Drive. Second viewing. (The first.) I told myself I was just going to watch the opening scenes again, but I kept going. This time around I find myself enjoying the directing and mechanics even more and the plot/characters so much less. I can’t handle the beach scene. Still, those first 20-40 minutes? That’s some good stuff.
Things without all remedy
Should be without regard: what’s done is done.
Art thou afeard
To be the same in thine own act and valour
As thou art in desire? Wouldst thou have that
Which thou esteem’st the ornament of life,
And live a coward in thine own esteem,
Letting ‘I dare not’ wait upon ‘I would’?
Lady Macbeth, suggesting you be less of a wimp. Cf. Seneca:
You act like mortals in all that you fear, and like immortals in all that you desire.
Chris Glass » Vorontsov & Livadia Palaces. That floral relief is incredible.
Nought’s had, all’s spent,
Where our desire is got without content
A willingness to hear unwelcome truths is the unhappy person’s best friend.
Post-Popchips reflections. Anil Dash is awesome.
One of the great struggles in trying to challenge racist aspects of culture is that we’ve moved from overt, obvious, overbearing racist practices to things that are much more nuanced, and which are often the result of bad habits or ignorance from otherwise well-intentioned people.
He was the Walt Whitman of critical theory.
Feelings have great predictive value, but opinions don’t.
The Times Herald – A room so quiet no one can stand it for more than 45 minutes
Logan’s Run. Campy disco scifi. It works, in fits and starts.
Listen to your friends, by all means, but not to the conclusions they’ve drawn; those are about them. […] Listen instead to the reasons your friends felt and concluded what they did, and use them to inform your decisions.
Limits
There is a line of Verlaine I will never remember
There is another street I can no longer walk down
There is a face in the mirror I have seen for the very last time
There is a door that is closed until the end of the world.
Among the books of my library (I am seeing them now)
There are some that will never be read.
This summer I will be fifty:
Death consumes me, constantly.
—Jorge Luis Borges, trans. Rebecca Walker; original
Image of Borges, Hôtel des Beaux Arts, Paris, by Pepe Fernández, 1969
Borges auto-reblog rule in effect.
If you sit on, sleep on, stare at, or touch something for more than an hour a day, spend whatever it takes to get the best.
Q. If you could be president for one day what would be your first order of business?
A. […] Everyone gets free pizza making lessons (dough, sauce, etc). Crazy, right? No! It’s about teaching people to have an eye (and tongue) sensitive to quality. Pizza seems simple, but boy it’s tough at first. But then it’s pretty easy once you know what you’re doing. And you’re like: Wow! I make the best pizza in the ‘hood! And chances are, you’re right. You do. So, once you know great pizza, it’s *shocking* how little is out there. How much *bad* pizza is out there. It’s everywhere! Great pizza is actually a pretty low bar. And doesn’t have to cost that much. So it gets you thinking: “Why are these bad pizza places so bad? Why don’t they make great pizza? It’s not that hard!” And then: “Why don’t more people know what great pizza tastes like? Don’t they know how much pleasure they’re missing out on?” And then it spirals into more generalized notions of quality and sensitivity and experience. And then, *poof*, suddenly America is Japan. Or something like that.
Disco’s success at capturing glamour and sex as an aesthetic can be frightening — in approximately the same way it’s frightening to watch the world do similar things to weddings, turning them into sites of glittery yearning where one’s sense of self and love turns strangely prop-filled and expensive. This seems like one of the more-flattering reasons why rock fans treated disco with so much hostility: It’s a puritan’s gut instinct that there’s something dangerous about a sex-and-glamour bubble floating too exuberantly beyond the realm of reality, becoming too stylized and commercial. And of course straight, white, male rock fans were the ones who’d feel that fear and loathing most strongly: They’d have been the listeners with the least to gain from actively reimagining love, sex, and glamour. Disco claimed the audience with the most critical stake in reframing those things — gay, black, female, and Latino listeners chief among them.
Cf.
The Last Days of Disco: Abebe Remembers Donna Summer and Robin Gibb
A happy childhood is poor preparation for human contacts.
Mark Larson 