Beyond Observational Cinema

"It is enough to conjecture that a film need not be an aesthetic or scientific performance: it can become the arena of an inquiry." (128)

"Thus the observational filmmaker finds himself cut off from many of the channels that normally characterize human inquiry. He is dependent for his understanding (or for the understanding of his audience) upon the unprovoked ways in which his subjects manifest the patterns of their lives during the moments he is filming them. He is denied access to anything they know but take for granted, anything latent in their culture which events do not bring to the surface." (124)

"The viewfinder of the camera, one could say, has the opposite function of the gunsight that a soldier levels at his enemy. The latter frames an image for annihilation; the former frames an image for preservation, thereby annihilating the surrounding multitude of images which could have been formed at that precise point in time and space." (123)

"Invisibility and omniscience. From this desire it is not a great leap to begin viewing the camera as a secret weapon in the pursuit of knowledge." (120)

Lecture on Nothing

"Structure is simple be-cause it can be thought out, figured out, measured. It is a discipline which, accepted, in return accepts whatever, even those rare moments of ecstasy, which, as sugar loaves train horses, train us to make what we make."

"Structure without life is dead. But Life without structure is unseen. Pure life expresses itself within and through structure. Each moment is absolute, alive and significant." 

"Clearly we are beginning to get nowhere."

Benjamin Walter - Illuminations

"The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced." (221)


"One might subsume the eliminated element in the term "aura" and go on to say: that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art." (221)

The Politics of Hearing

"Music is supposed to bring out the spontaneous, essentially human element in its listeners and in virtually all human relations." (74)

"The greater the drabness of this existence, the sweeter the melody. The underlying need expressed by this inconsistency springs from the frustrations imposed on the masses of the people by social conditions." (74)

"Music as an art has always been an attempt to circumvent this taboo, to transform the indolence, dreaminess, and dullness of the ear into a matter of concentration, effort, and serious work. Today indolence is not so much overcome as it is managed and enhanced scientifically." (75)

The Unspoken Thing - Tom Wolfe

"To put it into so many words, to define it, was to limit it. If it's this, then it can't be that... Yet there it was!" (126)

"We are Beautiful People, ascendent from your robot junkyard::::::" (135)

"Huge stripes of Day-Glo green and orange ran up the soaring redwoods and gleamed out at dusk as if Nature had said at last, Aw freak it, and had freaked out." (138)

"There are historical and social lags, where people are living by what their ancestors or somebody else perceived, and they may be twenty-five or fifty years or centuries behind, and nobody can be creative without overcoming all those lags first of all." (145)

Turning on the World - Timothy Leary

"...and they were continually disappointed to discover that human society didn't want to have its mind changed..." (331)

"...and told about how the machines complicate our lives and how cold and hot were abstractions and how we didn't really need houses and shoes and clothes because it was just our concepts that made us think we needed these things." (337)

"I've come down to preach love to the world. We're going to walk through the streets and teach people to stop hating. I DECIDED I MIGHT AS WELL BE THE ONE TO DO SO-PRONOUNCED MY NAKEDNESS AS THE FIRST ACT OF REVOLUTION AGAINST THE DESTROYERS OF THE HUMAN IMAGE." (338)

The Possibilian

"Clocks offer at best a convenient fiction, he says. They imply that time ticks steadily, predictably forward, when our experience shows that time often does the opposite: it stretches and compresses, skips a beat and doubles back."

"How much of what we perceive exists outside of us and how much is a product of our minds?"

"'What if we were to land on a planet with aliens who live at a different time scale from us?' he asked me at one point. 'Would we seem like statues to them the way trees do to us?'"

"Time and memory are so tightly intertwined that they may be impossible to tease apart."

"I'm just celebrating the vastness of our ignorance."