Posts tagged narrative
To a clear eye the smallest fact is a window through which the infinite may be seen.
Hugo, though a bit long at times, is a beautiful automaton, I mean movie
The automaton, a complex work of art and science designed to do one thing, or communicate one message, in this case, is an ingenious metaphor for movies themselves. Moreso, the automaton would not reveal its purpose or message until a heart-shaped key was inserted; nor will a movie reveal its deeper meaning without the viewer using their mind (as key) and heart to engage with the movie and unlock its mystery. My favorite part of this construct is the boy’s belief that the automaton produce a message from his dead father. By extension, then, a movie reveals a message from, in some kind of spiritual collective manner, our shared origin or what binds us all together. Beautiful.
Another thread through the movie is that of finding one’s purpose, and being free to do the work that serves one’s purpose in life. Do not live at the Paris train station of life where people merely come and go, but stop and take hold of your purpose, whatever it may be. For Scorsese, that purpose is art through movies which in the library are found “on the top shelf”. Beautiful.
Now we live in an age of distraction, an age dominated by bombardment coming from the screen … We live, too, in the age of the Tea Party, a movement that cherishes stupidity and zealotry and hates thinking, reading, and teaching. If these people had their way, we’d be done with teaching. It shows the weak-mindedness that has descended upon America, the proclivity for nonsense and political hatred, the disrespect for literature, history, and serious thinking. There is only one remedy to the current predicament, and that is to encourage people to think independently. And that, in turn, begins with reading. People need to remember the best that has been said and thought in the past. That is the starting point, and that is the path, out of our current appalling situation.
AMAZING!
crazy book origami by Isaac Salazar
American writing, for example, beguiles and exasperates in equal measure. Its newspapers - with one or two exceptions - are awful.
Endless sub-clauses roam across prairies of newsprint in search of the point, like homesteader wagons on the Oregon trail circling around a knackered old buffalo.
The Afterlife of David Foster Wallace
Girl with Curious Hair is one of my favorite
