“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
Category: cinema
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“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
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“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.
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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
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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
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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
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Write early in the morning, cultivate memory, reread core books, take detailed reading notes, work on several projects at once, maintain a thick archive, rotate crops, take a weekly Sabbath, go to bed at the same time, exercise so hard you can’t think during it, talk to different kinds of people including the very young and very old, take words and their histories seriously (i.e., read dictionaries), step outside of the empire of the English language regularly, look for vocabulary from other fields, love the basic, keep your antennae tuned, and seek out contexts of understanding quickly (i.e., use guides, encyclopedias, and Wikipedia without guilt).”
I’d add Claude 3.5 Sonnet and Perplexity.ai to without guilt list.
H/T Austin Kleon
Hanrahan, Brían. “The Anthropoid Condition: An Interview with John Durham Peters.” Los Angeles Review of Books, July 10, 2015. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-anthropoid-condition-an-interview-with-john-durham-peters/.
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Lucas took it all in, reading books and comics, watching movies, filing away the bits and pieces he liked, discarding what he didn’t. “I researched kids’ movies and how they work and how myths work,” Lucas said, “and I looked very carefully at the elements of films within that fairy tale genre which made them successful. I found that myth always took place over the hill, in some exotic, far off land. For the Greeks, it was Ulysses going off into the unknown. For America it was out West. . . . The last place left ‘over the hill’ is space.”
May the Fourth be with you.
Jones, Brian Jay. George Lucas: A Life. United States, Little, Brown, 2016. pp179
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It was a week before the solstice when Little Helmut finally realized he was being hunted by a polar bear.
I loathe marketing, but this commercial. Damn it.
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He has indeed made many different kinds of lines. An art historian could put together a chronology of his career just in terms of the multiplicity of diverse lines that he has produced. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, for example, there were the ultra-thin marks made by a kind of pen called a Rapidograph, with which he created drawings modelled with line alone — no shadows. Then, quite different, the works in coloured crayon and pencil of the early 1970s; the chunkier reed-pen strokes of portraits from the end of the decade, such as the poignant one of his mother done just after his father died in February 1979 ( not 1978, the date inscribed on the drawing); the later ones drawn with a brush, including watercolours from 2003; the extraordinary charcoal landscapes of the Arrival of Spring 2013; and on and on.
– Martin GayfordA
careerlife in lines sounds like a good one to aspire to.Gayford, Martin, and Hockney, David. Spring Cannot Be Cancelled: David Hockney in Normandy. United Kingdom, Thames & Hudson, 2021. pp83
Floodlights and Goalposts 
