Ecstatic Truths and Alternative Facts
Jim Jarmusch joined us on this day in 1953. I don't like that he turns 70 years old today! That's the age that Stanley Kubrick died in his sleep.
"Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from - it’s where you take them to."
Fun fact- He's the son of David Lynch and Anthony Jeselnik.
Quite a day for director birthdays, DW Griffith and Sergei Eisenstein also joined us on this day, in 1875 and 1898 respectively. The three of them all made it to Akira Kurosawa's top 100 list of favorite films.
When asked about films that have affected his directing style he mentioned ones by Tarkovsky, Bresson, and Dreyer. Heavy hitters!
Jim Jarmusch on embracing imperfections of weavers of the Navajo and Zuni Native American tribes:
“When they make a blanket and it has a repeated pattern that is totally symmetrical, they reject it and say it has no magic. If there’s something that somehow fucks up the symmetry in some small way, then it has a little opening for something magical.”
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Tom Waits- “Jim Jarmusch once told me Fast, Cheap, and Good… pick two. If it’s fast and cheap it won’t be good. If it’s cheap and good it won’t be fast. If it’s fast and good it wont be cheap. Fast, cheap and good… pick two words to live by."
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Philosopher Francis Bacon joined us too on this day in 1561.
"There is no exquisite beauty… without some strangeness in the proportion."
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First and second generation immigrants from countries the president hates should quit their jobs at Trump properties. We'll do a GoFundMe, and if one in a hundred of us donate $20 they can all retire happily.
January 22, 2018
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Paraphrasing Trump, "My first inauguration beat Obama's second inauguration in viewership."
-Such a petty focus.
-Until the end of time, every first inauguration will beat every second inauguration which is little more than a formality.
-The story is not the comparison, it's the fact that it's a manufactured story to try to steal focus from the marches.
-It's also meant to deflect focus from the fact that just yesterday they stated contrary to our own eyes that it was the biggest inauguration crowd in history.
These lies and deflections are meant to confuse our reasonable selves from the plain facts that:
-Trump is an extraordinarily unpopular incoming president.
-His big lie is that he's for the little guy while packing his cabinet with establishment billionaires.
-A majority is opposed to his stated and implied policies.
His undoing is that his actions intended to deflect actually highlight the fact that he intends to be an authoritarian bully, and as long as enough people can continue to see that, and resist it, we'll be alright.
January 22, 2017
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Just crossed my mind that they will attempt to explain away alternative facts with... yep, more alternative facts.
January 22, 2017
Postscript- It took me a week to figure that out???
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KellyAnne Conway can go to alternative heaven.
January 22, 2017
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Bernie Sanders- "It would be funny if it wasn't so absurd. Trump, the billionaire president, surrounded in his inaugural by billionaire campaign contributors and billionaire cabinet nominees, tells the country that he is the anti-establishment president. If the billionaire class is anti-establishment, who the hell is the establishment?"
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Gretel was woken up last night by a nightmare... apparently a shark was trying to eat her and her friends, and it was doing a Nazi salute. I didn't know I could pass on neuroses through DNA. I've consciously tried to steer her from being afraid of sharks, and I've only brought up the Nazis a small handful of times. We don't need a reincarnation of Freud to explain the symbolism though, now do we?
January 22, 2017
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I learned today that speaking to two people named Yael in one day is equally likely as seeing an albino Grimace.
January 22, 2016
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When I left this morning it was one degree outside and when I got to work it was two degrees, but it certainly doesn't feel twice as warm!
January 22, 2014
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The New York City "Mad Bomber", George P. Metesky, was arrested in Waterbury, Connecticut on this day in 1957, charged with planting more than 30 bombs.
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The Supreme Court delivered its decision in Roe v. Wade, legalizing elective abortion in all fifty states on this day in 1973.
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John Donne joined us on this day in 1573.
"To know and feel all this and not have the words to express it makes a human a grave of his own thoughts."
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Lord Byron join us on this day in 1788. James Byron Dean was named after him, by his mother.
"Those who will not reason, are bigots, those who cannot, are fools, and those who dare not, are slaves."
Two truth-seekers.
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Piper Laurie joined us on this day in 1932. Here she is before she had Carrie.
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On this day in 1961, Daniel Johnston joined us. I'm not sure if true love found him in the end.
https://youtu.be/Ma7lyfYzIw8
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Diane Lane joined us on this day in 1965.
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Phillies catcher, Carlos Ruiz, joined us on this day in 1979- member of the 2008 World champion ship team, he also caught Roy Halladay's perfect game, a postseason no-hitter from Halladay, and Hamels' no-hitter. An anchor of the team for many years, through division championships.
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Other notable birthdays- Sam Cooke (1931), Malcolm McLaren (1946), Olivia d'Abo (1969), Phil Wang (1990)
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Lord James Bryce left us on this day in 1922. He wouldn't say British ambassador to the United States. Ken Burns has used this quote in The West, National Parks, and The American Buffalo.
"Gentlemen, why in heaven's name this haste? You have time enough. [...] Ages and ages lie before you. Why sacrifice the present to the future, fancying that you will be happier when your fields teem with wealth and your cities with people? In Europe we have cities wealthier and more populous than yours, and we are not happy. You dream of your posterity; but your posterity will look back to yours as the golden age, and envy those who first burst into this silent, splendid nature, who first lifted up their axes upon these tall trees, and lined these waters with busy wharves. Why, then, seek to complete in a few decades what the other nations of the world took thousands of years over in the older continents? [...] Why, in your hurry to subdue and utilize nature, squander her splendid gifts? [...] Why hasten the advent of that threatening day when the vacant spaces of the continent shall all have been filled, and the poverty or discontent of the older States shall find no outlet? You have opportunities such as mankind has never had before, and may never have again. Your work is great and noble; it is done for a future longer and vaster than our conceptions can embrace. Why not make its outlines and beginnings worthy of these destinies, the thought of which gilds your hopes and elevates your purposes?"
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30th Treasurer of Pennsylvania, Budd Dwyer, shot himself in the head on camera on this day in 1987. That gave me nightmares for years!
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Heath Ledger left us on this day in 2008. I don't know what it is, but this scene has profound visceral effect on me. I swear that I'm there.
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Hank Aaron left us on this day in 2021.
"I looked for the same pitch my whole career, a breaking ball. All of the time. I never worried about the fastball. They couldn't throw it past me, none of them."
Curt Simmons- "Trying to throw a fastball by Henry Aaron is like trying to sneak a sunrise past a rooster."
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Vietnamese Thiền Buddhist monk and peace activist, Thích Nhất Hạnh, left us on this day in 2022.
"To live, we must die every instant. We must perish again and again in the storms that make life possible."
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Other notable deathdays- Ann Miller (2004), Jean Simmons (2010), Ursula K. Le Guin (2018)
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The Beastie Boys- Fight For Your Right Revisited. Best short film ever???
https://youtu.be/evA-R9OS-Vo
January 22, 2011
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NPR- Stonewall? Explaining Obama's Historic Gay-Rights Reference
Shocked me that he said it...
http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsallpolitics/2013/01/22/169984209/stonewall-explaining-obamas-historic-gay-rights-reference
January 22, 2013
Postscript- How about that, 10 years ago it was shocking that a president brought up Stonewall!
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Jim Jarmsuch, 63 today??? That can't be right. Ice cream, you scream, we all scream, for ice cream.
https://youtu.be/a_LMI0mPFMY
January 22, 2016
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New York Magazine- An Exhaustive List of the Allegations Women Have Made Against Donald Trump
Accusations, not convictions... but if someone is willing to give him a chance with the country, I think they should be willing to give him a chance with their daughter.
http://nymag.com/thecut/2016/10/all-the-women-accusing-trump-of-rape-sexual-assault.html
January 22, 2017
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NPR- Fact Check: Science And The Trump Administration
Science literacy is beyond whether we agree or disagree with an issue- it's fundamental to whether or not we understand the issue to which they are agreeing or disagreeing.
http://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2017/01/22/510384513/fact-check-science-and-the-trump-administration
January 22, 2017
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Washington Post- Donald Trump has assembled the worst Cabinet in American history
Brief summaries of each awful pick. Best people you could find, huh?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2017/01/19/donald-trump-has-assembled-the-worst-cabinet-in-american-history/
January 22, 2017
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New York Times Opinion- Let Us All Now Weep for Donald Trump
From the article:
"He’s always right and yet always wronged. He demands that we marvel at his invincibility even as we tremble at his degradation. He can vanquish any enemy — and his enemies are legion! — but look at how he’s pushed around. Trump takes a textbook oxymoron and gives it presidential form. Behold, at the Resolute Desk, a jumbo shrimp."
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/21/opinion/donald-trump.html
January 22, 2020
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For a long time I've marveled at the fact that we still have people among us like Hank Aaron and Willie Mays. They are testaments to how narrowly removed we are from some awful policies in the past. It's like Ken Burns says, one of the greatest baseball players... also among the greatest American heroes.
Well Hank Aaron is gone, but give me a break, he still has the home run record.
https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/unum/playlist/baseball#hank-aaron
January 22, 2021
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New York Times- An Atheist Chaplain and a Death Row Inmate’s Final Hours
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/21/us/an-atheist-chaplain-and-a-death-row-inmates-final-hours.html
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Marx Brothers, 1915.
Jerry Seinfeld- "Do you know how the Marx Brothers got started? They were a singing group and they were traveling around the country and the father got deathly ill, and the mother had to leave them alone. When she came back three weeks later the monkeys were out of the cage and there was no getting them back in. They had asked themselves, "What if we just screw around?"
He must be right. They look like they just want to screw around!
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Bacon again- "Man prefers to believe what he prefers to be true."
As I've said, we pick the things we wish were true and then pretend they are.
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Sam Harris- "If someone doesn't value evidence, what evidence are you going to provide to prove that they should value it?"
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Timothy Leary said that hallucination is to reality what a microscope is to biology
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Hitchens- "Public opinion is often wrong, mob opinion is almost always wrong, and religious opinion is wrong by definition."
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Muhammad Ali- "Silence is golden when you can't think of a good answer."
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George Burns- "Sex at age 90 is like trying to shoot pool with a rope."
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The endlessly prescient Max Planck- "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."
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Asimov- "Once, when a religionist denounced me in unmeasured terms, I sent him a card saying, "I am sure you believe that I will go to hell when I die, and that once there I will suffer all the pains and tortures the sadistic ingenuity of your deity can devise and that this torture will continue forever. Isn't that enough for you? Do you have to call me bad names in addition?"
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Hawking- "I regard the afterlife to be a fairy story for people that are afraid of the dark."
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Camus- "The most important thing you do everyday you live is deciding not to kill yourself."
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Orwell- "Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, 'he that is not with me is against me'."
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Dave Attell:
I watch the Discovery Channel, and you know what I discovered–I need a girlfriend. ‘Cause that Discovery Channel is the most boring shit I’ve ever seen in my life, and the more of it you watch, the less chance you ever have of meeting a woman, cause it fills your head full of odd facts that come out at any moment like Tourette’s Syndrome. I’m talking to a girl: “hi, how ya doin’. Did you know Hitler was ticklish? Much like the sea otter. Where are you going? Come back!”
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