Quote of the day

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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

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Paris, Texas

Walt: What’s the matter?
Travis: Where’re we going?
Walt: We’re gonna fly to L.A. You are not afraid of flying, are you?
Travis: …leaving the ground?


Cue Jonathan Mardukas?

Walt: I-I told him you are his father. But see … well you’ve been gone a long time, Trav.
Travis: How long have I been gone, do you know?
Walt: Four years.
Travis: Is four years a long time?


Sure. Though it does pale next to eternity.

Walt: We live in the Los Angeles suburbs, but I’ve got my business in town
Travis: Oh yeah? What’s your business?
Walt: I make billboard signs for advertising.
Travis: Oh yeah? So you’re the one who makes those signs, I love those. Some of them are beautiful.
Walt: Uh, I’m not the only one who makes them, Trav.


Next up: you hate them.

Anne: I’m just afraid.
Walt: You’re afraid of Travis?
Anne: No. I’m afraid of what will happen to us if we lose Hunter.
Walt: We’re not gonna lose Hunter.
Anne: Then why do you keep pushing them together? It’s almost as if you wanted him to leave. You keep promoting this father-son business between them.
Walt: It’s not business! Travis is his father! And Hunter is his son! That’s a fact. We’ve known that all along. And Travis happens to be my brother.
Anne: I know he is.
Walt: Then what’s this promotion bullshit? You want us to go on pretending that we are the parents of my brother’s son? How long do you expect Hunter to buy that?
Anne: I was never pretending! I love him just like he was my own flesh and blood.
Walt: So do I.


So does Jane?

Anne: Travis, there’s something I have to tell you. I was not going to, because somehow it makes things easier that nobody knows. I never even told Walt or Hunter. After Hunter came to live with us, Jane used to call, asking about him. She made me promise not to tell anyone she was calling.
Travis: Did she ask about me?
Anne: Yes, in the beginning.
Travis: Where did she call from?
Anne: Places in Texas.
Travis: What places?
Anne: Let me finish, Travis. After what happened between you and Jane, she decided Hunter should be with us. She said she couldn’t be a mother to him any more.
Travis: She stopped being a mother to him a long time before that.
Anne: Travis, I don’t want to feel I’m hiding something from you anymore.
Travis: She was young. She wanted something, I just couldn’t figure out what it was. I just didn’t realize how much rage I had.
Anne: A little more than a year ago, she stopped calling. I haven’t heard from her since then.
Travis: Nothing?
Anne: Not a word.


And then lots of them.
Words, that is.
But then Anne tells him about the bank account.


Travis [in a tape recording to Hunter]: “Hunter, it’s me. I was afraid I’d never be able to say the right words to you…in person. So, I’m trying to do it like this. When I first saw you, this time, at Walt’s, I was hopping for all kinds of things. I was hoping to show you that I was your father. You showed me I was. But the biggest thing I hoped for, can’t come true. I know that now. Your belong together with your mother. It was me that tore you apart. And I owe it to you to bring you back together. But I can’t stay with you. I can never heal up what happened. That’s just the way it is.”

Bummer. Like many other things that "just are what they are."

Travis: I knew these people…
Jane: What people?
Travis: These two people. They were in love with each other. The girl was…very young, about seventeen or eighteen, I guess. And the guy was…quite a bit older. He was kind of ragged and wild. She was very beautiful, you know. And together they turned everything into a kind of an adventure, and she liked that. Just an ordinary trip down the grocery store was … full of adventure. They were always laughing at stupid things. He liked to make her laugh. And…they didn’t much care for anything else, Because all they wanted to do was be with each other. They were always together.
Jane: Sounds like they were very happy.
Travis: Yes, they were. They were real happy. And he, he loved her more than he ever felt possible. He couldn’t stand being away from her, uh…during the day when he went to work. So, he quit. Just to be home with her. Then he got another job when the money ran out, then he quit again. But pretty soon, she started to worry.
Jane: About what?
Travis: Money, I guess. Not having enough. Not knowing when the next check was coming in.
Jane: Yep. I know that feeling.
Travis: So he started to get kind of…torn inside.
Jane: How do you mean?
Travis: Well he knew he had to work to support her, but he couldn’t stand being away from her, either. And the more he was away from her, the crazier he got. Except now, he got really crazy. He started imagining all kinds of things. He started thinking that she was seeing other men on the sly. He’d come home from work and accuse her of spending the day with somebody else. He’d yell at her, break things in the trailer.
Jane: The trailer?
Travis: Yes. They lived in a trailer home…He started to drink real bad. And he’d stay out late to test her.
Jane: What do you mean “test her”?
Travis: To see if she’d get jealous. He wanted her to get jealous, but she didn’t. She just worried about him, but that got him even madder.
Jane: Why?
Travis: Because he thought if she never got jealous of him that she didn’t really care about him. Jealousy was a sign of her love for him, and then one night, one night she told him that she was pregnant, she was about three or four months pregnant and he didn’t even know and then suddenly everything changed, he stopped drinking, he got a steady job, he was convinced that she loved him now that she was carrying his child and he was going to dedicate himself to making a home for her. But a funny thing started to happen, he didn’t even notice it at first, she started to change. From the day the baby was born, she began to get irritated with everything around her. She got mad at everything. Even the baby seemed to be an injustice to her. He kept trying to make everything all right for her. Buy her things. Take her out to dinner once a week. But nothing seemed to satisfy her. For two years he struggled to pull them back together like they were when they first met, but finally he knew that it was never going to work out. So he hit the bottle again. But this time it got… mean. This time, when he came home late at night, she wasn’t worried about him, or jealous, she was just enraged. She accused him of holding her captive by making her have a baby. She told him that she dreamed about escaping. That was all she dreamed about: escape. She saw herself at night running naked down a highway, running across fields, running down riverbeds, always running. And always, just when she was about to get away, he’d be there. He would stop her somehow. He would just appear and stop her. And when she told him these dreams, he believed them. He knew she had to be stopped or she’d leave him forever. So he tied a cow bell to her ankle so he could hear at night if she tried to get out of bed. But she learned how to muffle the bell by stuffing a sock into it, and inching her way out of the bed and into the night. He caught her one night when the sock fell out and he heard her trying to run to the highway. He caught her and dragged her back to the trailer, and tied her to the stove with his belt. He just left her there and went back to bed and lay there listening to her scream. And he listened to his son scream, and he was surprised at himself because he didn’t feel anything anymore. All he wanted to do was…sleep. And for the first time, he wished he were far away. Lost in a deep, vast country where nobody knew him. Somewhere without language, or streets. He dreamed about this place without knowing its name. And when he woke up, he was on fire. There were blue flames burning the sheets of his bed. He ran through the flames toward the only two people he loved…but they were gone. His arms were burning, and he threw himself outside and rolled on the wet ground. Then he ran. He never looked back at the fire. He just ran. He ran until the sun came up and he couldn’t run any further. And when the sun went down, he ran again. For five days he ran like this until every sign of man had disappeared.


I love this scene. I play it over and over and over. Go ahead, ask me why.
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Re: Quote of the day

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Science

“There are three stages in scientific discovery. First, people deny that it is true, then they deny that it is important; finally they credit the wrong person." Bill Bryson


Or four if you count God. The right God.

“The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.” Richard Dawkins

Fortunately, some insist, it's entirely "beyond our control".

“One thing I have learned in a long life: that all our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike -- and yet it is the most precious thing we have.” Albert Einstein

Praise the Lord?

“There are as many atoms in a single molecule of your DNA as there are stars in the typical galaxy. We are, each of us, a little universe.” Neil deGrasse Tyson

Praise the Lord?

“I consider it an extremely dangerous doctrine, because the more likely we are to assume that the solution comes from the outside, the less likely we are to solve our problems ourselves.” Carl Sagan

Note to the bots: they're coming for you.
Again.


Atheism by itself is, of course, not a moral position or a political one of any kind; it simply is the refusal to believe in a supernatural dimension. For you to say of Nazism that it was the implementation of the work of Charles Darwin is a filthy slander, undeserving of you and an insult to this audience. Darwin’s thought was not taught in Germany; Darwinism was so derided in Germany along with every other form of unbelief that all the great modern atheists, Darwin, Einstein and Freud were alike despised by the National Socialist regime.

Next up: IC's ridiculous Atheists?
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Re: Quote of the day

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Based on a true story of sexual obsession, Ruth Ellis becomes entangled in an illicit affair that, in the end, leads to her execution. The last execution in England. Said to have “shocked the world.” Other than that though it’s all rather ordinary.

To wit: A wealthy man who is meant to marry one sort of woman and keep another sort as his mistress. Lots and lots of them in fact. The spurned mistress wants more but cannot procure it. The mistress kills him. Your typical fists and flowers relationship.

Again and again: “In love” we can talk ourselves into believing the most preposterous things. If we perused it only with the least bit of effort we’d double over in laughter. It is human emotion in the end that counts. Especialy when the chips are down. Or in the “spur of the moment”. In the blink of an eye whole lives change.

And then there is Desmond. He seems content to be her pet. Or, rather, resigned to be. I love the scene where David takes Ruth out on the dance floor and Desmond is left behind. The music playing in the backround? “How Much is that Doggie in the Window”.



Dance With a Stranger

David: I love you.
Ruth: Everybody does. Why should you be different.


Would you be?

David: Has Desmond slept in this bed with you.
Ruth: No. Come to think of it, he must be the only man in London who hasn’t.
David: Some people have no shame.
Ruth: Some people have enough for everyone.


Here? Let's name names.

Ruth [from a card sent with flowers to David]: “Congratulations on your forthcoming marriage. Please return front door key immediately.”

Setting it all in motion?

Ruth: Don’t get snotty with me, Christine. You take them all too seriously.
Christine: I don’t take any of them seriously. They’ve still got their mother’s milk dribbling down their chins.


Ouch?

Ruth: …it’s a finishing school in Switzerland.
Andy [her son]: What do you do there?
Ruth: Well, young ladies go there to finish their education. And to cook and sew. And to fill in divorce papers.


Fully finished in other words.

Ruth [from a card sent with flowers to David]: “Congratulations on your forthcoming marriage. Please return front door key immediately.”

He keeps it.

David: I hate everything you did before you met me.
Ruth: Well, take two aspirins and tell me about it in the morning. I’m going to bed. I’ve got a business to run.
David: I want you to marry me.
Ruth: Why? Are you pregnant?
David: I shan’t have any peace until I have you.
Ruth: I’ve never had any peace.


Two scenes later he is slapping her across the face.

Ruth: I’m pregnant.
[pause]
Ruth: Shall I have an abortion?
David: No.
Ruth: Why not? One more won’t make any difference now.


Besides, who's counting?

Carol: As long as you’re involved with that woman you’ll be quarreling with everybody.
David: She’s had a rough life.
Carol: We’ve all had rough lives. If you marry her she will drive you down to her level because she is incapable of rising to yours.


The class struggle!

Desmond[ to Ruth]: Is he still hitting you?
Ruth: I don’t know.
Desmond: Surely, even you must know when someone is beating the living daylight out of you!


Or hanging you?

Title card: Ruth Ellis was hanged on July 13th 1955 at H.M. Prison, Holloway, London. 27 years later her son. Andria, killed himself.

You can see the execution enacted in the film "Pierrepont: The Last Hangman".
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Re: Quote of the day

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God

“God is fucking stealing souls again!” Stephen Adly Guirgis


Check on yours and get back to us.
Or, better still, perhaps, help me to find mine?


“It is an absurdity to believe that the Deity has human passions, and one of the lowest of human passions, a restless appetite for applause.” David Hume

No more absurd than not believing it?

"If there is no God, then man and the universe are doomed. Like prisoners condemned to death, we await our unavoidable execution. There is no God, and there is no immortality. And what is the consequence of this? It means that life itself is absurd. It means that the life we have is without ultimate significance, value, or purpose.” William Lane Craig

Exactly!

“Think of God and not religion, of ecstasy and not mysticism. The difference between the theoretician of faith and the believer is as great as between the psychiatrist and the psychotic.” Emil Cioran

At least on this planet?

“Spontaneously, without any theological training, I, a child, grasped the incompatibility of God and shit and thus came to question the basic thesis of Christian anthropology, namely that man was created in God's image. Either/or: either man was created in God's image - and has intestines! - or God lacks intestines and man is not like him.
The ancient Gnostics felt as I did at the age of five. In the second century, the Great Gnostic master Valentinus resolved the damnable dilemma by claiming that Jesus "ate and drank, but did not defecate."
Shit is a more onerous theological problem than is evil. Since God gave man freedom, we can, if need be, accept the idea that He is not responsible for man's crimes. The responsibility for shit, however, rests entirely with Him, the creator of man.” Milan Kundera


Next up: semen?

“God's ways are higher than our ways not because he is less compassionate than we are but because he is more compassionate than we can ever imagine.” Rachel Held Evans

Take for example those "acts of God". The most mysterious compassion of all perhaps?
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Re: Quote of the day

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As someone who loves music with a passion, the most frightening thing imaginable is going deaf. Really, I think I would rather be dead.

Here it’s not just listening to it but revolving your whole fucking life around it. What must that be like?

Though in part congenital, the other part he brought on himself. Years and years of being around very, very loud music. It’s a tough call though for some: From day to day to day they thrive on the sound. The louder the better. But down the road the ears can’t take it anymore. Some get tinnitus. Some lose hearing altogether.

It’s like, say, someone who loves to stuff his face with junk food. He knows it’s not healthy but it tastes so good in the moment he rationalizes the future away. Until the future is now and his heart finally takes him down for the count. It’s a trade-off some are willing to make. Same with booze and drugs. And lots of other things where the risk of losing something important to you is involved.

I once listened to music myself VERY LOUD. Then I stopped. I don’t enjoy it as much but at least I can still hear it. And gradually my own chronic tinnitus dissipated as well. You’ve just got to be practical about these things. Or take your chances going to the edge.

Frankie’s genius is that he learned to do with sight [and touch] what he once did with sound. Until he dropped out altogether.

When Frankie is having the extensive hearing tests, the instrument that the doctor uses has markings that go up to 11. This is a reference to Nigel Tufnel’s Amp in “This Is Spinal Tap”

Paul Kaye is not a fan of dance music and, whenever a scene has him in head phones, he instead listened to punk rock like Sex Pistols or The Clash.
IMDb


It's All Gone Pete Tong

Frankie: I was thinking, you know Paul Newman’s got his salad dressing and that? So why not Frankie Wilde Hummus?


While he can still joke about it.

Friend: Frankie’s problem was quite a common problem amongst DJ’s…an occupational hazard. They work in the clubs. The noise just takes its toll.

Next up: the toll that noise takes here.

Jack: His hearing was fucked. But he tried to keep working and plow through. You know, put the horse blinkers on. Ignore the problem, and it’ll go away.

Unless, of worse, it gets considerably worse.

Jack: Well, denial is a river in Frank, and it runs deep. And his sets were shambolic at times. Clearly, could only be the work of a man who couldn’t hear.

Next up: clearly the posts of a man who could not think.

Frankie: I tell you, I really fucked up last night, man. It’s my call. I picked the wrong set.
Max: It stunk. It stunk like shit, Frank. It stunk like…Well, like you shit your pants…and you just sat in it for a week, and then you shit yourself again. That’s how fucking bad it stunk, Frank.


Next up: you shit your pants here.

Frankie: I couldn’t hear a fucking thing.
Max: Right. Because you might be deaf, Frank.
Frankie: What’s that?
Max: You could be deaf, Frank.
Frankie: What you saying?
Max: You are deaf.
Frankie: Can’t hear you, Max.
Max: YOU’RE FUCKING DEAF, ASSHOLE!!!


Well, at least it's now all out in the open.
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Re: Quote of the day

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It's All Gone Pete Tong

Max: You’re talking like a 95 year old war vet. Frank, you need professional help.


Cue [among other things] the Benjamin Button Syndrome.

Doctor: I don’t want you to panic, Frank. I’ve got some bad news for you, though. You’re going deaf. Completely deaf. As you know, your right ear is completely shot. Your left ear has got 20 percent left. You were born with little holes in them…and slowly the fluid pressure is dropping.
Frankie: Can’t you just plug it up with some ear putty or something?
Doctor: It doesn’t work like that. The ear organism, it’s way too sensitive and delicate. Surgery doesn’t work. Cochlear implant doesn’t work. You’ve gotta stop exposing yourself to so much noise.
Frankie: What do you mean?
Doctor: It means that if you listen to absolute silence your ears are gonna last a little bit longer. They’re crumbling as we speak.


And we know what's coming.

Doctor: Stop the drugs, Frank. Stop the drinking. Go to bed at a decent hour. We can give you a hearing aid that gives you temporary hearing…but that damages the ear even further. These are the facts, Frank. These are the facts. We can’t change them. You are deaf, man. You are a deaf man.
Frankie: This is costing me thousands of fucking euros an hour. Chuck me a fucking bone!
Doctor: This is your hearing aid, Frank. Use it only when you have to. Only when you have to.


Next up: Frankie in the studio. The tipping point.

Jack: I didn’t want a deaf DJ on the label. I didn’t want the company to be touched with the deaf stamp. Well, business is tough and sometimes you have to make awkward decisions and I’ve made harder decisions than dropping the deaf DJ.

And, of course, the equivalent of that here.
So, who gets dropped?


Repoter: Where’s Frankie Wilde today?
Max: I haven’t talked to him in almost a year now. I’ve heard some stories. This guy supposedly saw him in New York wearing a garbage bag for a hat and shoeboxes on his feet and he had a rock, and he was trying to eat it like a sandwich.


Wouldn't surprise me.

Jack: The first time I heard “Hear No Evil”, I was like “whatever”. But Max told me Frankie’s story and the penny dropped. People love a good tragedy. People love handicaps, frankly. It gets them emotional. I’ll get on that deaf train with a wheelchair ramp, no problem. First-class ticket, please.

Like I always say, "whatever works".

Frankie: What’s with the fucking ear sculpture?
Max: The ear, that represents your deafness, okay. Deaf people hate their ears, see. Don’t they? So it’s symbolic. So you’re gonna smash it. The deaf kids are gonna go fucking nuts.
Frankie: It’s wank. I’m sucking deaf cock for you, mate…and I’m fucking choking on it.
Max: All right, first off, okay, you’re sucking show-biz cock. But look, this is gonna be good money. This is all about cash. Shitloads of cash, Frank. And better than that…Sonya can’t get her grubby fingers on this fucking money, understand? This is Sonya-free cash!


Capitalism let's call it. And what if it really is the best of all possible worlds?

Max: That was it, gone. Frankie Wilde, bye-bye. Gone. I’ve heard a story that he’s running a record shop in Oxford. There’s a story that he went to Fiji and then died of syphilis. But nobody knows. You know, I don’t know where he is. He was another deaf guy with a deaf guy’s needs. And he went off to a quiet place. Although, I suppose that wouldn’t make much difference.

Uh, start here?
https://www.quora.com/Does-DJ-Frankie-Wilde-exist
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Re: Quote of the day

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Werner Herzog

The world reveals itself to those who travel on foot


And not just to the kitchen or the bathroom.

Am I in the wrong place here, or in the wrong life? Did I not recognize, as I sat in a train that raced past a station and did not stop, that I was on the wrong train, and did I not learn from the conductor that the train would not stop at the next station, either, a hundred kilometers away, and did he not also admit to me, whispering with his hand shielding his mouth, that the train would not stop again at all?

You're dead in other words.

For a moment the feeling crept over me that my work, my vision, is going to destroy me, and for a fleeting moment I let myself take a long, hard look at myself, something I would not otherwise do--out of instinct, on principle, out of self-preservation--look at myself with objective curiosity to see whether my vision has not destroyed me already. I found it comforting to note that I was still breathing.

He wondered: "Me too?"

Americans believe that they are normal, that they make sense, and that the rest of the world is exotic. They do not seem to understand that they are the most exotic people in the world right now.

Yeah, right.

Amos Vogel was a mentor, a guiding light for me. In his presence, you always rose. But his importance to me is of minor significance. What is significant is that with him an entire epoch ends. The Last Lion has left us. I am still not capable – or rather unwilling – to understand the fact that Amos passed away, because a man like him cannot be dead. His traces are everywhere.

Reminds me of this guy:

"Oscar Tio was a friend of mine
92 years old he sent me a valentine
Oscar Tio passed away a few years ago flat on his back
he never cried…he never sighed
and with his last departing breath
he said he had a mighty fine time"


You should look straight at a film; that's the only way to see one. Film is not the art of scholars but of illiterates.

Hint, hint.
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Re: Quote of the day

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His neighbors are possible extremists. His neighbors are possible terrorists. His neighbors are possible nuts?

On the contrary, just ask them.

He teaches a course on terrorism that was once academic. But then his wife – an FBI agent – was killed by a right wing terrorist organization. Or so the FBI believed. Not false flags though. Just wrong flags. Or sort of wrong flags.

This film came out a few years after the Oklahoma City bombing [and the incident at Ruby Ridge]. It invents its own facsimiles of both. The politics here are clearly liberal. The terrorists/idealists are right wingers. The message is this: there really is a vast right wing conspiracy out there to bring down the government. One apparently not connected to Talk Radio or Fox News. Or MAGA and Q-Anon

[I think in part it touches on the role that politics can play in relationships. You can befriend someone [a neighbor, say] and share much in common. But if over time you become considerably at odds politically then [eventually] something [some event] will drive a wedge between you. This is just an extreme imagining of it.]

One too many coincidences for me though. And if the real terrorists were actually this clever I’d say we all have something to worry about. Unless, of course, you are one of them.


Arlington Road

Michael [to Brooke]: Why would he tell me it’s a mall when it wasn’t?


Take a wild guess.

Oliver: Never wiser than when we’re children. They say it and it’s true. We’ll never see things that clear again.

Of course, all the ideologues say that. And some even believe it.

Brooke [to Michael]: You have invaded his privacy. So maybe he lied about where he went to college. Big deal. People lie about things all the time. You don’t have the right to spy on them. God, you of all people. Are you teaching the Bill of Rights this semester…or did that not make the program?

Let's get back to her on this...

Brooke: What are you doing?
Michael: Pretending to wait for a locksmith. Pretending to be locked out.


Fooling the terrorists?

Michael: Brooke, the guy was testing me. He wanted to see if I was an enemy or an ally.

Oh, he knows that already.

Michael: What the hell have you done with my son?!
Oliver: If you want to be his father, you will walk to your house, sleep in your bed, teach your classes, and live your life!
Michael: What are you doing? How many people are you going to kill?
Oliver: Well, if I see any strange cars on my street, if you feel compelled to talk to someone, a federal agent perhaps, I imagine we’re just going to kill one.
Michael: He’s nine years old!


You gotta sort of read between the lines here.

Oliver: I’m a messenger Michael, I’m a messenger! There’s millions of us, waiting to take up arms, ready to spread the word… millions of us!
Michael: No! The government’s not who you’re killing!
Oliver: Yes. Yes… they’ll pay. They’ll pay for their sins. Their lies.
Michael: You’re killing children! Children die!
Oliver: Children…I know that. This is war, Michael. In a war, children die.


Any kids ever die given the wars we wage here?

News announcer: And so after an exhausting hundreds of thousands of man-hours and leads, federal investigators are finally ready to say that just as in the IRS bombing two years ago, the attack on the FBI was the work of one man and one man alone, Michael Farraday.

And then a couple of years later...9/11.
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Re: Quote of the day

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Death

“The death of dogma is the birth of morality.” Immanuel Kant


Oh, indeed, categorically and imperatively.

Anyway, I'm sort of glad they've got the atomic bomb invented. If there's ever another war, I'm going to sit right the hell on top of it. I'll volunteer for it, I swear to God I will. J.D. Salinger

Of course: https://youtu.be/snTaSJk0n_Y?si=0YBc7Delw4XgjVk0

One day you'll call me Death.
For now, Wrath will do.” Kerri Maniscalco.


Next up: in the interim?

“People who get up early in the morning cause war, death and famine.” Banksy

And not just those in the Pentagon. Though, sure, no one else comes even close.

Music is crucial. Beyond no way can I overstress this fact. Let's say you're southbound on the interstate, cruising alone in the middle lane, listening to AM radio. Up alongside comes a tractor trailer of logs or concrete pipe, a tie-down strap breaks, and the load dumps on top of your little sheetmetal ride. Crushed under a world of concrete, you're sandwiched like so much meat salad between layers of steel and glass. In that last, fast flutter of your eyelids, you looking down that long tunnel toward the bright God Light and your dead grandma walking up to hug you--do you want to be hearing another radio commercial for a mega, clearance, closeout, blow-out liquidation car-stereo sale?” Chuck Palahniuk.

Up popped this -- https://youtu.be/XhtoRlVUPo0?si=G7NxFmsxLPS4N9wS -- in my head.

I thought of the people before me who had looked down at the river and gone to sleep beneath it. I wondered about them. I wondered how they had done it--it, the physical act. I simply wondered about the dead because their days had ended and I did not know how I would get through mine.” James Baldwin

The good news: nobody does.
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Re: Quote of the day

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You don’t get much further removed here from the sci-fi we get out of Hollywood. Not many explosions, for example. And the special effects are not the main reason you watch it.

The premise is familiar enough though. Something very strange is happening somewhere “out there” and we want to find out what it is. Someone reports what he saw. Is it just a hallucination? Is it just a natural phenomena twisted by his imagination into some sort of psychological projection? Is it just the point of view of an amateur—one not qualified “scientifically” to assess what he thinks it might be? And then the gap between how it behaves and how it ought to behave if it wishes to be understood as a civilized, moral entity.

Or are we at the “boundaries of human knowledge” instead—at a place beyond which we cannot go in grasping what we can in fact confirm [empirically] to have been perceived?

For example, Solaris is a planet where the entire ocean may be a living, thinking organism.

Yet what is often demoralizing about films like this is how they imagine the future they protray as more or less right around the corner. Think of the gap between Clarke’s imagined 2001 and the reality of it. These films came out at or around the time of the Moon missions. It was thought by many that we’d be exploring the stars by now. And not just through telescopes or satelites. Instead, it will be years now even before the Mars missions begin. Space [and reality itself] seem to be far, far vaster than we ever could have imagined. And possibly vaster than we ever will imagine.


Solaris [Solyaris]

Burton: You want to destroy that which we are presently incapable of understanding? Forgive me, but I am not an advocate of knowledge at any price. Knowledge is only valid when it’s based on morality.
Kelvin: Man is the one who renders science moral or immoral. Remember Hiroshima?


Of course, that debate still rages on.

Gibarian [of the girl]: Did you see her? Kris, understand that this is not madness. It has something to do with conscience.

I didn't get that impression at all.

Snaut: Dr Kelvin, if you see something out of the ordinary, something besides me and Sartorious, try not to lose your head.
Kelvin: What would I see?
Snaut: I don’t know. That sort of depends on you.
Kelvin: Hallucinations?
Snaut: No, Just remember.
Kelvin: Remember what?
Snaut: That we’re not on Earth.


Unless, perhaps, you count the Bermuda Triangle?

Gibarian [in a recording to Kelvin]: Kris, by now you are at the station and know what happened to me. What happened to me is not important. Or rather, it cannot be explained. I’m afraid what happened to me is only the beginning. This could happen to you too. And the others. Here, it could probably happen to anyone. Just don’t think I’ve lost my mind. I’m of sound mind, believe me, Kris. You know me. If I have enough time, I’ll tell why I did everything. I’m telling you this so that, if it does happen to you, you’ll know it’s not madness. That’s the most important thing.

Next up: it happens to him.

Gibarian [in a recording to Kelvin]: It’s all so senseless. They won’t understand me. They think I’ve gone crazy.
[a girl gives him a glass of milk—a girl that is not supposed to exist]
Gibarian: Do you see, Kris, how it’s not entirely absurd? I have to do this because I’m afraid they will come in here. I mean Snaut and Sartorius. They themselves do not understand what they are doing. I’m afraid, Kris…Nobody will be able to understand.


Indeed, tell me about that here.

Sartorius: You are lucky.
Kelvin: How so?
Sartorius: It’s meaningless, yet you’ve managed to establish emotional contact with them.


Meaning what?
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Re: Quote of the day

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Solaris [Solyaris]

Kelvin [reading from a book Snaut gives him]: “I know only one thing, senor. When I sleep, I know no fear, no hope, no trouble, no bliss. Blessings on him who invented sleep. The common coin that purchases all things, the balance that levels sheperd and king, fool and wise man. There is only one bad thing about sound sleep. They say it closely resembles death.”


More to the point, blessings on him or her that invented dreams.

Snaut [after Satorius toasts him and science]: Science? Nonsense! In this situation mediocrity and genius are equally useless! I must tell you that we really have no desire to conquer any cosmos. We want to extend the Earth up to its borders. We don’t know what to do with other worlds. We don’t need other worlds. We need a mirror. We struggle to make contact, but we’ll never achieve it. We are in a ridiculous predicament of man pursuing a goal that he fears and that he really does not need. Man needs man!

Imagine then his reaction to what we do here.

Sartorius: All these heartbreaking lamentations are nothing but second-rate Dostoyevsky. Who are you to judge? I know why I’m here. I’m here to work. Man was created by Nature in order to explore it. As he approaches Truth he is fated to Knowledge. All the rest is bullshit.

He means Bullshit, of course.

Snaut: Doesn’t a man who’s ready to give up his life just to make cursed contact, in order to know more about it, the right to drink?

Contact with what though?

Kelvin: She drank liquid oxygen. She did it out of despair.
Snaut: It’ll get worse. The more she’s with you the more human she’ll become.


God forbid?

Snaut: What do you intend to do?
Kelvin: Wait until she returns. And then leave the station.
Snaut: Kris, she can only live here, on the station. You know that.
Kelvin: What can I do? I love her.
Snaut: Which one? Her, or the one in the rocket. She will appear again and she’ll keep appearing. Don’t turn a scientific problem into a common love story.


Cue the philosophers?

Kelvin [to Snaut]: Suffering makes life seem dismal and suspect. But I won’t accept that. Is that which is indispensable to life also harmful to it? Remember Tolstoy? His suffering over the impossibility of loving mankind as a whole?

Now those are philosophy questions, aren'tthey?

Kelvin: Listen, Snaut. Why are we being tortured like this?
Snaut: In my opinion, we have lost out sense of the cosmic. The ancients understood it perfectly. They never would have asked why or what for. Remember the myth of Sisyphus.


Go ahead, try this yourself. Then get back to us.
More or less sputtering, I suspect.


Snaut: You like dire questions. Soon you’ll be asking me the meaning of life.
Kelvin: Wait. Don’t be ironic.
Snaut: It’s a banal question. When man is happy, the meaning of life and other eternal themes rarely interest him. These questions should be asked at the end of one’s life.
Kelvin: But we don’t know when our life will end, do we? That’s why we are in such a hurry.
Snaut: The happiest people are those who are not interested in these cursed questions.
Kelvin: To ask them is always the desire to know.


Again: "It’s a banal question. When man is happy, the meaning of life and other eternal themes rarely interest him."
Or course, he's just paraphrasing my ex-wife.
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Re: Quote of the day

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Philosophy

“...when a language dies, a way of understanding the world dies with it, a way of looking at the world. ” Steiner G.


So, does that tell us more about language or the world?

“Thinking only begins at the point where we have come to know that Reason, glorified for centuries, is the most obstinate adversary of thinking.” Martin Heidegger

Coming from him, right?

“Do you shovel to survive, or survive to shovel?” Kōbō Abe

Yes.

“Between love and the automatic garbage chute, young people everywhere have made their choice and prefer the garbage chute." Ivan Chtcheglov

A Western thing?

“Time is what keeps things from happening all at once.” Ann Brashares

Could that really be all it is?

“...when dogma enters the brain, all intellectual activity ceases.” Robert Anton Wilson

And, no, not just among the lluminati.
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A flat tire. At the wrong place or the wrong time. Or at the right place or the right time. Depending on whether the consequences either do or do not work in your favor.

The film takes place in an unnamed South American country—just after the fall of a brutal dictatorship. A military junta in other words. No doubt similar to the many regimes set up and/or sustained by the powers that be in Washington and on Wall Street.

Suppose you were the victum of such a regime. Suppose, in other words, you were detained and tortured by thugs put into place by the regime. And then repeatedly raped by a doctor employed to keep the prisoners alive. And then suppose, fortuitously, the doctor stumbled into your life years later. What would you do?

Here there’s justice when terrible acts are done to someone else and justice when they are done to you. The wrinkle however is that we don’t really know if what she thinks she knows is in fact true. At least until we do.

And then aside from “the government” there are all the different ways we torture each other day in and day out. Our own private hells.

One thing for sure, it wouldn’t have ended the way it did if it was me instead of her.

Sigourney Weaver stated in a later interview that Roman Polanski would sometimes randomly fire a gun in order to get the most genuine expressions of fear from the cast. IMDb


Death and the Maiden

Gerardo: What am I supposed to be lying about?
Paulina: You said yes to the president.
Gerardo: Okay, I’m sorry.
Paulina: God damn it! Don’t apologize. You think you can pay for anything with those fucking words. If you were really sorry you would have said no to this whitewash. You would have said, “No, Mr. President, I will not dignify this betrayal.”
Gerardo: It’s not a betrayal.
Paulina: Bullshit.
Gerardo: Once the truth starts to come out I can get the president to change the rules.
Paulina: But you still didn’t get him to change his mind. It is still only cases that ended in death.
Gerardo: You have to give me time.


No fucking way, right?

Roberto: Even though we can’t put those bastards on trial because they gave themselves amnesty at least we can make their names public.
Gerardo: Well, one of the ground rules is the names aren’t going to be made public.


Politics, lets call it.

Gerardo [to Roberto]: You just taught me a valuable lesson. In a democracy, the midnight knock on the door can be friendly.

Let's get back to that though.

Roberto: It must be some kids out for a joyride.
Gerardo: No, this time I really do have something to apologize for. My wife took your car.


Trust me: she's just getting started.

Gerardo [seeing Roberto trussed up in the chair]: What is this?
Paulina: It’s a miracle. He’s delivered himself. Like a fantastic surprise Christmas present, left at the door.


You know, if he's actually who she thinks he is.

Gerardo: What the fuck is going on?
Paulina: It’s him.
Gerardo: Who?
Paulina: The doctor. The doctor who played “Death and the Maiden”.
Gerardo: But you were blindfolded.
Paulina: The voice.
Gerardo: His voice? That’s it?
Paulina: That’s it. That’s enough for me.


I was certainly convinced myself.
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Richard Wright from Native Son

Goddamnit, look! We live here and they live there. We black and they white. They got things and we ain't. They do things and we can't.


Of course now all that has changed. If not actually for the better.

Every movement of his body is an unconscious protest. Every desire, every dream, no matter how intimate or personal, is a plot or a conspiracy. Every hope is a plan for insurrection. Every glance of the eye is a threat. His very existence is a crime against the state!

Not unlike posting here, for some.

... a knowledge of how to live was a knowledge of how to die.

Tell me that's not rooted existentially in dasein.

But rape was not what one did to women. Rape was what one felt when one's back was against the wall and one had to strike out, whether one wanted to or not, to keep the pack from killing one. He committed rape every time he looked into a white face. He was a long, taut piece of rubber which a thousand white hands had stretched to the snapping point, and when he snapped it was rape. But it was rape when he cried out in hate deep in his heart as he felt the strain of living day by day. That, too, was rape.

Rape here?

You can't make me do nothing but die!

Uh, we should all be so lucky?

Did you ever feel happy in church?
Naw. I didn’t want to. Nobody but poor folks get happy in church. But you are poor, Bigger.
Again Bigger’s eyes lit with a bitter and feverish pride. I ain’t that poor.


Cue the Communists?
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Death and the Maiden

Gerardo: As long as you’re holding the gun, we have nothing to discuss.
Paulina: On the contrary, the minute I give up the gun all discussion will end.


I know! Let's call these conflicting goods!!

Paulina [holding a gun to his throat]: You threatening?
Roberto: I’m not.
Paulina: Yes, you were. Let me make this clear. The time for people like you making threats is over. Out there maybe you bastards are still running things behind the scenes but in here…in here I’m in charge. Understand? Me!


Of course, the time for people like him carrying out those threats will never be over. Though, sure, if they do stop around the globe, get back to us on it.

Roberto: You didn’t do anything. You just stood there.
Paulina: Of course he just stood there. He’s the law.


Hint, hint, let's say.

Gerardo: What if by some incredible miracle this is just some crazy coincidence? What if he’s innocent?
Paulina: If he’s innocent, then he’s really fucked.


I'd say so.

Gerardo: If you don’t want to die you’ll confess. She promised if you confess and show remorse…she’ll let you go.
Roberto: My God. You’re no different from them…threatening to kill me if I don’t confess. And you’re supposed to be a democrat, a lawyer, a man who believes in justice.


Unless, of course, he is guilty.

Roberto: She’s mad, she needs therapy.
Gerardo: You are her therapy.


Now we're getting closer to, well, whatever we are expected to.

Gerardo: She wants the confession to be genuine.
Roberto: How can it be genuine. I am innocent.


Here the exchanges become particularly peculiar.

Gerardo: You came back all beat up and crazy. You were half-dead…taken punishment a thousand times worse than anything I could have taken. And you did it to save my life. How do you think that makes me feel? I would have given them your name to save my skin. They would have broken me on the first day.

Or even over the phone?

Roberto: You have my confession.
Gerardo: You told me you made it up.
Roberto: I…I made it up. Yes, but you have the tape. I’ll keep quiet.
Paulina: He can’t decide which lie to stick to.
Gerardo: Either you were in Barcelona in April of '77 or not.
Roberto: What can I say? If I’m guilty you’ll kill me. If I’m innocent, you’ll kill me. If I’m innocent, you’re screwed. If I’m guilty, you’ll kill me for revenge!


Seriously, I forget how this ends!!
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