How does it feel to be you?

Just think now: How much do you weigh? This is a thing I like to do with myself when I get lost and I get feeling funny. How much do you weigh? Think about how much each person here weighs and try to feel that weight in your seat right now, in your bottom right now. Parts in your feet and parts in your bum. Just try to feel your own weight, in your own seat, in your own feet. Okay? So if you can feel that weight in your body, if you can come back into the most personal identification, a very personal identification, which is: I am. This is me now. Here I am, right now. This is me now. Then you don't feel like you have to leave, and be over there, or look over there. You don't feel like you have to rush off and be somewhere. There's just a wonderful sense of well-being that begins to circulate up and down, from your top to your bottom. Up and down from your top to your spine. And you feel something that makes you almost want to smile, that makes you want to feel good, that makes you want to feel like you could embrace yourself.

So, what's it like to be me? You can ask yourself, "What's it like to be me?" You know, the only way we'll ever know what it's like to be you is if you work your best at being you as often as you can, and keep reminding yourself: That's where home is.


Bill Murray (via)

rediscovering Bjork

I go for a lot of walks and I sing. That's when you find an angle on things, where it makes sense for that particular moment. It's more that feeling. In a way, I also rediscovered music, because it's so miraculous what it can do to you; when you are in a really fucked situation, it's the only thing that can save you. Nothing else will. And it does, it really does.

via THE INVISIBLE WOMAN: A CONVERSATION WITH BJÖRK

it's tough

I want to support young girls who are in their 20s now and tell them: You're not just imagining things. It's tough. Everything that a guy says once, you have to say five times.

via The Invisible Woman: A Conversation with Björk

what kind of knowledge can art give us?

Art gives us the knowledge that many have gone before, and had the same strange feelings and the same unanswerable questions, and that we are not alone in the art-endeavor, let alone life. It gives us the knowledge that people have always been stupid and violent and cruel, and compassionate and confused and curious and wondrous and astonished and tired. What it does not give us is answers. It gives us instead a picture. It does not ask that we analyze the picture, but that we stand before it and look, in the hope that looking might turn into gazing. For gazing will hold our attention for a very long time.

Mary Ruefle (interview)

accurate

Your voice sounds completely different in different languages. It alters your personality somehow. I don't think people get the same feeling from you. The rhythm changes. Because the rhythm of the language is different, it changes your inner rhythm and that changes how you process everything.

When I hear myself speak French, I look at myself differently. Certain aspects will feel closer to the way I feel or the way I am and others won't. I like that—to tour different sides of yourself. I often find when looking at people who are comfortable in many languages, they're more comfortable talking about emotional stuff in a certain language or political stuff in another and that's really interesting, how people relate to those languages.



François Arnaud (via interview magazine)

I would like to make my films about disappearing

This subject is important to me because society changes so fast and everything disappears so fast - historical sites, culture. (...) People in their forties have no way of finding traces of their childhood. Modern people are afraid of disappearance. Living in Taipei, for example, we constantly have to deal with compelling visual change. We ask the question: what do you love the most? Who do you love the most? You will lose them - it will happen in modern society. My films ask the question: how we can face the disappearance? The loss?


Tsai Ming-Liang (via)

Deep memory is a polyphony of voices

(...) everything you read might end up in your work whether you're aware of it or not. At the same time the reader brings their own readings into the reading of a new work and might identify echoes the writer never interacted directly with. When you read an author, let's say author X, you might be reading so many other authors indirectly, and all these authors were in turn reading other authors that you as a reader might too have read. So, you, as a reader, find these echoes there that perhaps author X never intended. It's all really promiscuous and confusing; an orgy of voices making up a unique voice. Reading might be one of the most promiscuous activities as you get to be intimate with all these voices replayed in your head with your own voice.


Susana Medina (via debunking the anxiety of influence)

creative women are putting forth more complicated versions of femininity

The bigger the stretch or the farther away it is from you, the most pleasure you get in the attempt to reach for it and get yourself around it. I never want to do something that I've done before, and I never want to do something that I feel comfortable with...you can find the things that feel like a stretch for you and then push it even further...it's exciting that more women are writing because I think we're desperate to understand ourselves, and I think men want to understand their wives and their girlfriends and daughters and sisters better. I think these movies are starting to show something. Creative women are putting forth more complicated versions of femininity.


Brit Marling (via BlackBook)

i'm quite normal until i go mad

Did you study poetry at all?

Hell no, I detest most poetry. Ancient, modern. I can’t read it, I can’t stomach it. I just stay away from all academic training. I try to stay away from poets. And short story writers. And novelists. I’d rather get drunk with a plumber. Or even a cop.


More Sublime, Charles Bukowski (via Beautiful Voices Project)

the ugliness completes reality

We all think a thousand thoughts every day that aren't our own, live out narratives not of our own invention, inhabit bodies preloaded with behaviors not of our choosing. Those bodies depend upon social and economic structures possessed of a psychology to which we either submit or suffer the life of an invalid. That's all pretty banal, boilerplate I'm-a-modern-human stuff, but its banality doesn't alleviate its problemness.

That said, I find the prospect of being alive, of having a life, cripplingly beautiful. The girl who bagged my groceries tonight at the Hy-Vee had a face that arrested me for a full second, long enough to provide the sufficient beauty for a great deal more suffering at my own hands or by the grip of history. I'm not indignant. I'm a little in love with how fucked up and strange everything is e.g., America, the Hy-Vee, its plastic bags swirling in the great Pacific garbage vortex. The ugliness completes reality, makes it worthy of love.

I think it's my nature to reject any prescriptions to tidy it up. I'm repulsed, on some level, by preciousness, by ploys to anesthetize the experience of life via beauties that aren't also very cruel. I guess the book was a love letter to experience, a thank you for not taking it easy on me.


Dylan Nice numa entrevista à Bookslut

It's not the job of films to nurse people.

With what's happening in the chemistry of love, I don't want to be a nurse or a doctor, I just want to be an observer. I do believe that this kind of love exists and has nothing to do with taboo*. I don't think cinema is there to victimize or accuse people. Cinema has another aim.

from Spectacularly intimate: an interview with Claire Denis

*sobre o tema incesto

you have to make films from the perspective of the weak

Do you believe that movies are still an effective way to inform young people?

I'm not talking about education. What I'm after is telling the truth. Movies are entertainment, but that doesn't stop us from telling the truth through them. In Harada's film you get Beethoven on the soundtrack and Koji Yakusho as the chief of police. It's a hymn to the cops, but it was those same cops that pushed those kids to go as far as they did. If it's a profit you're after, there are other ways to make money than by making films. Me, I try to at least remain truthful when I make my films. Also, a true filmmaker doesn't make films from the point of view of those in power. To me, that's a fundamental rule: you have to make films from the perspective of the weak. Take Akira Kurosawa, for instance. His films were always about the downtrodden.

entrevista a Koji Wakamatsu (via Mignight Eye)

o realizador japonês faleceu hoje, 5 dias após ter sido atropelado por um taxi em Tokyo.