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No þinge is meriar þen Ihesu to synge. — Richard Rolle
Austin in the 1950s. I saw the premiere of Malick’s A Hidden Life at the Paramount in 2019. Congress looks a little different now.
Speaking of title sequences, here’s a post on Disney’s.
For anyone who has spent time at Penn Station — and, for my sins, I’ve spent a good bit of time there over the years — it’s always a shock to be reminded what it used to look like.
My friend Austin Kleon has four notebooks, but I have only three: a planner, a journal, and a movie notebook. Whenever I watch a movie I write some brief thoughts on it. I started this practice just a few years ago, and I am now getting to the end of my second notebook. I love looking back through what I’ve seen and how I have responded — especially when I re-watch films, which I often do.
Eno, 1995:
Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8bit — all these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided.
It’s the sound of failure: so much of modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.
The absolute definition of being “in the pocket” is Al McKay’s rhythm guitar on “That’s the Way of the World.”
Feel free to play Guess the Location of this old photo (taken by me) if you want.
The love of humanity is a thing supposed to be professed only by vulgar and officious philanthropists, or by saints of a superhuman detachment and universality. As a matter of fact, love of humanity is the commonest and most natural of the feelings of a fresh nature, and al...
“Artificial in- telligence”? “Machine learning”? I say: daikaiju.
I’ve said most of what I have to say about machine learning, and there are plenty of other people doing the heavy lifting on that topic. Mike Sacasas had a typically wise and incisive post the other day, and The New Atlantis is hosting a council on AI ethics. I’d prefer to make this site a cabinet of curiosities. And when I do comment on AI it will be in the form of haiku, or, as I prefer to style the word, haiku.
Marcin Wichary is absolutely correct: Paste And Match Style solves one problem whole creating others.
Austria v. Australia! HItler’s birthplace v. the country where he currently lives in peaceful retirement. ⚽️
Finished reading: Turner and Constable: Art, Life, Landscape by Nicola Moorby. A wonderful book, especially fine on how each painter was moved by rivers: Turner the great Thames, Constable the humble Stour. Now I’m desperate to get back to London to see their paintings again with fresh eyes. 📚
And here is another short film, shot two years later, featuring Dorothy L. Sayers and the cast of her wonderful play The Zeal of Thy House — take a look at the wings on those angels. (At the end there is footage from her far less successful play The Devil to Play.) I don’t know that there is any other film of Sayers and Eliot from that era.
Here is an amateur film from 1935, shot at Canterbury Cathedral, featuring T. S. Eliot and some of the cast of Murder in the Cathedral (including Robert Speight, who played Becket — and then later voiced Jesus in the original production of Sayers’s The Man Born to Be King).
One of the strangest figures of the first half of the 20th century was Charles Edward, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, who began his life as an English prince, the grandson of Queen Victoria, but as an adolescent was plucked from his life at Eton and transported to Germany wh...
This piece of mine is half-essay and half-homily.
John Ruskin, from The Crown of Wild Olive (1866):
All good architecture is the expression of national life and character; and it is produced by a prevalent and eager national taste, or desire for beauty. And I want you to think a little of the deep significance of this word 'taste;' for no statement of mine has been more earnestly or oftener controverted than that good taste is essentially a moral quality. ‘No,’ say many of my antagonists, ‘taste is one thing, morality is another. Tell us what is pretty; we shall be glad to know that; but preach no sermons to us.’
Permit me, therefore, to fortify this old dogma of mine somewhat. Taste is not only a part and an index of morality — it is the ONLY morality. The first, and last, and closest trial question to any living creature is, ‘What do you like?’ Tell me what you like, and I'll tell you what you are.
Pattern Recognition - Comment Magazine
Also from Sara, Pattern Recognition - Comment Magazine:
It can be hard to fully appreciate this kind of design for the astonishing, radical statement in its provision: that the babies of strangers carry the kind of dignity that is tantamount to those of close kin and tribe....
Sara Hendren:
If you don’t accept the optimized project rubric for having children, then you should think all the way through what an alternative rubric might be, and how it might shift the very foundations undergirding family-making, period. But most people short-circuit w...
You know, I’ve seen the Uffington White Horse and it doesn’t really look like this.
Resting after running.
