Dreams – how do they work? Kenneth Tynan ponders

Whenever we solve the problem of dreams, we shall not be far from solving the root problems of human identity and creativity. Has anyone noticed the really inexplicable thing about our nightly narrative tapes? They have suspense. This occurred to me last night, when I was involved in a Hitchcock-type chase dream—in which, I suddenly realized, I did not know what was going to happen next. I did not know who would be lurking behind the next door; and I wanted desperately to know. What part of one’s mind is it that harbours secrets unknown even to the unconscious? (For in dreams we are surely privy to the unconscious in full flood.) The theory that in dreams we tap a source of energy outside the individual psyche is powerfully reinforced by the presence of suspense.

Diaries, Kenneth Tynan

Tynan on the true nature of a car wash

Herzog momentarily looks back on his youth

My ancient times. Remoter than Egypt. No dawn, the foggy winters. In darkness the bulb was lit. The stove was cold. Papa shook the grates, and raised an ashen dust…

Napoleon Street, rotten, toylike, crazy and filthy, riddled, flogged with harsh weather – the bootlegger’s boys reciting ancient prayers. To this Moses’s heart was attached with great power. Here was a wider range of human feelings than he had ever again been able to find.

Herzog, Saul Bellow

Pluralistic Ignorance and The Beatles

I felt I wasn’t playing great, and I also felt that the other three were really happy and I was an outsider.

I went to see John, who had been living in my apartment in Montague Square with Yoko since he moved out of Kenwood. I said, “I’m leaving the group because I’m not playing well and I feel unloved and out of it, and you three are really close.” And John said, “I thought it was you three!”

So then I went over to Paul’s and knocked on his door. I said the same thing: “I’m leaving the band. I feel you three guys are really close and I’m out of it.” And Paul said, “I thought it was you three!”

Ringo Starr, recalls in Anthology.

The future is always the same, it’s the past that keeps changing – Russian proverb

Soviet era proverb, probably misquoted and I know I read it somewhere but can’t recall specifically where. Still good though.

Happy Birthday – arrangement by Ivan Fischer

Bobby Fischer vs Donald Byrne

Olivier – Richard III, Jed Harris inspiration

“There, staring back at me from the mirror, was my Richard, exactly as I wanted him. I’d based my makeup on the American theater director Jed Harris, the most loathsome man I’d ever met. My revenge on Jed Harris was complete. He was apparently equally loathed by the man who created the Big Bad Wolf for Walt Disney.”

On Acting, Laurence Olivier.

Barrymore as Hamlet

“My Hamlets in later years owed a great deal to Jack Barrymore. It seemed to me that he breathed life into the character, which, since Irving, had descended into arias and false inflections – all very beautiful and poetic, but castrated. Barrymore put back the balls.”

On Acting, Laurence Olivier

Still life – Lamp with pumpkin

One of the principal genres (subject types) of Western art – essentially, the subject matter of a still life painting or sculpture is anything that does not move or is dead

https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/s/still-life

Their definition, my pic.

Spinoza and William James on freedom

Spinoza long ago wrote in his ethics that anything that a man can avoid under the notion that it is bad he may also avoid under the notion that something else is good. He who habitually acts sub specie mali, under the negative notion, the notion of the bad, is called a slave by Spinoza. To him who acts habitually under the notion of good he gives the name of freeman. See to it now, I beg you, that you make freemen of your pupils by habituating them to act, whenever possible, under the notion of a good. Get them habitually to tell the truth, not so much through showing them the wickedness of lying as by arousing
their enthusiasm for honor and veracity.

Talks to Teachers, William James
via Project Gutenberg
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/16287

PROP. LXVII. A free man thinks of death least of all things; and his wisdom is a meditation not of death but of life.

Proof.–A free man is one who lives under the guidance of reason, who is not led by fear (IV. lxiii.), but who directly desires that which is good (IV. lxiii. Coroll.), in other words (IV. xxiv.), who strives to act, to live, and to preserve his being on the basis of seeking his own true advantage; wherefore such an one thinks of nothing less than of death, but his wisdom is a meditation of life. Q.E.D.

Ethics, Benedictus de Spinoza
via Project Gutenberg
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3800

Show Biz Wisdom

“The show must go on.”
“Always leave them wanting more.”
“You see the same people on the way up as you do on the way down.”
“You can put as much effort into a bad movie as a good one.”
– Proverbial Wisdom

“There are no small parts, only small actors.”
– Constantin Stanislavski

“I love acting. It is so much more real than life.”
– Oscar Wilde

“All the world is a stage”
– Shakespeare

“Nobody knows anything…… Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work. Every time out it’s a guess and, if you’re lucky, an educated one.”
– William Goldman

“Make sure you get paid.”
– Mick Jagger

How to sew a button

Kurt Vonnegut on Armistice Day

When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.

Breakfast of Champions, Kurt Vonnegut. 1973
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakfast_of_Champions

Armistice Day

Armistice Day is commemorated every year on 11 November to mark the armistice signed between the Allies of World War I and Germany at Compiègne, France, for the cessation of hostilities on the Western Front of World War I, which took effect at eleven o’clock in the morning—the “eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month” of 1918.

Wikipedia – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armistice_Day

This is what a world war 1 battlefield in Verdun France looks like today. from interestingasfuck

How to tie off a knot. Hand sewing.

Watership Down

waterhsip-down

Watership Down is a survival and adventure novel by English author Richard Adams, published by Rex Collings Ltd of London in 1972. Set in southern England, the story features a small group of rabbits. Although they live in their natural environment, they are anthropomorphised, possessing their own culture, language, proverbs, poetry, and mythology. Evoking epic themes, the novel follows the rabbits as they escape the destruction of their warren and seek a place to establish a new home, encountering perils and temptations along the way.

via Wikipedia

Rabbit in Skyline Park

‘El-ahrairah, your people cannot rule the world, for I will not have it so. All the world will be your enemy, Prince with a Thousand Enemies, and whenever they catch you, they will kill you. But first they must catch you, digger, listener, runner, prince with the swift warning. Be cunning and full of tricks and your people shall never be destroyed.’

Watership Down, Richard Adams

Shibboleth

A shibboleth is any custom or tradition, particularly a speech pattern, that distinguishes one group of people (an ingroup) from others (outgroups). Shibboleths have been used throughout history in many societies as passwords, simple ways of self-identification, signaling loyalty and affinity, maintaining traditional segregation or keeping out perceived threats.

via Wikipedia

The general name for this type of thing is “Shibboleth,” after a city whose name was used that way in the Bible. Shibboleths are interesting to learn about, partly because it’s deep-cover spycraft, and partly because they words used are always whackadoodle nonsense.

In WWII, the Dutch would identify German spies by how they pronounced “Scheveningen,” a district in the Hague. The Germans pronounced the first syllable as something like the English word “chef,” while the Dutch version has a guttural “skhef” sound.

via reddit

Shakespeare’s Two Genres

“Indeed, you might define Shakespeare’s two principal genres in starkly simple terms: In the comedies, people are driven into the countryside where they dress up as other people, come in again, and get married; in the tragedies, they strip off, stay outside, and die.”

How Plays Work, David Edgar