Werner Herzog
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota, April 30, 1999
LESSONS OF DARKNESS
1. By dint of declaration the so-called Cinema Verité is devoid of verité. It reaches a merely superficial truth, the truth of accountants.
2. One well-known representative of Cinema Verité declared publicly that truth can be easily found by taking a camera and trying to be honest. He resembles the night watchman at the Supreme Court who resents the amount of written law and legal procedures. “For me,” he says, “there should be only one single law; the bad guys should go to jail.”
Unfortunately, he is part right, for most of the many, much of the time.
3. Cinema Verité confounds fact and truth, and thus plows only stones. And yet, facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes their inherent truth seem unbelievable.
4. Fact creates norms, and truth illumination.
5. There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.
6. Filmmakers of Cinema Verité resemble tourists who take pictures of ancient ruins of facts.
7. Tourism is sin, and travel on foot virtue.
8. Each year at springtime scores of people on snowmobiles crash through the melting ice on the lakes of Minnesota and drown. Pressure is mounting on the new governor to pass a protective law. He, the former wrestler and bodyguard, has the only sage answer to this: “You can’t legislate stupidity.”
9. The gauntlet is hereby thrown down.
10. The moon is dull. Mother Nature doesn’t call, doesn’t speak to you, although a glacier eventually farts. And don’t you listen to the Song of Life.
11. We ought to be grateful that the Universe out there knows no smile.
12. Life in the oceans must be sheer hell. A vast, merciless hell of permanent and immediate danger. So much of hell that during evolution some species—including man—crawled, fled onto some small continents of solid land, where the Lessons of Darkness continue.
Journalism, Imperial Beach style.
This is Allen Ginsberg’s reading list for his class, “Literary History of the Beats.” (Yes, he is on it.)
For more of this morning’s roundup, click here.
Thesis defended, committee approved! Pictured above: my lovely audience, waving. YOU’RE THE BEST.
“I met a genius on the train
today
about 6 years old,
he sat beside me
and as the train
ran down along the coast
we came to the ocean
and then he looked at me
and said,
it’s not pretty.”
it was the first time I’d
realized
that.
This is what writing a dissertation looks like. Not pictured: cookies, alcohol, afternoon naps.
“Patients have been known to seek fluids from any source possible.”
grading marathon anthem
grey rural skies
don’t wiggle it.
Sometimes when I’m waiting for the bus at Nicollet & 4th three-quarters drunk, having to take a piss, freezing my ass (hands) off and nose running because of it, I realize that this is what life is.
too tired for yesterday
"There are many ways a man can serve his time"
Two One-Act Plays: French Theory and Office Hours, by Andrew Marzoni
you’re the only one now x 11
“So, Michael Jackson is Napoleon, but Europe is a boy’s butthole.”
Local Man Knows He Moved To Minneapolis For Something, But Can’t Remember What: Full Report
R. Kelly joined Phoenix at Coachella to play Ignition (Remix) mashed up with a bit of 1901
Dreams come true.
"suddenly I’m hip"
Insane luck at Barnes & Noble.