Tag: Quote

The most beautiful thing in the world to me is an empty parking lot at night – Harmony Korine Interview

Korine has always seen the world in a visual way. “It’s an affliction,” he says. “I can’t even read books or scripts because I spend the entire time imagining the room or the streets. It’s exhausting.”

Maybe so, but from the moment I first watched Gummo, I’ve been intrigued as to what it’s like living inside his head.

“I wouldn’t wish that on anybody, it’s trippy,” he says with a smile.

Is that why he finds it so hard explaining his motives? Perhaps, but towards the end of our conversation he breaks off from one of his more impenetrable passages and takes a different approach: “The most beautiful thing in the world to me is an empty parking lot at night,” he says. “You know, with the street lamps and an overturned milk crate. It’s mostly me trying to show you that. Do you know what I’m saying?”

And actually, this time, I think I sort of do.

Our time up, Korine heads off to meet the photographer inside the gallery. When I pop over to say goodbye I find him pulling on – what else? – a fluorescent green balaclava for the photoshoot. He is adamant that he shouldn’t be pictured without it. Our photographer is not so sure: “We want people to know that it’s you,” she reasons.

“This is me,” says Korine. And he’s probably right. If, that is, he even exists.

‘I burned out – and started mowing lawns’: a reality-bending chat with Harmony Korine
He rocketed to notoriety at 19 with the shocking film Kids. Now, at 51, he’s smoking two fat cigars for breakfast – and making retina-burning work with acids and infrared cameras. Our writer gets deep with the eternal enfant terrible

Loss of WWI Youth – Chariots of Fire Speech

Master of Caius: I take the war list, and I run down it. Name after name which I cannot read, and which we – who are older than you – cannot hear without emotion. Names which will be only names to you, the new college, but which to us summon up face after face, full of honesty and goodness, zeal and vigor, and intellectual promise. The flower of a generation, the glory of England – and they died for England, and all that England stands for. And now, by tragic necessity, their dreams have become yours. Let me exhort you: Examine yourselves. Let each of you discover where your true chance of greatness lies. For their sakes – for the sake of your college, and your country – seize this chance. Rejoice in it, and let no power or persuasion deter you in your task.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082158/quotes/?ref_=tt_trv_qu

Disillusionment, Pete Townsend on

I had a big, big problem because I had been the big rock idealist and now it was all letting me down. The industry hadn’t fulfilled its promise. Rock ‘n’ roll had changed the length of men’s hair and very little else. I felt like a fool because I’d waved the banner so aggressively. And what was really worse, I felt that I was being used by journalists.

I hated the feeling that I was in a band on the downward slide that was killing people in Cincinnati, killing off its own members, killing its manager. We were into making big money and anybody who got in the way or had a problem, we dropped. Nobody seemed to notice. Nobody seemed to think this was a particularly bad thing, or we pretended it wasn’t, anyway. I felt it start to kill me. Something was getting its teeth into me. I should have stopped doing what I really didn’t want to go on doing. I should have stopped working with the band. I should have stopped and had another look at rock ‘n’ roll, the thing that I loved and cared about so much, which I held above all other things.

Pete Townsend, from the book:
The Courage to Change: Personal Conversations about Alcoholism
Dennis Wholey
Note – the book is from 1984.

Drip Painting, AI, and Life – Ex Machina Quote

Nathan: [points to painting] You know this guy, right?

Caleb: Jackson Pollock.

Nathan: Jackson Pollock. That’s right. The drip painter. Okay. He let his mind go blank, and his hand go where it wanted. Not deliberate, not random. Some place in between. They called it automatic art. Let’s make this like Star Trek, okay? Engage intellect.

Caleb: Excuse me?

Nathan: I’m Kirk. Your head’s the warp drive. Engage intellect. What if Pollock had reversed the challenge. What if instead of making art without thinking, he said, “You know what? I can’t paint anything, unless I know exactly why I’m doing it.” What would have happened?

Caleb: He never would have made a single mark.

Nathan: Yes! You see, there’s my guy, there’s my buddy, who thinks before he opens his mouth. He never would have made a single mark.

Nathan: The challenge is not to act automatically. It’s to find an action that is not automatic. From painting, to breathing, to talking, to fucking. To falling in love…

Nathan: And for the record, Ava’s not pretending to like you. And her flirting isn’t an algorithm to fake you out. You’re the first man she’s met that isn’t me. And I’m like her dad, right? Can you blame her for getting a crush on you?

IMDB

The Authentic Feel of Unpolished Expression

Of course Bernard didn’t realise the song wasn’t in his key. None of us did. We didn’t know anything about stuff like that. We always wrote the music first, and what I’d always loved about Barney’s vocals was the unintentional strained quality as he tried to fit into the track. Like Ian, he wasn’t blessed with the world’s best singing voice, but it had emotion, passion, and to me the struggle in Bernard’s voice was a major part of the band’s appeal. (I agree with David Byrne, who said, ‘The better a singer’s voice, the harder it is to believe what they’re saying.’)

Substance: Inside New Order
Peter Hook

I Like the Bricks More Than the Building – Nietzsche quote

Error of philosophers: The philosopher believes that the value of his philosophy lies in the whole, in the building. But posterity discovers it in the bricks that he used and which others will often make use of again for better building; in the fact, that is to say, that the building can be destroyed and nevertheless possess value as material.

— Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human (1878)

Epigraph found in:
Heidegger in Ruins
Richard Wolin

The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame – Chesterton Quote

Over the past couple of years, I volunteered to teach in the West Tennessee State Penitentiary, where I was part of a faculty cohort that offers humanities seminars to incarcerated women.

The program director had invited me to discuss a play, but I didn’t think I could do justice to a drama in just two brief sessions. So we read Shakespeare’s sonnets instead. Right choice! One student, Aja, was so enthusiastic that she came to the first class having already translated her favorite into her own verse.

The sparse classroom has a corkboard on one wall whose dimensions mirror the shape of a sonnet on the page, giving us a good visual analogue for the form: why would an artist choose to work within such a frame? G. K. Chesterton, who held that art consists in limitation, was only half jesting when he asserted that the most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.

How to Think like Shakespeare
Scott Newstok

From the footnotes, original source:
Cited by Ian Ker, Chesterton: A Biography (Oxford University Press, 2012), 254.

Growing Old Together – You and What You Fear

..here he was on Broadway, his hair iron-gray, his stare wild, his walk unsteady, his hands flailing at the air. His clothes were out of the men’s shelter, and his face so ill-looking you wanted to put him in a hospital for a month before we even discussed the situation.

My mother looked curiously at me. “Why were you afraid of him?” she asked. “You could knock him over with one hand.”

“Ma, he didn’t look like that twelve years ago. Believe me. She continued to stare after him as he shambled down Broadway, bumping into people left and right.

“You’re growing old together,” she said to me. “You and what frightens you.”

Fierce Attachments
Vivian Gornick

Attention and Belief – Chat GPT Explains William James Quote

Our attention and beliefs are the same fact – did william james say this and if so, where

William James, a prominent American philosopher and psychologist, did write about the relationship between attention and belief. However, he did not express the idea that “our attention and beliefs are the same fact” in those exact words.

In his book “The Principles of Psychology,” James discussed how attention and belief are intimately connected. He argued that our beliefs influence what we attend to, and what we attend to influences our beliefs. In his words, “What we attend to is what we believe in.”

He also emphasized that attention and belief are both active processes that shape our perception of the world. As he put it, “Belief and attention are motor phenomena, and only through the study of their motor consequences can we get at their nature.”

So, while James did not explicitly state that attention and belief are the same fact, he did see them as closely intertwined and mutually influencing.

Signs We Can’t Read – Dogs in a Library – William James Quote

I believe rather that we stand in much the same relation to the whole of the universe as our canine and feline pets do to the whole of human life. They inhabit our drawing-rooms and libraries. They take part in scenes of whose significance they have no inkling. They are merely tangent to curves of history the beginnings and ends and forms of which pass wholly beyond their ken. So we are tangent to the wider life of things. But, just as many of the dog’s and cat’s ideals coincide with our ideals, and the dogs and cats have daily living proof of the fact, so we may well believe, on the proofs that religious experience affords, that higher powers exist and are at work to save the world on ideal lines similar to our own.

Pragmatism
William James