Just the Facts of Life Ma’am
Category: Culture
Work or Labor?
“So long as one is happy one can endure any discipline: it was unhappiness that broke down the habits of work.”
The End of the Affair
“There are men whom one has an irresistible desire to tease: men whose virtues one doesn’t share.”
A.I.
Last Tuesday, tomorrow morning, A.I. destroyed the world. How this tragedy came about is anyone’s guess given the iron-clad nature of the Nondisclosure Agreements.
Gun Crazy
The central moral is clear: never fall in love with a carny.
Uncommon Qualities
“Oddity though he was, Norman was himself and seemed incapable of being anything else. That was very rare.” The Uncommon Reader.
Question: Does reading allow us to become better versions of ourselves or someone else?
War, What is it Good for?
War is not politics by other means. It is not the outcome of failed policy but a policy of failure itself. What is the objective? Victory? A Pyrrhic one at best. A cleansing of bloodlust? There are not enough scapegoats to sate man’s thirst. Peace? A madness and a delusion. To the victor go the spoils, clutching a worthless and dead carcass. This, alas, is your reward. No god, no country, no honor, no salvation, no freedom. War, yes. The Devil, probably.
Ebert on Louise Brooks
“Her job as an actress wasn’t to lead us in the proper reaction. It was to observe its reality.”
Or in Lulu’s own words: “The great art of films does not consist of descriptive movement of face and body but in the movements of thought and soul transmitted in a kind of intense isolation.”
Nostalghia
“Feelings unspoken are unforgettable.”
James Gray on Rossellini
Stromboli: Rossellini shows an amazing “ability to move beyond the traditional markers of narrative.” The film combines the quotidian and mundane with a religious examination of the mysteries of the soul. “You realize we are all grappling with the struggle of what it means to be a person, and that will be eternally unresolved.”
The Hack 