Infinite Jest

In another Variety Actors on Actors video, Bryan Cranston and Jason Segel discuss the characters they play in their latest film's - Trumbo and The End of the Tour.

Cranston's movie is based on the prolific screenwriter Donald Trumbo who was one of many 'blacklisted' by Hollywood establishments through the 40's and 50's for being a communist. It's a compelling story told in a humorous and flamboyant way. I thought it would be hard to look at Cranston and not see Walter White, but Trumbo and White couldn't be more different and he plays them both so well.

Segel plays David Foster Wallace, an American author and professor of English and creative writing who is widely known for his novel Infinite Jest (need to read this). The film sees Rolling Stones writer David Lipsky (played by Jesse Eisenberg) dismayed to hear about the death of David Foster Wallace, it follows their intimate and insightful relationship before his death. Love Jesse Eisenberg & Jason Segel - so refreshing to see him in this role.

This clip is so worth the watch, two legends conversing. A conversation I'd like to have been a part of:

The Great Dictator

"I’m sorry, but I don’t want to be an emperor. That’s not my business. I don’t want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone - if possible - Jew, Gentile - black man - white. We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other’s happiness - not by each other’s misery. We don’t want to hate and despise one another. In this world there is room for everyone. And the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way. Greed has poisoned men’s souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical. Our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost. The aeroplane and the radio have brought us closer together. The very nature of these inventions cries out for the goodness in men - cries out for universal brotherhood - for the unity of us all. Even now my voice is reaching millions throughout the world - millions of despairing men, women, and little children - victims of a system that makes men torture and imprison innocent people.To those who can hear me, I say - do not despair. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed - the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish. .....Soldiers! don’t give yourselves to brutes - men who despise you - enslave you - who regiment your lives - tell you what to do - what to think and what to feel! Who drill you - diet you - treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder. Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men - machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts! You don’t hate! Only the unloved hate - the unloved and the unnatural! Soldiers! Don’t fight for slavery! Fight for liberty!In the 17th Chapter of St Luke it is written: “the Kingdom of God is within man” - not one man nor a group of men, but in all men! In you! You, the people have the power - the power to create machines. The power to create happiness! You, the people, have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure.Then - in the name of democracy - let us use that power - let us all unite. Let us fight for a new world - a decent world that will give men a chance to work - that will give youth a future and old age a security. By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power. But they lie! They do not fulfil that promise. They never will!Dictators free themselves but they enslave the people! Now let us fight to fulfil that promise! Let us fight to free the world - to do away with national barriers - to do away with greed, with hate and intolerance. Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men’s happiness. Soldiers! in the name of democracy, let us all unite!" - Charlie Chaplin, 'The Great Dictator'.

GURLPOWER

Bye bye Bowie

David Bowie has left this world today. We mourn, deflated - to think that one of our greats has been taken, far too early, by cancer. At least he was here and he did what he did. 

While the mortal him is no more, the spirit of Bowie lives on.

Some quotes to remember him with, courtesy of International Business Times:

"I really had a hunger to experience everything that life had to offer, from the opium den to whatever. And I think I have done just about everything that it's possible to do" – interview with The Telegraph

"I always had a repulsive need to be something more than human. I felt very puny as a human. I thought, "F**k that. I want to be a superhuman'"

"Fame, it's not your brain, it's just the flame / That burns your change to keep you insane" – Fame lyrics

"I'm not a prophet or a stone aged man, just a mortal with potential of a superman. I'm living on" – Quicksand lyrics

"We spent endless hours talking about fame, and what it's like not having a life of your own any more. How much you want to be known before you are, and then when you are, how much you want the reverse" – recalling his conversation with The Beatles singer John Lennon to Time Out

"I think fame itself is not a rewarding thing. The most you can say is that it gets you a seat in restaurants" – interview with Q magazine in 1990

"To not be modest about it, you'll find that with only a couple of exceptions, most of the musicians that I've worked with have done their best work by far with me" – interview with Livewire's One On One

"I don't know where I'm going from here, but I promise it won't be boring" – to his audience at New York's Madison Square Garden in 1998

"The truth is of course is that there is no journey. We are arriving and departing all at the same time"

Winter

“The English winter - ending in July to recommence in August” - Lord Byron


Finn and I still haven't quite adapted to the dark mornings.





Bolt and bar the shutter,
For the foul winds blow:
Our minds are at their best this night,
And I seem to know
That everything outside us is
Mad as the mist and snow.

Horace there by Homer stands,
Plato stands below,
And here is Tully's open page.
How many years ago
Were you and I unlettered lads
Mad as the mist and snow?

You ask what makes me sigh, old friend,
What makes me shudder so?
I shudder and I sigh to think
That even Cicero
And many-minded Homer were
Mad as the mist and snow.

- W B Yeats

Truthfully I love winter; crisp sunny mornings, frost on the grass that sends dogs crazy, open fires, an extra blanket on the bed, rosy cheeks and noses, Christmas. 

It's a beautiful thing to watch the seasons change in nature if you bother to stop and notice it.

Tony Benn, 1992

If we want world peace we need to replace this ancient culture of power and greed with love and compassion. Focus less on defense and destruction, focus more on enhancing life and personal growth. If we respond to evil powers with hatred and violence, it only diminishes our own humanity and fans the flames of evil. It's such a viscous cycle but the only way to change it is by starting inside yourself. There can't be any large scale revolution without that. We can't force this change of culture using violence or oppression, it doesn't work, as we have seen over and over again and as is discussed here: http://www.ronpaulinstitute.org/…/paris-you-don-t-want-to-…/ I don't know what the answer is either, I just know that violence only breeds violence, we must lead the way with compassion and tactic. "No martyr's cause has ever been stilled by his assassin's bullet."

Autumn dog life

All the pretty colours pre decomposition...

...and lots of poo to roll in.

What it Takes to be a Rebel in Modern Times

More of the same stuff from my last post.. Although more recent.

Capitalism: A Love Story

This was released in 2009 but I've only now seen it as it's just been uploaded to Netflix. Well worth a watch. More disturbing than any horror movie I've seen:

I fear Britain is growing more similar to this American government/corporation combination.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire

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Oppression

noun

1. the exercise of authority or power in a burdensome, cruel, or unjustmanner.

2. an act or instance of oppressing or subjecting to cruel or unjust impositions or restraints.

3. the state of being oppressed.
4. the feeling of being heavily burdened, mentally or physically, by troubles, adverse conditions, anxiety, etc.
------------------------------------------------------------------

Such a great book on the nature of oppression. It would do the world good if everyone read and absorbed this. It makes perfect sense.



A few quotes from the first chapter:

"The oppressed, having internalised the image of the oppressor and adopted his guidelines, are fearful of freedom. Freedom would require them to eject this image and replace it with autonomy and responsibility. Freedom is acquired by conquest, not by gift. It must be pursued constantly and responsibly. Freedom is not an ideal located outside of man; nor is it an idea which becomes myth. It is rather the indispensable condition for the quest for human completion."



"The oppressed suffer from the duality which has established itself in their innermost being. They discover that without freedom they cannot exist authentically. Yet, although they desire authentic existence, they fear it. They are at one and the same time themselves and the oppressor whose consciousness they have internalised. The conflict lies in the choice between being wholly themselves or being divided; between ejecting the oppressor within or not ejecting them; between human solidarity or alienation; between following prescriptions or having choices; between being spectators or actors; between acting or having the illusion of acting through the action of the oppressors between speaking out of being silent, castrated in their power to create and re-create, in their power to transform the world. This is the tragic dilemma of the oppressed which their education must take into account."



"To deny the importance of subjectivity in the process of transforming the world and history is naive and simplistic. It is to admit the impossible: a world without people. This objectivistic position if as ingenuous as that of subjectivism, which postulates people without a world. World and human beings do not exist apart from each other, they exist in constant interaction."

"Reality which becomes oppressive results in the contradistinction of men as oppressors and oppressed. The latter, whose task it is to struggle for their liberation together with those who show true solidarity, must acquire a critical awareness of oppression through the praxis of this struggle. One of the gravest obstacles to the achievement of liberation is that oppressive reality absorbs those within it and thereby acts to submerge human beings' consciousness. Functionally, oppression is domesticating. To no longer be prey to its force, one must emerge from it and turn upon it. This can be done only by means of the praxis: reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it."



"Any situation in which "A" objectively exploits "B" or hinders his and her pursuit of self-affirmation as a responsible person is one of oppression. Such a situation in itself constitutes violence, even when sweetened by false generosity, because it interferes with the individual's ontological and historical vocation to be more fully human. With the establishment of a relationship of oppression, violence has already begun. Never in history has violence been initiated by the oppressed. How could they be the initiators, if they themselves are the results of the violence? How could they be the sponsors of something whose objective inauguration called forth their existence as oppressed? There would be no oppressed has there been no prior situation of violence to establish their subjugation.

Violence is initiated by those who oppress, who exploit, who fail to recognize others as persons-not by those who are oppressed, exploited, and unrecognised. It is not the unloved who initiate disaffection, but those who cannot love because they love only themselves. It is not the helpless, subject to terror, who initiate the terror, but the violent, who with their power create the concrete situation which begets the "rejects of life." It is not the tyrannised who initiate hatred, but those who despise. It is not those whose humanity is denied them who negate humankind, but those who denied that humanity (thus negating their own as well). Force is used not by those who have become weak under the preponderance of the strong, but by the strong who have emasculated them.

For the oppressors, however, it is always the oppressed (whom they obviously never call "the oppressed" but - depending on whether they are fellow countrymen or not - "those people" or"the blind and envious masses" or "savages" or "natives" or "subversives") who are disaffected, who are "violent," "barbaric," "wicked," or "ferocious" when they react to the violence of the oppressors."



"Acts which prevent the restoration of the oppressive regime cannot be compared with those by which a few men and women deny the majority their right to be human.

However, the moment the new regime hardens into a dominating "bureaucracy" the humanist dimension of the struggle is lost and it is no longer possible to speak of liberation. Hence our insistence that the authentic solution of the oppressor-oppressed contradiction does not lie in a mere reversal of position, in moving from one pole to the other. Nor does it lie in the replacement of the former oppressors with new ones who continue to subjugate the oppressed - all in the name of their liberation.

But even when the contradiction is resolved authentically by a new situation established by the liberated labourers, the former oppressors do not feel liberated. On the contrary, they genuinely consider themselves to be oppressed. Conditioned by the experience of oppressing others, any situation other than their former seems to them like oppression. Formerly, they could eat, dress, wear shoes, be educated, travel, and hear Beethoven; while millions did not eat, had no clothes or shoes, neither studied nor traveled, much less listened to Beethoven. Any restriction on this way of life, in the name of the rights of the community, appears to the former oppressors profound violation of their individual rights - although they had no respect for the millions who suffered and died of hunger, pain, sorrow, and despair. For the oppressors, "human beings" refers only to themselves; other people are "things." For the oppressors, there exists only one right: their right to live in peace, over against the right, not always even recognised, but simply concerned, of the oppressed to survival. And they make this concession only because the existence of the oppressed is necessary to their own existence."



Every paragraph is worth quoting on here but I'll stop there..

Go buy the book, I had to read some bits a few times to understand it properly but it really is one of those books you could pick up and read front to back over and over, and everyone should.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Pedagogy-Oppressed-Penguin-Education-Freire/dp/014025403X

All photos found on Google images.