Revised Text
Student Cee and Professor Dee are ready to take on it on the road.
Capt. George Washington Alexander was a pirate, a playwright, a torturer – and one of the most fascinating characters of the Civil War.
Captain Alexander looked like a pirate — and in fact he was a pirate. He was also a playwright, a poet, a songwriter, an escaped convict and a crooked prison warden who ran an elaborate scheme to extract bribes from his more affluent inmates.
… .
Captain Alexander sometimes dropped by to show his latest poems to the inmates. “By praising his poetry,” Lewis noted, “it was easy to keep on the right side of him.”
You were not there for the beginning. You will not be there for the end. Your knowledge of what is going on can only be superficial and relative.
“
| — |
Naked Lunch, William Burroughs (via fuckyeahbeatgeneration) |
To my friends who live outside of Turkey: I am writing to let you know what is going on in Istanbul for the last five days. I personally have to write this because most of the media sources are shu…
HAPPY BIRTHDAY WALT WHITMAN!
(May 31, 1819 – March 26, 1892)
WALT WHITMAN SHOPPING CENTER
Huntington, Long Island, N. Y.
A view of the Mall looking South
And don’t forget the Walt Whitman service area on the New Jersey Turnpike southbound.
In 1997, J.G. Ballard said this:
“In a sense, we’re policing ourselves and that’s the ultimate police state.”
Then, in 2013, after the Boston bombing, we became that:
“Boston shows a new model manhunt emerging: one reliant on the FBI embracing crowd-submitted…
Saying too much too quickly too clearly to too many people you don’t know too well is not too good an idea. (Oh, gawd, did I just post this to Tumblr—what was I thinking?)
One of the things that happened was controlling students — in fact, controlling students for the rest of their lives, by simply trapping them in debt. That’s a very effective technique of control and indoctrination. And I suspect — I can’t prove — but I suspect that that’s a large part of the reason behind [high tuitions].
“
| — |
Noam Chomsky via |
I remember there was a lot of criticism of Fahrenheit to do with François’ knowledge of English. The critics complained that it was so stilted. But that had all been quite deliberate. He hadn’t even wanted to place it as an English film, or to suggest that the language was necessarily English. The script was written first in French, deliberately, so that it could be translated into English, then translated back into French, because he wanted to lose the English idiom completely, then finally translated back into English. He wanted it set- and I thought this was a marvellously futuristic idea – in a time when people had lost the use of language. After all, the whole premise of the film was to do with losing a literary background. And that was completely missed by the critics. … He also wanted a certain sense of awkwardness in behaviour patterns. After all, things change subtly. I’ve always noticed that films set in any sort of future very rarely draw on the present. But just imagine someone a hundred years ago trying to predict the present. I live in a house that’s a hundred years old. Its internal functions are different, the carriages outside are different – but it’s a mixture. Things don’t all go away. That’s why we began Fahrenheit with those aerials and things on top of suburban houses, although inside the houses are sliding doors – which don’t work… Changes are so subtle: relationships, manners, our behaviour. I thought it was quite a frightening film in that respect. But it’s very difficult to read that. It’s easier to see something you can be totally in awe of. Something which is part of your life and has taken on another aspect is much more difficult to believe in.
Nicolas Roeg talks about working with François Truffaut on Fahrenheit 451, winter 1984/85 issue of Sight & Sound
Stop thinking about art works as objects, and start thinking about them as triggers for experiences. (Roy Ascott’s phrase.) That solves a lot of problems: we don’t have to argue whether photographs are art, or whether performances are art, or whether Carl Andre’s bricks or Andrew Serranos’s piss or Little Richard’s ‘Long Tall Sally’ are art, because we say, ‘Art is something that happens, a process, not a quality, and all sorts of things can make it happen.’ … [W]hat makes a work of art ‘good’ for you is not something that is already ‘inside’ it, but something that happens inside you — so the value of the work lies in the degree to which it can help you have the kind of experience that you call art.
“
| — |
Brian Eno (via jessiethatcher) I could reblog/post this every day as a constant reminder. (via notational) And I’m sticking it up here for people who define the “good” in Make good art in ways that I definitely didn’t intend… (via neil-gaiman) |
