“Here I am in the 21 century/Have to say it ain’t as cool as I hoped it’d be” —Steve Earle. “21st Century Blues”

“culture always is a fog, in many ways it’s meant to be a fog machine.” —Raymond Durgnat

“critical judgment is a derelict appendage.”—Manny Farber

“Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us. In the end, writers will write not to be outlaw heroes of some underculture but mainly to save themselves, to survive as individuals.”—-Don DeLillo

Last 25 or so films I’ve watched (not in the MUBI database):

1. The Magician (1926)—dir. by Rex Ingram
2. Escape From Fort Bravo (1953)—dir. by John Sturges
3. The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond (1960)—Boetticher
4. Grace (2008)—dir. by Paul Solet
5. Cpt. Horatio Hornblower R.N.(1951)—dir. by Raoul Walsh
6. Chapter 27 (2007)—dir. by J.P. Schaefer
7. Sergeant Madden (1939)—dir. by Josef von Sternberg
8.
9.
10. Blackout (2008)—dir. by Rigoberto Castañeda
11. Bright Leaf (1950)—dir. by Michael Curtiz
12.
13.
14. Noise (2007)—dir. by Matthew Saville
15. Mystery Street (1950)—dir. by John Sturges
16. Avenging Trio (1989)—dir. by Gik-Laam Cheung
17. Doctor Bull (1933)—dir. by John Ford
18. The Crooked Way (1949)—dir. by Robert Florey (cinematography by John Alton)
19. Tigrero: A Film That Was Never Made (1994)—dir. by Mika Kaurismäki
20. The Horn Blows at Midnight (1945)—dir. by Raoul Walsh
21. Amu (2005)—dir. by Shonali Bose
22. Betrayed (1954)—dir. by Gottfried Reinhardt
23. Coogan’s Bluff (1968)—dir. by Don Siegel
24. The Passionate Plumber (1932)—dir. by Edward Sedgwick
25. Doughboys (1930)—dir. by Edward Sedgwick
26. Sidewalks of New York (1931)—dir. by Zion Myers and Jules White
27. Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson (2004)—dir. by Ken Burns
28. Invitation to Hell (1982)—dir. by Wes Craven
29. Tiger Cage (1988)—dir. by Yuen Woo-ping
30. Roaring Rails (1924)—dir. by Tom Forman
31. Ten Little Indians (1965)—dir. by George Pollock
32. Meanwhile (2011)—-dir. by Hal Hartley
33. Hearts of the West (1975)—-dir. by Howard Zieff

“I think one of the problems with my early criticism is that it assumes you’re supposed to be able to follow everything and then get this meaning of a scene. I don’t see how or why anyone should be expected to get the meaning of an event in a movie or a painting. That’s a place where criticism goes wrong: it keeps trying for the complete solution. I think the point of criticism is to build up the mystery. And the point is to find movies which have a lot of puzzle in them, a lot of questions.” —Manny Farber

“Theoreticians, like cineastes, base a part of their meditation (written or filmed) on two common premises which Lindsay argued at the edge of cinema theory: the idea that film, because it does not imitate a referent but allows it to come forth from the real, can eventually provide the world; and the corollary that an image is not a plastic phantom but a dynamic principle endowed with powers that demand to be deployed and reflected. From that spring the three axes of theorisation which seem to me to have been of major significance through this decade: work on the powers of the image, on the figurability of the subject, and on the thinkable relations between the cinematograph and history.” —Nicole Brenez

“Film is more than the twentieth-century art. It’s another part of the twentieth-century mind. It’s the world seen from inside. We’ve come to a certain point in the history of film. If a thing can be filmed, the film is implied in the thing itself.”—Don Delillo

Captured: America in Color from 1939-1943

“When Bazin praises the ‘prefectly clear decoupage’ of Wyler’s Jezabel, Ford’s Stagecoach, and Marcel Carne’s Le Jour se leve . . . he was referring to a process of planning the mis en scene . . . Decoupage for Bazin was a deliberate means of reclaiming from editing . . . the mantle of the essence of film art.” —Timothy Barnard

“Not until film began to become an art was the interest moved from mere subject matter to aspects of form. What had hitherto been merely the urge to record certain actual events, now became the aim to represent objects by special means exclusive to film. These means obtrude themselves, show themselves able to do more than simple reproduce the required object; they sharpen it, impose a style upon it, point out special features, make it vivid and decorative. Art begins where mechanical reproduction leaves off, where the conditions of reproduction serve in some way to mold the object.”—Rudolph Arnheim

“Man makes the word, and the word means nothing which the man has not made it mean, and that only to some other man. But since man can think only by means of words or other external symbols, these might turn around and say: You mean nothing which we have not taught you, and then only so far as you address some word as the interpretant of your thought… … . the word or sign which man uses is the man himself Thus my language is the sum-total of myself; for the man is the thought.”—Charles Peirce

“Solidarity is not discovered by reflection, but created. It is created by increasing our senstivity to the particular details of the pain and humiliation of other, unfamiliar sorts of people" —Richard Rorty

“When your gravity fails and negativity don’t pull you through . . . "—Bob Dylan

“Democracy don’t rule the world
You’d better get that in your head
This world is ruled by violence
But I guess that’s better left unsaid”
—Bob Dylan, “Union Sundown”

“[Noel] Carroll’s idea, then, is that something is a work of art if and only if it can be connected with other, bona fide cases of art by a convincing historical narrative. As he puts the view,“I propose that … we identify works as artworks – where the question of whether or not they are art arises – by means of historical narratives which connect contested candidates to art history in a way that discloses that the mutations in question are part of the evolving species of art. I call these stories ‘identifying narratives’” (“Historical Narratives and the Philosophy of Art”).” —Peter Kivy, forward to Carroll’s Beyond Aesthetics: Philosophical Essay

“Every reasonable human being should be a moderate Socialist.”—Thomas Mann

“Belief and knowledge are considered to be two different things. But they are not.”—Stanley Fish

“The difference between taste and judgment emerges in this way: You can recognize that some films are good even if you don’t like them. You can declare Birth of a Nation or Citizen Kane or Persona an excellent film without finding it to your liking. Why? Most people recognize some general criteria of excellence, such as originality, or thematic significance, or subtlety, or technical skill, or formal complexity, or intensity of emotional effect. There are also moral and social criteria, as when we find films full of stereotypes objectionable. All of these criteria and others can help us pick out films worthy of admiration. These aren’t fully “objective” standards, but they are intersubjective—lots of people with widely varying tastes accept them.” —David Bordwell

“For me, all writing begins with the idea that what most needs to be said can’t be said. If it were, then nothing more would need to be said. Beginning there, everything I write is finally an experiment to say how close I can come to saying what I know can’t be said.”
— John Guzlowski

“Philosophy’s failure to grasp the idea of reason not in terms of subjectivity but in terms of communicative intersubjectivity—an idea implicit in Schiller’s and the young Hegel’s view of art as the genuine embodiment of a communicative reason and a noncoercive unifier—constitutes for Habermas the philosophical catastrophe of the epoch”
—Richard Rorty

“By moral in the context of art I mean a style which executes the deeper social and psychological function of form, as opposed to a particular aspect of vanity called taste. Pop sensibility, pop consciousness, pop sentimentality have been invaluable in clarifying the provincialism and nostalgia that actually permeate a culture that has come to pride itself on sophistication.”—SIdney Tillim, “Figurative Art 1969: Aspects and Prospects,”

“One concept the non-old have trouble getting their minds around is the difference between taste and judgment. It’s fine not to like almost anything, except maybe Al Green. That’s taste, yours to do with as you please, critical deployment included. By comparison, judgment requires serious psychological calisthenics. But the fact that objectivity only comes naturally in math doesn’t mean it can’t be approximated in art. " ― Robert Christgau

“Sometimes I go, in the middle of the night, why didn’t I wait one more second. Or why didn’t I frame up a little bit. And that is good. You should really feel like that. I mean, you are not going to call up the producer in the middle of the night and say I really want to do one more second of the shot where she runs down the street. But you should feel that way, and that is the pleasure.”— Christopher Doyle

Skol!