[T]here is this question that goes on with celebrities, especially people in the music industry, which I think are different in a way than actors and so forth: What is the real person? What is the person behind the mask and all that sort of stuff? And I’ve always had trouble with this question because I don’t really think there is anything behind the mask. I don’t think there is anything of any substance behind the mask except a kind of withered, etiolated memory of something we may have been when we were younger. I think there’s a desperation that comes with a lot of people in the entertainment business, especially in the music business, or wanting to become something different than you were when you were a child, to become something that you perceive as a grander thing. And I think you give over your life to that wish, you know, for better or for worse.
[…] There is only one mask, and eventually that mask kind of calcifies itself onto the face and you can’t take it off anymore, and you just become that thing. This is all sounding a bit bleak, but actually it’s quite a wonderful thing as well.
Month: September 2014
Inspiration: Greil Marcus
Records that made no apparent history other than their own, the faint marks they left on the charts or someone’s memory, might count for more than any master narrative that excludes them.
— Greil Marcus, The History of Rock ’n’ Roll in Ten Songs, 2014.
From the Mouth of the Whale
Sjón, From the Mouth of the Whale, 2008, translated 2011.
Inspiration: Nostalghia
Andrei Tarkovsky, Nostalghia, 1983.
David Foster Wallace with Charlie Rose
explore-blog:
David Foster Wallace on commercial entertainment, the redemptive power of reading, and the future of writing in the age of information
– highlights from his fantastic 1996 Charlie Rose interview.
I also like, “There’s this part that makes you feel full. There’s this part that is redemptive and instructive, [so that] when you read something, it’s not just delight — you go, “Oh my god, that’s me! I’ve lived like that, I’ve felt like that, I’m not alone in the world…”
Inspiration: Ain’t No Love in the Heart of the City
Al Brown, “Ain’t No Love in the Heart of the City,” Darker Than Blue: Soul from Jamdown, 1973–1977, rel. 2001.
Living with a Wild God
Barbara Eherenreich, Living with a Wild God, 2014.
“[I]f you’re not prepared to die when you’re almost sixty, then I would say you’ve been falling down on your philosophical responsibilities as a grown-up human being.”