Sophie: "Mom, I don't have very much water."
Me: "Yes you do. How much is in that glass?"
Sophie: "Half."
Me: "Right, your glass is half..."
Sophie: "Empty, Mommy."
Me: "Uh oh."
Sophie: "What?"
Showing posts with label quotes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label quotes. Show all posts
August 25, 2010
February 14, 2007
"I love the idea of taking everyday images, and giving them a graphic sophistication."
The title is a quote from Juan Gatti, who has designed titles for Pedro Almodóvar's films for the past 20 years or so. I just saw Almodóvar's "Volver" last night. Wow on so many, many fronts.I'm still processing the film, but the lush visual feast of it was enough to think about for many weeks to come. I was especially astounded by the Gatti's graphics during the end credits, and went to find more information and images. I came across an article "Graphic images to seduce the filmgoer" by Alice Rawsthorn from the International Herald Tribune, and learned about Pedro Almdovar's longtime collaboration with Juan Gatti. Exerpts are below; see the whole article here.
"For Volver's titles, or end credits, [Gatti] created an animation of the flowers, leaves and spots on the women's aprons and dresses. 'Pedro is very clever at building his characters with details like that,' Gatti says. 'And I love the idea of taking everyday images, and giving them a graphic sophistication.'"
"Gatti's collaboration with Almodóvar has lasted for more than 20 years, since the director was making short films in Madrid. Together they have produced some of the most memorable graphic images in contemporary cinema. 'A good title sequence should be seductive," observes Gatti. "It should have a hypnotic quality that gets the audience into the mood of the movie.'"
"Few designers and directors have enjoyed as productive a relationship as Gatti and Almodóvar. They met at a party in the early 1980s shortly after Gatti, who was born in Buenos Aires in 1950, had moved to Madrid. Both belonged to La Movida, the group of artists, designers and writers who were then defining the cultural identity of the newly democratic Spain."
"For each film, Gatti first reads the script, then he and Almodóvar identify reference points for the graphics, such as books, works of art and different characters. 'One of the reasons why we work so well together is because we have a similar frame of reference,' Gatti says. They then discuss possible styles and techniques, but do not develop them until Gatti has seen the first cut of the movie. He sketches his ideas as a storyboard, and refines them in dialogue with Almodóvar."
"In the titles of 'Bad Education' of 2004, he drew on his love of street art by collaging trashy images with religious ones to resemble fliers pasted on a street hoarding. 'I love seeing fragments of old posters peeping out from behind new ones,' he says."
January 26, 2006
Conversation Tidbit From Today: Kicking The Ass Of Math
I was talking with my friend Liz today, discussing the fact that math was hard for me in high school because I kept getting placed in advanced math classes. They assumed because I was good at all of the other subjects I could handle the advanced math, I guess. And I did, but not without a large amount of angst and the only D of my high school career. (The nearly all-A student in me must clarify that the D was a quarter grade, not a semester grade, and I managed to kick it up to a B, I think.) I found myself saying, "If I had been taking just the regular math classes, I would have kicked the ass of math in high school." To which Liz replied, "Did you hear what you just said?"
I was talking with my friend Liz today, discussing the fact that math was hard for me in high school because I kept getting placed in advanced math classes. They assumed because I was good at all of the other subjects I could handle the advanced math, I guess. And I did, but not without a large amount of angst and the only D of my high school career. (The nearly all-A student in me must clarify that the D was a quarter grade, not a semester grade, and I managed to kick it up to a B, I think.) I found myself saying, "If I had been taking just the regular math classes, I would have kicked the ass of math in high school." To which Liz replied, "Did you hear what you just said?"
December 13, 2004
I can't tell if you would have to like Bob Dylan or not to enjoy his book. (Personally, I adore the guy.) But what I can tell you is that I'm only about 60 pages in, and I've already got about 12 little passages I've fallen in love with. Including: "I began cramming my brain with all kinds of deep poems. It seemed like I'd been pulling an empty wagon for a long time and now I was beginning to fill it up and would have to pull harder."
October 22, 2004
"...in any case it is life itself as it chances to exist that furnishes the stimulus for art..."
"...each artist finds, in casual aspects of reality a form of life, a means to create an oeuvre, to build a language of himself, his peculiar wit and skill and taste and comprehension of things."
- from The Shape of Content by artist Ben Shahn
"...each artist finds, in casual aspects of reality a form of life, a means to create an oeuvre, to build a language of himself, his peculiar wit and skill and taste and comprehension of things."
- from The Shape of Content by artist Ben Shahn
August 25, 2004
March 18, 2004
Two quotes from Flannery O'Connor:
"The type of mind that can understand good fiction is not necessarily the educated mind, but it is at all times the kind of mind that is willing to have its sense of mystery deepened by contact with reality, and its sense of reality deepened by contact with mystery."
"The sorry religious novel comes about when the writer supposes that because of his belief, he is somehow dispensed from the obligation to penetrate concrete reality ...But the real novelist, the one with an instinct for what he is about knows that he cannot approach the infinite directly, that he must penetrate the natural human world as it is."
"The type of mind that can understand good fiction is not necessarily the educated mind, but it is at all times the kind of mind that is willing to have its sense of mystery deepened by contact with reality, and its sense of reality deepened by contact with mystery."
"The sorry religious novel comes about when the writer supposes that because of his belief, he is somehow dispensed from the obligation to penetrate concrete reality ...But the real novelist, the one with an instinct for what he is about knows that he cannot approach the infinite directly, that he must penetrate the natural human world as it is."
February 24, 2004
Jasper Johns and Things The Mind Already Knows
Johns' fascination with the ordinary, commonplace objects of everyday culture is also found in a number of sculptures he made. In this, he . . . was extending the tradition established by Marcel Duchamp, who was one of the first to break down the barrier between the world of high art and that of everyday objects and experience." (Wayne Craven, American Art, History and Culture)
American artist Jasper Johns has talked about certain motifs that appeared in his paintings in the 1950s as "things which are seen and not looked at, not examined...." Specifically, he was referring to paintings featuring the American flag or targets and, later, letters and numbers. They were all "things the mind already knows." They gave him "room to work on other levels." (Christopher Andreae, Christian Science Monitor, August 7, 2000)
Johns' fascination with the ordinary, commonplace objects of everyday culture is also found in a number of sculptures he made. In this, he . . . was extending the tradition established by Marcel Duchamp, who was one of the first to break down the barrier between the world of high art and that of everyday objects and experience." (Wayne Craven, American Art, History and Culture)
American artist Jasper Johns has talked about certain motifs that appeared in his paintings in the 1950s as "things which are seen and not looked at, not examined...." Specifically, he was referring to paintings featuring the American flag or targets and, later, letters and numbers. They were all "things the mind already knows." They gave him "room to work on other levels." (Christopher Andreae, Christian Science Monitor, August 7, 2000)
December 8, 2003
An excerpt from a Frank Rich op-ed in the New York Times from Sunday, December 8:
'Caroline,' Kennedy and Change
"The Kennedy assassination shattered conventional ways of seeing and understanding reality," David M. Lubin writes in "Shooting Kennedy," a fascinating cultural history published this fall. In this, Mr. Lubin both describes the [Tony] Kushner sensibility that is so in tune with our moment and echoes Paul Fussell's "The Great War and Modern Memory," the classic study of how the charnel house of World War I provoked a new literature of irony and fragmentation to encompass irrational horror. The trouble with the designs for the ground zero memorial is that they can't apply this lesson to our own horror. The competition's rules and deadline required that 9/11 be presented as a coherent story with a settled conclusion, rather than as a moment in which history shattered and has yet to be made whole.
To overview briefly the rest of the article, Rich was writing about a new, for lack of a better word, musical called "Caroline, or Change" by playwright Tony Kushner, author of Angels in America. Set in 1963, the Kennedy assassination happens in the first act of the three-act show. The rest is the aftermath.
Two things struck me. One, a reference to "a new literature of irony and fragmentation to encompass irrational horror" and that some are desperately trying to present 9/11 "as a coherent story with a settled conclusion."
These two ideas together remind me of Dostyoevsky’s Underground Man, which I need to re-read soon. One of the main ideas that’s stuck with me from that book is that it is in man’s nature to act as he will act – rationally or irrationally, but almost always mysteriously. That no human can predict what humans will do, because human beings themselves hardly know what they will do.
Or to put it another way, "who can know the heart of man"?
In my postmodern literature and life class in college, we learned about narratives and metanarratives. In the class, the point was that people tell stories for their own reasons, and the words they choose shape the way the story is remembered. Open a Russian history textbook – or an American one for that matter. Human beings have a natural and strong attraction and affinity for the arc of a story, a beginning middle and end.
And so many forms of information we receive, and certainly our entertainments, use this form to grab and hold our interest.
But when does a story obfuscate an essential truth that we must face? For the characters in "Caroline, or Change" – and for Americans following JFK’s assassination – their storyline had been decimated. The ending didn’t turn out like they thought. There was no satisfying ending. There wasn’t even a middle.
Art that engages this idea: that we are not all part of a story with a predictable or tidy beginning middle and end – let alone happy end – can also be difficult. Difficult to understand and difficult to like. Which are the novels following World War I that Frank Rich was referring to, these novels that use "irony and fragmentation to encompass irrational horror." I’d like to find out, and will.
What are the stories that I cling to? What are the arcs I have built up in my own mind, the beginnings, middles and ends? What are they stopping me from doing – and what can they help me to do?
'Caroline,' Kennedy and Change
"The Kennedy assassination shattered conventional ways of seeing and understanding reality," David M. Lubin writes in "Shooting Kennedy," a fascinating cultural history published this fall. In this, Mr. Lubin both describes the [Tony] Kushner sensibility that is so in tune with our moment and echoes Paul Fussell's "The Great War and Modern Memory," the classic study of how the charnel house of World War I provoked a new literature of irony and fragmentation to encompass irrational horror. The trouble with the designs for the ground zero memorial is that they can't apply this lesson to our own horror. The competition's rules and deadline required that 9/11 be presented as a coherent story with a settled conclusion, rather than as a moment in which history shattered and has yet to be made whole.
To overview briefly the rest of the article, Rich was writing about a new, for lack of a better word, musical called "Caroline, or Change" by playwright Tony Kushner, author of Angels in America. Set in 1963, the Kennedy assassination happens in the first act of the three-act show. The rest is the aftermath.
Two things struck me. One, a reference to "a new literature of irony and fragmentation to encompass irrational horror" and that some are desperately trying to present 9/11 "as a coherent story with a settled conclusion."
These two ideas together remind me of Dostyoevsky’s Underground Man, which I need to re-read soon. One of the main ideas that’s stuck with me from that book is that it is in man’s nature to act as he will act – rationally or irrationally, but almost always mysteriously. That no human can predict what humans will do, because human beings themselves hardly know what they will do.
Or to put it another way, "who can know the heart of man"?
In my postmodern literature and life class in college, we learned about narratives and metanarratives. In the class, the point was that people tell stories for their own reasons, and the words they choose shape the way the story is remembered. Open a Russian history textbook – or an American one for that matter. Human beings have a natural and strong attraction and affinity for the arc of a story, a beginning middle and end.
And so many forms of information we receive, and certainly our entertainments, use this form to grab and hold our interest.
But when does a story obfuscate an essential truth that we must face? For the characters in "Caroline, or Change" – and for Americans following JFK’s assassination – their storyline had been decimated. The ending didn’t turn out like they thought. There was no satisfying ending. There wasn’t even a middle.
Art that engages this idea: that we are not all part of a story with a predictable or tidy beginning middle and end – let alone happy end – can also be difficult. Difficult to understand and difficult to like. Which are the novels following World War I that Frank Rich was referring to, these novels that use "irony and fragmentation to encompass irrational horror." I’d like to find out, and will.
What are the stories that I cling to? What are the arcs I have built up in my own mind, the beginnings, middles and ends? What are they stopping me from doing – and what can they help me to do?
August 14, 2003
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