Facebook divide

Some who feel that every time they log on to fb something's being taken from them; others who feel this apprehension couldn't be further from ridiculous.

DayOne entry, Jul 25, 2011

Not doing enough when someone dies. Like not sending them off with food or clothing for a trip. Feeling appalled at how life goes on, heedless, impiously. Feeling ashamed and scrawny in my tennis whites, pampered and undeserving, as I looked at Mr. Ligget's downy translucent ears. They lived in the home of James Monroe, and we visited them dressed up at Xmas in revolutionary war garb. I thought they were ancient and from that time. No concept of time, just as I thought the mediaeval players at Elm Court meant that that place too hearkened back to that era. And I in the present, with all I'd been given, spoiled, with nothing heroic about me. Strange, the degree of shame and nervousness and inadequacy I felt toward so much growing up. Wonder how that has transmuted these days, if at all...

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In age

She was just become gloss
From a matte finish

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two guys batting around literary allusions around a third (woman?)

literary monkey in the middle

clumsy new writer

makes jokes not convincingly about things he takes seriously

novels bring back the time when

we could be most exalted by the practice of perfecting ourselves. But in this world today, perfecting yourself is navel-gazing. Any kind of self-attention is attention away from a world that's coming apart. The impulse to do something about the state of the world seems to make one a candidate for sacrifice in belittlement. the self-perfecting somehow doesn't apply, although morally you think it would. there's a kind of grey annihilation of the self--which I guess could be ennobled by considering in the Buddhist context, but to agitate against inequity, destruction of resources, inhumanity to others, these seem just fatiguing and demolishing and degrading of the self, unless I suppose you learn the art of participating in them exuberantly, artfully. that may be the only successful adaptation to learn.

Bertrand Russel's enjoining to lead a life motivated by love and guided by knowledge, or something like that, would be the touchstone idea, which, if never lost sight of, might make for the life well-lived, and artfully...

The people trying to hold the line on this world

To hold the center
To not want it over so soon
And those who shruggingly do what
Humans are designed to do, be charming and excellent
And creative and arch and witty, and can't deign
To see who prepares that ground
For it is beneath one.

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incapacity to process loss of a friend - therefore anger

Charades with tight two

they finish eachother's sentences. shakes fist - Shakespeare! apes thermometer in mouth, temp!...the Tempest! Yay!

Desire Control

what a character dubs for masturbation

Compassion Graph

I'd like to see a Compassion Graph as it relates to income. It starts off at near 0 with extreme poverty. How can you care about others when you are trying to survive. Then it must shoot upward and peak somewhere and head back down to 0, or near it, with extreme wealth. Apply it to per capita income of countries. USA close to zero?

Irreducibility of consciousness is best

Argument for God I know.
God as something
That promises us a return,
That our joy in each other
Was the culmination of all this striving
And that its taking place is a knot
In a rope that after all
Stays.
There are those intent on proving
The reduction.
Of course the definition of material is what
Can come apart.
But I tell you, as the wind and rain
And sun and gravity describe the tree
They draw it in expectation and it comes
So these forces drew us.
There is an impelling toward consciousness
That describes us. That's what I call God
And it ain't nothing. I can't feel it is nothing.

Parody of the green grasper

Happy for the liberal inchoate...incompletion...addicted to the mystery; abhors the closed door

doc: about people being sold things they don't want

FORCED to BUY.

about the evolution of consumer society. boom postWWII, advertising. now we're beyond advertising. we will sell you GMOs, Nuclear Power, Bottled Water, whether you want it or not...

Memwah of a Newborn

the misuse of even as

the title for a pedant's memwah

art is always on borrowed time

torn from its babies
thrown in a pauper's grave
its ribs
heaving up in the winter thaw
and used as swords by the
by the neighbor's children
at play

I scream at people hardened into these little conceptual nuggets of self-satisfaction!!!!

leaders

if we're overwhelmingly inclined to extermnate ourselves as a race--if we're helpless before this design, a leader is one who is going the opposite way. that is the definition of a leader. one who is with every fiber of his or her being going against our current. We take note and are inspired by that novelty. A leader may make a difference, but as far as I can see, leaders historically haven't been followed long before the current resumes. 95% of so-called leaders actually speed our way along to extinction, aping the behavior and language of leaders for destructive ends.

film as suprise machine

a tunnel through which surprises come without warning

or a means of artistic expression, which involves presenting, expectation, beauty, pacing etc

Brene Brown schtick

and this Brene Brown person, yes very perceptive about scarcity--made me realize the connection. It's really about relation. Back to Buber's I & Thou. Significant to me that such intellectual lights as C Hitchens roundly trash Buber as a hypocrite. I know little of his life, but the work has always seemed essential and true to me. about the most essential thing I can think of having read.

here's my beef with G and Hollywood and all

on some level, they forgot what films are about. films about films, films about self-congratulation. or films about people and the world now. Not ersatz world. this world.

film: private school field trip to do community service at public schools

The Effective generation

I'm going to be effective, not ineffectual. Morally neutral position, enabling those who want to be effective and immoral too.

Obama, bro

when life was one thing

one indescribable plumbable thing with no edges. George had that indivisability. Or rather that irreducibility. He was just this effusive force, mindful of making other people feel great, driven to get work created, to have his say about large things, state of the world things, if big in misjudgments, even bigger in correcting himself.

the culture of surprise

like film, a tunnel and you don't know what's coming. hacks exploit this. it's the appeal of the internet. what can we throw at you now, and now, and now. keep you off-balance, unsure, take your money.

belief in a character, belief in God

Belief in a character, whether created, performed or experienced is identical to belief in God. It fills you with light energy and hope. It either is a surrogate for that real connection to the creator of everything we know, or it is actually an expression of that same creation.

Meditation on Ali Fear Eats the soul vs Blue Valentine

Why does Fassbinder work, where climax of BV seems like a frantic improv

whores and cannibals

in the face of this adversity, first you become a whore, then a cannibal

greed and envy

debilitating envy.
change, force, lead, take charge
or wait, clutch, live in dread of deprivation and be deprived

film: victim of some horrible crime

sheriff deputy names his dog after the victim. misunderstood as slur

Film: candidelike

Character wooed by every life career possibility--a kind of generalists odyssey looking at the myopia of

joan, arkansas

making yourself your audience

alway always...otherwise lapse into what I used to call the sentimental, positing someone else as your audience. it's not a confining stance if you realize as whitman put it, that you "contain multitudes". that's the challenge. and that's what I thank "Keane" for reminding me of.

Movie: Keane

He made a great film. So great it transcends envy. Simply alive and great.

continuity in art

in Art, continuity is everything. that's why in teaching filmmaking, teach history. art can't be taught, but the impulse to pick up the thread and what to do with it, the excitement of that, perhaps can be offered

NOW

Marking the time it begins

what does Time do?

what does Time do?
balloon your crime
your woe
your love
Time is a lazy fuck
and couldn't care less
Time is a person you
made up in your cute
sad way
Time is gravity i.e
acceleration
the limning of an eye
not the eye
not the sumi-e
calligrapher
Time is nothing
Get Time out of your head
Stop reifying
You'll be fine

Ok, so it's ADD

if I'm only motivated to act by adrenaline, by the sense of a deadline, or perhaps the ultimate deadline, which is death, and that simple disappointment and dissatisfaction is something that I will lazily shoulder and bear up until that point, then this spells a trainwreck, a wasted life, and I am well on my way toward that end, having done or left little to be proud of. If I don't scare myself, get off the tractor that I sat on at age 13 dawdling, dreaming, waiting for ambition to strike me, I will end a bitter failure. i need to lay down principles to reverse course now.

1) bannish laziness
2) do nothing halfway that matters
3) set real deadlines and meet them
4) don't deviate
5) and don't coddle yourself with the notion that you are wrecking your dream inspiration. it will survive. trust me.

Movie: The Social Network

Ok, read the screenplay on the internet, saw the movie. So it was skilfully done and very entertaining. Nice job Sorkin, nice job Fincher. Jesse Eisenberg taking on the mantle of that brilliant-but-socially-blind-but-still-capable-of-great-friendship-and-hurt character did great. The story is a defense of how genius alienates and can lose touch with the heart. Check. Kind of like Citizen Kane, only here someone steps in at the end and says to Charles Foster Kane, you're not an asshole, you just want to be one and salvages a hopeful happy ending from the jaws of tragedy. Of course it's different, because while Zuckerberg is portrayed as driven and somehow charismatic in a new way the world has never known, yet he is also shy with autistic shading. Great snappy dialogue, observation of the zeitgeist pretty good (although I wonder how Harvard-as-newest colony in the Aryan Nation really corresponds to reality). It's less of an amusement park ride than I thought it might be before reading the script, but it's a ride nonetheless, in that it does not perforate into the real world of real live human beings, but comfortably hides behind the "spectacular monied success or failure", "asshole or not an asshole" as the main dramatic questions. Maybe little drama, truth be told, plumbs much farther than that, but Sorkin sets out with the firm credo that it properly cannot, and that the only thing workable is to grow up and realize that and make good stories within that box. He once said any screenwriter who thinks his characters somehow have "lives" beyond what's on the page is delusional. Of course he's right in one sense, wrong in another. And for his adhering faithfully to that "declaration of principles" I think he has made the Social Network a great social document, not a great movie.

p.s. - interesting deletion on screen from the screenplay. there is a scene where Sean Parker sets up Zuckerberg in a revenge ploy toward his own former nemesis the VC Mike Moritz, instructing him, once Facebook is taking off and investors are begging onboard, to take a meeting with Moritz and tell him to fuck off. Zuckerberg agrees to do it, and while the scene isn't shown it is presumed to happen offscreen. The setup of that scene was deleted, clearly because it overly complicates Zuckerberg's character and makes him less sympathetic. Was it Fincher who cut that? Did they shoot it? Interesting because the calculation was that they would have lost some of the audience, who needs a very simple throughline on Zuckerberg to follow in order to keep loving him. Thought experiment: Imagine the script being made by Cassavetes. Or more realistically Mike Nichols--ok, say the Mike Nichols of Carnal Knowledge. Not only not deleting that scene, but elaborating on it and doing mischief withe script. Then, maybe a movie for the ages...

p.p.s. - to be fair, reality tugs at the movie in much more insistent way than documentary truth about Hearst troubled Mankiewicz, who in fact delighted in the arch pastiche of it and had a personal axe to grind too.

it would be self-aggrandizing to say

oh they've all written me off.
they didn't even know you existed
misprision
prison

upon making his entrance

upon making his entrance
he wanted to fix everything
make everone happy
mend grievances
be admired loved respected
an entry into a new room
was like falling
and grabbing as he fell
always a chute of failure
abject failure

what a man has done

Pawel: What remains after someone dies.
Krzysztof: What a man has done.

- Dekalog, 1

death is a nice place to visit

they joked about the dead man
to demonstrate to others how well they knew him
and how he would join in their joking if he were alive
or joke about them if they'd been the one dead.
it was a way of switching places
a courtesy
death is a nice place to visit

actor playing a cipher

vacillating within the bubble of whom he's supposed to be.
trying not to break the bubble's walls.

film about a tibetan buddhist

who is set up by his disbelieving friend to a lunch date with an eminent disbelieving former buddhist. the crisis that ensues. short

meaning lives inside emotion, a reification?

when emotion turns, meaning hollows out. not motive energy