Live and learn how to make films. I didn’t go to film school. I just watched movies in the cinemas. And probably my greater education was actually making films, so that’s all I would ever say: watch movies, get a camera, make a movie. And if you do it enough times, eventually you start learning how films are made.
Painting. I warned you that I was all “painting talk” from here on in. So, I guess I would kill the dinosaur of Post-Modernism. I would expose the lazy “cult of genius” for the naked emperor it is. I am tired of young art students getting into the crap-ass school of their choice and getting all hopped up on figurative painting, then getting the smack-down from their bitter teacher who leaned to paint during the Sixties when craftsmanship was a dirty word. The student is “reminded” that figurative painting is dead, and the hundred-year-old path of Modernism is where it’s at. The poor student looks up to this antiquated jackass in his rumpled, pleated, khaki clown-suit and actually believes his rhetoric. The student also learns that it is a s***load easier to be considered a genius when you have work that functions as a smokescreen for your incompetence. Look, if you chuck poo-poo at a piece of cardboard and call it “The Throws of Man’s Discontent,” you could be considered a genius pretty fast. But if you have to learn how to paint flesh… man, that could take years (if it ever happens). Who has time for that? You see what I mean about painting making me angry? I get way too into this crap. Anyway, I would change the way the “industry” looks at figurative painting.
Source: tv.ign.com
There are a thousand ways that you can eviscerate a movie, but as soon as you say that it’s a threat to public morals my Geiger counter starts clicking.
Source: somecamerunning.typepad.com
What would you do if you were a rich person and decided to do the right thing with your riches? I’m filtering that corporate approach through Batman to see what we get.
Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.
Source: nancylicious
I’ve described myself as a militant atheist for the last twenty years! I think it’s a reaction. I think a lot of us were naïve and thought that religion would quietly slip away, embarrassed and mumbling, saying “Sorry I got it so wrong guys”. Instead it’s come back and said, “We were right all along.” Well no you bloody weren’t! The world works in a certain way, and the way you find out about it is you do science, you do experiments, and you use reason, that is how you find out how the world and the universe works.
Religion just doesn’t do that, it’s a set of hypotheses arrived at by very primitive people two thousand years ago, and it’s not fit for purpose, it doesn’t describe reality, it’s that simple. You can believe whatever you want to believe, but when you start basically saying that reality isn’t reality, when you start saying this nonsense about the world is only six thousand years old, when you have this absolute refusal to meet with reality, we can’t just say, “You’re entitled to your view.” No you’re not! You’re not entitled to put that view across as being just as good as science, because we can prove that science works.
Iain M. Banks, interviewed in Wired.
(Update: I came across this interview quite late last night, and wanted to add something. The reason I like Banks’ work is the way he engages and plays with ideas. His treatment of religion isn’t just one-note dismissal, he’s genuinely interested in the impulses that drive people towards religious belief, and of the societal effects that religious organisations have. Working in science fiction allows him to conduct thought experiments and interrogate the basic precepts of belief, in ways that range from large-scale philosophical/thematic underpinnings of his stories, to dark little bits of satire.)
Jim Jarmusch (via).
For his part, Butler’s never been one of those indie purists who believes that big-time success comes hand in hand with a fundamental loss of integrity, anyway. “When I was growing up in the suburbs, I was able to hear and be moved by bands like REM and U2 and Radiohead, which wouldn’t have happened unless they had a certain level of distribution,” he says. “I mean, I got The Bends because the video was on MTV, not because I was some cool person who knew about something. So I don’t take it lightly that we have the opportunity to actually reach people.
I found that if you can write to a suitable cadence, the audience would be very giving even if the poem itself wasn’t actually saying anything. Later I realized that it might be a good idea to use the same rhythmic technique but with actual material with importance or relevance, and this didn’t just apply to spoken word. When the reader is engaged with a printed text, they are creating a rhythm in their heads, if there is a rhythm there. So all of my stuff has paid probably too much attention to the actual rhythm of the words.
