Andrei Tarkovsky, Nostalghia, 1983.
Andrei Tarkovsky, Nostalghia, 1983.
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…”
Al Brown, “Ain’t No Love in the Heart of the City,” Darker Than Blue: Soul from Jamdown, 1973–1977, rel. 2001.
Carl Th. Dreyer, Day of Wrath, 1943.
Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word “love” here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace – not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.
— James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
The alienation of the spectator to the profit of the contemplated object (which is the result of his own unconscious activity) is expressed in the following way: the more he contemplates the less he lives; the more he accepts recognizing himself in the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own existence and his own desires. The externality of the spectacle in relation to the active man appears in the fact that his own gestures are no longer his but those of another who represents them to him. This is why the spectator feels at home nowhere, because the spectacle is everywhere.
— Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 1967.
Masada, “Tahah,” Alef, 1994.
The rhythm unit gives emotional and artistic coherence to the very shape of the tempo and the pulsation — the statement and the interpretation of the meter itself, the underlying, syncopated divisions of motion through musical space — the time.
— Stanley Crouch, Considering Genius, p 106.
To write at all is to dwell in the illusion of language, the rapture of communication that comes as we surrender our troubled individual isolated experiences to the communal consciousness.
— Robert Duncan, The H.D. Book
Music is of G-d…, and music is with G-d, and music is how G-d expresses Him- or Herself, and music is everywhere, and music is a crafty art and is completed in places inside us, in the impossible-to-locate precincts wherein there is access to feelings that we might otherwise ignore.
— Rick Moody, “On Celestial Music“