Lauren Wilford
oh, look. meaning.
"But I think it’s worth remembering just how bracing and essential those flirty looks and missed connections once felt, how understated and remarkable Jenna Fischer was in a role that so easily could have rankled with cuteness or veered into doormat. The end of Season 3 remains one of a handful of perfect television moments from my lifetime: Pam is doing a talking head to the camera assuming Jim, whom she’s lost to the wiles of Rashida Jones’s Karen, has gotten a corporate job in New York. Then Jim bursts into the room, a little flustered and a lot excited. He asks Pam out on a date. She accepts. He leaves. She turns back to us, asking “I’m sorry, what was the question?” And her skyscraping smile fills the screen in a way that standard sitcom laughter never could."
~ The Office Shuts Off the Lights, Grantland I love this Office retrospective.
"Indeed, along with the ethical urge of each individual to affirm his subjective existence, there is also the temptation to forgo liberty and become a thing. This is an inauspicious road, for he who takes it – passive, lost, ruined – becomes henceforth the creature of another’s will, frustrated in his transcendence and deprived of every value. But it is an easy road; on it one avoids the strain involved in undertaking an authentic existence."
IM: At least since the early ’80s, it’s began to fill out for me as an idea in fiction, that there’s something very entwined about imagination and morals. That one of the great values of fiction was exactly this process of being able to enter other people’s minds. Which is why I think cinema is a very inferior, unsophisticated medium.
ZS: Absolutely. Because you get surfaces only.
IM: Right. And with the novel we have happened to devise this form, this very elastic, mutable form that can allow us moments of real human investigation. Milan Kundera says very wise things in this context. He lays a lot of stress on the novel as a mode of investigation. It’s an open-ended way of looking at our own image, in ways that science can’t do, religion’s not credible, metaphysics is too intellectually repellent on its surface—this is our best machine, as it were.
— Zadie Smith Interviews Ian McEwan, The Believer, 2005
"It’s like a family album, the consciousness of your own past—well, you must find this already. I certainly find it. People say what were you doing in such and such year, and I know exactly what I was doing. I know I was publishing a particular book, or halfway through one. These books are the spoonfuls with which I’ve measured my existence."
~ Ian McEwan, Zadie Smith Interviews Ian McEwan, The Believer, 2005
ZS: You were asked once what you believe, truly believe though you can’t prove it, and you said: the absolute belief that there’s nothing after consciousness. But something about Saturday and its joy in the world and, again, that kind of Updikean pleasure, made me wonder whether you’d ever imagined yourself moving in that vaguely Christian direction…
IM: No.
ZS: Never? No change as you’ve got older, no inching fears or hopes…
IM: No. I don’t see any paradox in that which celebrates all things within the context of the extremely brief gift of consciousness.
ZS: See, for a lot of writers even the phrase “brief gift of consciousness” is enough to send them into a fit, and I’m one of them. As a breed, we tend to harbor quite severe death fears.
— Zadie Smith Interviews Ian McEwan, The Believer, 2005
"Need-love says of a woman, ‘I cannot live without her’; Gift-love longs to give her happiness, comfort, protection…appreciative love gazes and holds its breath and is silent, rejoices that such a wonder should exist even if not for him, will not be wholly dejected by losing her, would rather have it so than never to have seen her at all."
"To build, calculate, investigate, create; to see, hear, say, and cultivate; to think; all are ways men and women involve themselves with beings as a whole… The question of being is not bloodless after all, but vital. For what? For the recovery of the chance to ask what is happening with man on this earth the world over, not in terms of headlines but of less frantic and more frightful disclosures. For maintenance of the critical spirit that can say No and act No (as Nietzsche says) without puncturing the delicate membrane of its Yes."
"Obviously the bigger the budget, the more people this thing is going to have to appeal to—the more homogenized it’s got to be, the more simplified it’s got to be. So things like cultural specificity and narrative complexity, and, god forbid, ambiguity [laughter], those become real obstacles to the success of the film here and abroad."
~ Steven Soderbergh at SFIFF on the state of film and cinema. So smart, clear, and frustrating— but inspiring to hear a contemporary filmmaker so in tune with aesthetic thought.
Photograph of Helen Frankenthaler, 1969
This is what I like: someone is clearly standing in front of Frankenthaler with a camera, and yet I don’t see her caught up in that. What I see is the depth of how occupied she is. This is one of the chief gifts of artistic pursuits, that delicious grave quality of engagement that lifts us up out of ourselves and into the work.
(Source: artistandstudio)
about
seattle writer/student, re: film, narratives, art. editor-in-chief of SPU's art/lit journal, Lingua (www.thelinguajournal.com). former web intern for (and huge fan of) IMAGE journal.
on twitter
at Filmwell
there are some more things I have written here.
I study aesthetics and narrative at seattle pacific university.
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