Thursday, February 27, 2014

"Wait."


"Everything in True Detective is composed of questionable narratives, inner and outer, from Cohle’s view that identity is just a story we tell ourselves, to the stories about manhood that Hart tells about himself, to the not always truthful story they tell the detectives investigating them. So it made sense – to me, at least — to allude to an external narrative that that is supposed to create insanity, or as I prefer, deranged enlightenment. When I did that, a kind of secondary language began to form in the scripts, where the notion of cosmic horror became a very real part of the environment...

Whatever I watched, whatever I loved in 36 years of life on Earth, probably had some influence on me. For example, Cohle’s space-time speech. I can tell you that that’s Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence, and that is indeed Nietzsche’s line that time is a circle, that “all truth is crooked, time itself is a circle.” But that’s also quantum cosmology and Brane Theory. And then I remember that I was inspired by a line from Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, and I am paraphrasing: ‘He believed our lives were the songs they sung in eternity.’ And then I had this thought about the human complaint – Job’s complaint – being reduced to: “I think I’m a character in a story, and I don’t like how you’re telling my story. I do not like it at all.”

But beyond something that highbrow? My influences? That seventies British cop show The Sweeney is in there. The three Davids are in there – Chase (The Sopranos), Milch (Deadwood), Simon (The Wire). Michael Mann (Thief, Manhunter, Heat) is in there. The last 15 minutes of episode four [in which Rust Cohle, in his undercover Crash guise, infiltrates the Iron Crusaders and raids a stash house in the projects] is a Michael Mann tribute album. Faulkner was there, too. A lot of speculative philosophy. A lot of pulp fiction. Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett, still to me maybe the best crime novel ever. In the savagery, in the exhausted frontier. It was all kinds of things...

By the end, both [Cohle and Hart] will be stripped of many illusions. Yet while they may embody traits of the anti-heroes we’re used to seeing lately, they’re also melded with a very classic John Wayne type of hero. What’s being deconstructed here, if anything, are archetypes of post-war masculinity. If you look at their swagger and behavior under fire, they are fixated on articulating a specific kind of stoic or Orwell-like masculinity that they’ve picked up from somewhere else. For each man, the final confrontation is the realization that they don’t work..."


"She spoke with complete seriousness. “What is the meaning of life?” In my entire week with the Dalai Lama, every conceivable question had been asked—except this one. People had been afraid to ask the one—the really big—question. There was a brief, stunned silence at the table.

The Dalai Lama answered immediately. “The meaning of life is happiness.” He raised his finger, leaning forward, focusing on her as if she were the only person in the world. “Hard question is not, ‘What is meaning of life?’ That is easy question to answer! No, hard question is what make happiness. Money? Big house? Accomplishment? Friends? Or …” He paused. “Compassion and good heart? This is question all human beings must try to answer: What make true happiness?” He gave this last question a peculiar emphasis and then fell silent, gazing at her with a smile. 

“Thank you,” she said, “thank you.” She got up and finished stacking the dirty dishes and cups, and took them away."


"While “teen” porn is as mainstream as binging on House of Cards (I’ve certainly clicked on my fair share of “schoolgirl” videos) the genre comes with a mutual shared suspension of disbelief. That girl isn’t 18, and she barely even pretends to be upset she’s in detention. And I know she wasn’t cutting class and is most likely 28. It’s a fair compromise..."



"Writing for a six-justice majority in Kaley v. United States, thus concluded Justice Elena Kagan that a criminal defendant indicted by a grand jury has essentially no right to challenge the forfeiture of her assets, even if the defendant needs those very assets to pay lawyers to defend her at trial. In an odd ideological lineup, the dissenters were Chief Justice John Roberts and the more liberal Justices Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor."








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