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Posts tagged thought

Dec27

Tarantino on the Brutality of ‘Django Unchained’

Henry Louis Gates Jr.: Why do you think we’ve had to distance ourselves from the pain as we have — which makes your representation shocking?

Quentin Tarantino: I don’t know the answer to that question because I don’t feel that way. I can’t understand why anybody would feel that way. I think America is one of the only countries that has not been forced, sometimes by the rest of the world, to look their own past sins completely in the face. And it’s only by looking them in the face that you can possibly work past them. And it’s not a case where the Turks don’t want to acknowledge the Armenian holocaust, but the Armenians do. Nobody wants to acknowledge it here.

(via)

2 notes #thought #django unchained #Quentin Tarantino #Henry Louis Gates Jr #film #interview #quote #race #america

Dec26

Dec16

The humorous story is told gravely; the teller does his best to conceal the fact that he even dimly suspects that there is anything funny about it; but the teller of the comic story tells you beforehand that it is one of the funniest things he has ever heard, then tells it with eager delight, and is the first person to laugh when he gets through. And sometimes, if he has had good success, he is so glad and happy that he will repeat the “nub” of it and glance around from face to face, collecting applause, and then repeat it again. It is a pathetic thing to see.
Mark Twain, from How to Tell A Story (via joshsimpson)

(Source: joshsimpson)

10 notes #thought #mark twain #humor #story #comedy #storytelling #quote

Sep11

slaughterhouse90210: “Sherman made the terrible discovery that men make about their fathers sooner or later… that the man before him was not an aging father but a boy, a boy much like himself, a boy who grew up and had a child of his own and, as best he could, out of a sense of duty and, perhaps love, adopted a role called Being a Father so that his child would have something mythical and infinitely important: a Protector, who would keep a lid on all the chaotic and catastrophic possibilities of life.”― Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities This might be the best blog on the internet.

slaughterhouse90210:

“Sherman made the terrible discovery that men make about their fathers sooner or later… that the man before him was not an aging father but a boy, a boy much like himself, a boy who grew up and had a child of his own and, as best he could, out of a sense of duty and, perhaps love, adopted a role called Being a Father so that his child would have something mythical and infinitely important: a Protector, who would keep a lid on all the chaotic and catastrophic possibilities of life.”
― Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities

This might be the best blog on the internet.

682 notes #thoughts #tom wolfe #bonfire of the vanities #arrested development #quote #literature #thought

Aug2

Aug31

“I just want to have more experiences. I don’t look back at my old albums. I don’t organize or collate or try to rethink them. They’re up on my website, people can buy ’em, but I’m not thinking of them anymore because I’m trying to get back up onstage and write new material…I want to write a little bit everyday, I want to be open to any acting opportunity. I think I said this before in that response I wrote to David Cross, which is, “I’m really in this for two things: I want the money and I want the anecdotes.” I certainly want to keep working, but I also just want really cool stories. So, to me, working on an excellent film like Big Fan or working on a disaster like Blade: Trinity are just as equally valuable to me in my life because I’ve got great stories to tell about each one.

It took me until my 40s to realize it: There’s no destination. There’s no getting anywhere. There’s just the going. The key to life is to make the going really fun. Because people that are like, “If I just get to this, then boom!” And then they get there and there’s this dawning of an afterwards. Whereas I’m just always in the going. And it’s not a frantic going like, “I gotta keep going or I’m gonna go nuts!” I can not do anything for weeks or months if I need to and just sit and read books or watch movies. I’m just as fine consuming and absorbing new art as I am trying to make it. But it’s all in the going.”

Patton Oswalt from his A.V. Club interview (08/31/2011)

#patton oswalt #quote #av club #the onion #david cross #comedy #comedian #wisdom #thoughts #thought

Jun2

“Let ‘er rip” Every middle-schooler’s favorite actor thanks to classics such as Airplane, Spy Hard, and The Naked Gun, Leslie Nelsen had a famous affinity for whoopie cushions. If everyone had as good a sense of humor about such serious topics as Nielsen, the world would be a better place.

“Let ‘er rip”


Every middle-schooler’s favorite actor thanks to classics such as Airplane, Spy Hard, and The Naked Gun, Leslie Nelsen had a famous affinity for whoopie cushions. If everyone had as good a sense of humor about such serious topics as Nielsen, the world would be a better place.

#leslie nielsen #gravestone #comedy #thought

May20

Foodies vs. Darwin: How Meat Eaters Ignore Science→

I might be the biggest hypocrite of them all. I believe it’s wrong to eat animals, but for some reason can’t find the conviction to become a vegetarian. **Falling to my knees** Goddamn you medium-rare steaks, mushroom-swiss burgers, and Wendy’s spicy chicken sandwich.

As Paul Waldau reminds us in Animal Rights: What Everyone Needs to Know, it was Aristotle who, more than 2,000 years ago, codified a rigid typology of life based on a fundamental distinction between humans and animals. His typology was with the book of Genesis. In the Aristotelian worldview, humans transcended an atomized sub-human world in which every species served a distinct role in the service of humankind. Under Aristotle and the Old Testament, using animals was more than okay; it was our cosmological duty. “Nature,” Aristotle wrote in Politics, “has made all animals for the sake of man.” For Christians, of course, that role belonged to God.

But Darwin and Mendel, with their theories of evolution and genetics, put an end to this self-serving fantasy of dominion. They did so not only by scientifically situating humans in the same category as non-humans (animals), but by undermining the assumption that humans, as Waldau puts it, are “the pinnacle of and reason for creation.” Today, enlightened neo-Darwinists embrace the idea that shared genetic heritage—and often profoundly similar genetic structure—between humans and non-human species confirms the interrelatedness and continuum of all animal life. And this, as I see it, changes everything.

When humans and non-human animals are part of a continuum, rather than qualitatively distinct forms of life, human meat-eaters confront a serious quandary. It becomes incumbent upon us to forge a contemporary justification for carnivorous behavior. Aristotle and Genesis will no longer do. By undermining the long-held basis of inherent human superiority over non-human animals, the science of evolution obliterated the framework within which thoughtful carnivores long justified their behavior. As it now stands, human meat-eaters, unless they reject modern science, support the killing of non-human animals without the slightest intellectual or ethical grounding.

4 notes #thought #vegetarianism #philosophy #animal rights #food #darwin

Apr27

“Most [Ponzi schemers] are kind of swashbuckling characters, you know, the bon vivant, the most charming guy in the room. And Madoff was never the most charming person in the room, neither in my interviews or in my interviews with other people who knew him very well.

He would never be the most charming person in the room. He would make you feel like you were the most charming person in the room. That was his gift.”

From Terri Gross’ Fresh Air interview with New York Times financial writer and Bernie Madoff biographer, Diana Henriques.

3 notes #thought #bernie madoff #fresh air #terri gross #npr #quote

Apr7