One more quote from Errol Morris

"If everything was planned, it would be dreadful. If everything was unplanned, it would be equally dreadful. Cinema exists because there are elements of both in everything. There are elements of both in documentary. There are elements of both in feature filmmaking. It's what makes, I think, photography and filmmaking of interest. Despite all of our efforts to control something, the world is much, much more powerful than us, and more deranged even than us."

If Othello had been in Hamlet's place

Errol Morris, in conversation with Werner Herzog, talking (at first) about a serial killer:

"That's the way Werner described him at the time. An elephant with the soul of Mozart. I'm not sure that most of the prison authorities would have described him in the same way, but at the time I found Werner's description very interesting. I thought for a long time about it. It made it situational, as if God in his infinite perversity had somehow mismatched Kemper's various attributes in order to produce some kind of nightmare, some kind of tragedy. I remember thinking, Yeah, if Othello had been in Hamlet's place, and vice versa, there would be no tragedy."

Studying semiotics at Brown

I think this is something I would like to do.

List of people who studied semiotics at Brown:
Ira Glass
Jeffrey Eugenides
Todd Haynes
Christine Vachon
Rick Moody
Steven Johnson

I also love the fact that when Steven Johnson graduated and began writing, it sounded as though he had just translated his own text from French.

Wind Cathedral

Holy cow!

Joo Youn Paek

Pillowig lets you nap on the go! It was tested on subways, airplanes, laundromats, and libraries.

Besides the Pillowig, I particularly like the the Polite Umbrella.

Pretty wine bottles

The Second Bakery Attack

Whenever my wife expressed such an opinion (or thesis) back then, it reverberated in my ears with the authority of a revelation. Maybe that's what happens with newlyweds, I don't know. But when she said this to me, I began to think that this was a special hunger, not one that could be satisfied through the mere expedient of taking it to an all-night restaurant on the highway.

A special kind of hunger. And what might that be?

I can present it here in the form of a cinematic image.

One, I am in a little boat, floating on a quiet sea. Two, I look down, and in the water, I see the peak of a volcano thrusting up from the ocean floor. Three, the peak seems pretty close to the water's surface, but just how close I cannot tell. Four, this is because the hypertransparency of the water interferes with the perception of distance.

From "The Second Bakery Attack" by Haruki Murakami

Themes

The first episode of the Showtime TV adaptation of This American Life focuses on the theme of reality checks. It's pretty incredible. You can get more info here. What an interesting theme.

The book Banvard's Folly deals with failure and flawed genius. This is another theme I gravitate toward - for example, the Glass family and Wes Anderson's films, including the one inspired by the Glass family. A review of the book calls John Banvard's life "the most perfect crystallization of loss imaginable." At least Wes Anderson's films provide some hope of redemption.

I like making connections between otherwise unrelated stories and people to greater themes like the two examples above. I also like it when those connections are organized and articulated clearly. Maybe that's why I love Lawrence Weschler's Convergences and the beginning of Magnolia so much. Please recommend similar things.

Pere Formiguera

This work is titled "Father."

Secret Fauna

Please follow the link. I love this. One person wrote that this exhibit "calls into question the nature of truth and the infallibility of scientific reason." It basically deals with perception and mystery.

The intro to the Joan Fontcuberta book Twilight Zones states that "Reality changes... Art and science are two ways of approximating to reality. In both cases, one starts from the same occupation: reality, or one or other of its parts, is infinite in register and the mind can only transmit finite objects. To know is to deal with the anxiety of not knowing by reducing the infinite to something finite."