An online commonplace book
“My assistant porter Fritz and I will be serving a small complimentary Christmas brunch, including chocolate flavored hot beverage with whipped topping, in the cafeteria section at the rear of the coach starting in twenty minutes.”
conductor Ralph
Sometimes short films are best. Wes Anderson’s Christmas Movie “Come Together” is short film perfection. It even has a Wikipedia page!
It’s still Christmas people!
Savor!
Savor!
Learn to overcome your fears and shepherd your project to completion, no matter what. It’s the essential moments of struggle over the decades that I have learnt from and which have brought me to this point. When I think back to my earliest years in this business, I see I am nothing today but a product of my defeats. When I was burnt I learnt about heat, and when I was belittled I learnt about power structures. Instead of going to film school, for me it became a process of trial and error, and for the first few years it was mostly error.
Werner Herzog
Applicable everywhere. Building toward the new year.
Also, Merry Christmas.
Cronin, Paul. Werner Herzog – A Guide for the Perplexed. London: Faber & Faber, 2020. pg244
The best way forward with AI is empirical and pragmatic: develop and test models, observe what happens, and learn as we go.
That from his paper Compounding Intelligence: Adapting to the AI Revolution
Cohn-Bendit on TV. Intelligent, cunning, devious, has the memory of everything he has ever read; impertinent; good, rapid speaker; wraps up his opponents ( a trio of middle-aged newsmen). He has the ruthlessness of someone unable to put himself in another’s place.
– Mavis Gallant
How does Mavis get away with writing sentences like this? Describing so much with so few words. Incomplete sentences my elementary school teachers would say.
Read a few pages of the Paris Notebook and you’ll realize where the inspiration for the French Dispatch came from. Not only the Lucinda Krementz part. The entire film!
Even the typeface at the top of the pages and chapter beginnings will look familiar.
Gallant, Mavis. Paris Notebooks: Essays & Reviews. United States, David R. Godine Publisher, 2023. p. 19
“I encourage myself, since nobody else encourages me,”
– Werner Herzog
But how?
On every page lives a gem.
Cronin, Paul. Werner Herzog – A Guide for the Perplexed. London: Faber & Faber, 2020. p. xxiv
“Number 26 is a very intelligent player,” says Werner. “Who is he?” This is not a question I am able to answer, so Werner turns to the portly, slightly inebriated gentleman and his mates standing next to us, and asks again. “That’s Joe Cole,” we are told. “One of the best there is. Only eighteen years old.” “Yes,” says Werner. “He really knows how to use the space around him, even when he doesn’t have the ball. He’ll be playing for England soon.”
Werner Herzog scouting a young Joe Cole. A West Ham Joe Cole.
Herzog’s prediction came true.
I’m afraid this site is becoming a Werner Herzog commonplace book.
Cronin, Paul. Werner Herzog – A Guide for the Perplexed. London: Faber & Faber, 2020. ppxiv
“Good grief the bodies are piling up.”
“Good grief the bodies are piling up..” Hayao Miyazaki and the Heron. Directed by Kaku Arakawa, NHK, 2024.
(*translated from Japanese)
Best movie, documentary or otherwise I’ve watched this year. It lingers in the mind after each viewing.
There’s a Dante reference.
Miyazaki works at the same type of desk as the rest of his team.
COVID-19 is brisked over – Miyazaki kept working.
The field they keep next to the studio is for the neighborhood kids. It has an abandoned soccer goal on one end. At one point the grass finally grows in and Miyazaki overhears a group of kids playing sandlot baseball.
Realizing a dream doesn’t make the suffering go away. Miyazaki suffers over thousands of binned sketches.
The longer you live the more you experience the death of friends and colleagues.
This is inescapable.
What was it about May ’68 that made you choose that time as the context of the second story? Is it a product of all the time you’ve spent in Paris? Is there a personal connection?
Mavis Gallant. That was the inspiration. Her experience of May ’68 as a foreigner in Montparnasse: that especially engaged me. Our apartment in Paris is less than a block from where she lived, and I love her descriptions of the neighborhood. I love her voice and her analysis in general: clear, sharp, sometimes even bluntly judgemental – but with deep feeling and understanding. She listens, and her opinions are her own. She sees the young people not how they see themselves, not how their parents see them. She is amused, annoyed, rolls her eyes, and really does love and admire them.
Mavis Gallant was Wes Anderson’s inspiration for Lucinda Krementz in the French Dispatch. Will report back.
Anderson, Wes. The French Dispatch. United Kingdom, Faber & Faber, 2021. pg viii
I would rather read the 1545 Bible translation of Martin Luther than any of the German Romantics, and who can walk past Joseph Conrad’s short stories or Hemingway’s first forty-nine stories — especially “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” — without experiencing something phenomenal?
– Werner Herzog
Cronin, Paul. Werner Herzog – A Guide for the Perplexed. London: Faber & Faber, 2020. pp144
If I were caught on a desert island, without a doubt I would want all twenty volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary to keep me company. Such an incredible achievement of human ingenuity, one of the greatest cultural monuments the human race has created. Thousands of scholars have contributed to it over one hundred and fifty years.
– Werner Herzog
Werner’s birthday was this week. Reference books are underrated.
Cronin, Paul. Werner Herzog – A Guide for the Perplexed. London: Faber & Faber, 2020. pp144
Floodlights and Goalposts 
