from my friend Peg-leg who works at the morgue and keeps a gun around to shoot dead people.
I’m reading some of Hunter S Thompson’s collected letters again to help swallow down the bitter pill that the gonzo reservoir is just about dry. Sometimes all it takes is a brief missive from Hunter to a mail ordering company, pointing out how inferior their products are (”If the garbage on this coat is leather, I’ll eat it“), to bring a smile to my face.
The really good stuff though tends to be when Hunter is banging heads with someone who is not scared to call him out.
The relationship between him and Oscar Acosta (portrayed in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas as the “300-pound Samoan attorney” Dr Gonzo and played perfectly of course by Benicio del Toro in the Gilliam movie) is a stormy one to say the least. If you don’t own the Criterion DVD of the movie you’re really missing out on a bunch of cool stuff, but perhaps the most interesting extra on there is a look at Acosta, his work and his disappearance.
In an earlier letter Hunter is giving his friend some advice on writing:
Your problem there is that your club hand is dialogue, which used to mean fiction - but if you can teach yourself to use dialogue to tell a topical, non-fiction story you’ll sell it. I guarantee that - but only if you get that goddamn missionary instinct out of your narrative. Let the people tell their own stories; they may surprise you.
There’s a sad line in one letter where Acosta suggests that if they’re still around in the year 2000 maybe they’ll have made a couple of dollars off each other.
Only one of them made it.
I gave up on Heroes a couple of episodes before the awesome season one finale because it was a big piece of crap so I can’t answer this question:
And listen, does ‘Heroes’ get better? My patience is wearing thin. It’s like ‘Dawson’s Creek’ without the violence
Right now I’m treading water with Curb Your Enthusiasm and South Park until BSG and The Wire gets back.
There’s an excerpt from the new Hunter. S. Thompson biography, Gonzo, up on the Smith magazine website:
We broke into liquor stores. We’d jimmy a lock or break a window. I never paid a hotel bill when I was with Hunter, and it wasn’t his initiative as much as mine. We’d just go out the window or the fire escape. That was just normal.
After reading it I’m not sure I’m too taken with the oral history style… I much prefer and enjoy the gonzo-style biography Hunter by E Jean Carroll in which Hunter keeps the author trapped in a pit for a while.
I also dismissed the Steadman book The Joke’s Over, but will probably pick it up in paperback. What I’m really looking forward to is Hunter’s final collection of collected letters, The Mutineer: Rants, Ravings, and Missives from the Mountaintop 1977-2005.
Only due out in February though…
This relates to everything:
“We have to change the negative things into positive. In today’s Japanese film industry we always say we don’t have enough budget, that people don’t go to see the films. But we can think of it in a positive way, meaning that if audiences don’t go to the cinema we can make any movie we want. After all, no matter what kind of movie you make it’s never a hit, so we can make a really bold, daring movie. There are many talented actors and crew, but many Japanese movies aren’t interesting. Many films are made with the image of what a Japanese film should be like. Some films venture outside those expectations a little bit, but I feel we should break them.”
I stole it from Ben who grabbed it from Warren. It struck me as a huge idea when I first read it and then prompltly forgot all about it because I’m an idiot. For me and a few others, Ben probably included, it’s a nice manifesto for 2008.
I met Ben this weekend by the way. He crashed here on Saturday and brought a large amount of alcohol and cool books with him. Took far too long for this to happen, especially as if we’ve been in touch now via email for around 2 years.
Meeting people like Ben, Corran and all the other good friends I now have who started off as nothing but screen names is the reason I’ll continue blogging (despite my recent lapse). It’s also why I’ll always fall in love with new apps like Twitter that act as friend generators.
Facebook, on the other hand, can still fuck right off…
“It was a golf cart. How it ended up in this predicament I don’t know,”
The predicament the golf cart found itself in was being under Bill Murray.
One in a series via
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