Interview; Part I | II | III | IV

You need to learn to select your thoughts just the same way you select your clothes every day. This is a power you can cultivate. If you want to control things in your life, work on the mind.

— Elizabeth Gilbert

Aki Kaurismäki asked not to smoke at a press conference ...

Let feelings bring about events, not the contrary.

— Robert Bresson

Most of the time, the universe speaks to us very quietly. In pockets of silence, in coincidences, in nature, in forgotten memories, in the shape of clouds, in moments of solitude, in small tugs at our hearts.

— Yumi Sakugawa

isn't

Happiness was never important. The problem is that we don't know what we really want. What makes us happy is not to get what we want. But to dream about it. Happiness is for opportunists. So I think that the only life of deep satisfaction is a life of eternal struggle, especially struggle with oneself. If you want to remain happy, just remain stupid. Authentic masters are never happy; happiness is a category of slaves.

— Slavoj Žižek

What makes me depressed? Seeing stupid people happy.

— Slavoj Žižek

Gregor Schneider, N. Schmidt, 2017;
LWL Museum, Münster, 10.06.2017 - 01.10.2017

Most people aren't trained to want to face the process of re-understanding a subject they already know. One must obtain not just literacy, but deep involvement and re-understanding.

— Charles Eames

If it happens in Europe, they are terrorists. Or "evil losers". If it happens in Syria, they are "moderate rebels", or "freedom fighters".

― Pepe Escobar

Bill Viola | Tristans Himmelfahrt | 2005/2017

sqq. * | **

I've seen a lot of beautiful things with a heavy heart.

— Albert Camus

People are going to think what they want to think. I let them. You can't control perception. It's a losing game so I don't play. I let them lose; lose themselves in their own fantasies of what they want me to be.

― Sergei Polunin

sqq. *

Sometimes you can achieve grace through somebody else's belief in you.

— Jeff Buckley

Classy; as always.

Earth is what I feel for you.

— Andrzej Żuławski

I am not what you think I am. You are what you think I am.

— Tao

Oper Dortmund | Einstein on the Beach | April - Juni 2017

Man täusche sich nicht, das ganz Einfache ist zugleich auch ganz komplex. Deshalb ermüdet man auch nicht. Man ist hellwach und konzentriert. Schon der Anfang verdeutlicht das Programm: Der Chor singt lediglich Zahlen, One, two, three, four ..., in winzigen Variationen, während zwei Schauspieler- innen in ebenso geringfügigen Variationen Texte sprechen, die aus Floskeln und Redensarten bestehen, aber keinen Sinn preisgeben. Es wird so schnell nicht aufhören, aber man ahnt: Es wird aufhören, bevor man es leid ist. In diesem Kalkül liegt die Magie. Die Verführung.

— Martin Krumbholz

sqq. Rezension / Trailer

I shall tell you a great secret, my friend. Do not wait for the last judgment, it takes place every day.

— Albert Camus

The day with its cares and perplexities is ended and the night is now upon us. The night should be a time of peace and tranquility, a time to relax and be calm. We have need of a soothing story to banish the disturbing thoughts of the day, to set at rest our troubled minds, and put at ease our ruffled spirits. And what sort of story shall we hear? Ah, it will be a familiar story, a story that is so very, very old, and yet it is so new. It is the old, old story of love ...

— Philip Glass; Einstein on the Beach

It's not possible to live in this age, if you don't have a sense of many contradictory forces.

— Rem Koolhaas

Classy; as always.

I think some people are just inexplicably bonded. Drawn by forces beyond their own comprehension, they have no choice but to gravitate toward one another. Destined by fate to keep crossing paths until they finally get it right.

— L. B. Simmons

After a story there are some moments of silence. Then words begin again.

— Anne Carson

sqq. *

A word and everything is saved. A word and all is lost.

— André Breton

But I always liked side-paths, little dark back-alleys behind the main road–there one finds adventures and surprises, and precious metal in the dirt.

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The whole landscape a manuscript. We had lost the skill to read.

— John Montague

You will burn and you will burn out; you will be healed and come back again.

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Dazzledorf; revisited.

Gold runs in our blood.

— Virginia Woolf

Margarita Terekhova

Mirror; dir. by Andrei Tarkovsky in 1975

sqq. *

/// So I wrote to her.
Letters I never sent.
Letters I flushed away.

幽玄

/// The universe will keep teaching you the
same lesson, until you finally learn.

Fargo, Staffel 3; inszeniert von Noah Hawley, 2017

Eine absolute Offenbarung: Fargo, Staffel 3. Da dachte ich, dass mit der ersten Staffel und einem unglaublichen Billy Bob Thornton als unfassbarer Lorne Malvo keine Steigerungen mehr möglich wären, aber die dritte Staffel belehrt mich tatsächlich eines besseren. Abseits der fantastischen Exposition und Geschichte der Staffel, wird hier eine nahezu perfekte und hochästhetische Kameraarbeit in Szene gesetzt, wie ich sie bisher vergleichbar nur von Alexander Knyazhinsky in Tarkovskys' Meisterwerk Stalker oder von Thomas Mauch in Werner Herzogs' Fitzcarraldo kannte. Damit nicht genug, ist auch die Musik von Radik Tulush in einer Szene der ersten Folge The Law of Vacant Places eine Reminiszenz an Goblins' Schaffen in Dario Argentos' Meisterwerk Suspiria. Anschauen und genießen; echt.

There are metaphors, more real than the people who walk in the street.

— Fernando Pessoa

Charles Bukowski und Linda Lee Beighle; auf der Rennbahn.

All men see fires, storms, explosions, or landscapes; but how many feel the flames, the lightnings, the whirlwinds, or the harmony? How many have an inner beauty that tinges their melancholy?

— E. M. Cioran

Who other than the controversial German artist and sculptor, Gregor Schneider, a pre-eminent exponent of the new conceptual art and winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2001, could make Omonoia Square disappear? Shifting its centre, the very navel of Athens, art and metaphysics meet.

— Onassis Cultural Centre

Gregor Schneider, Invisible City; FFF 2017, Athens

sqq. *

To be so slow that you can feel the vibrations of the other, is far from easy.

— David Schnarch

Supreme Leader Kim Jong-Un on volcano Mt. Paektu, 2015.

It takes nothing to join the crowd,
but everything to stand alone.

Don't struggle so much, the best things happen when not expected.

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

Do not be afraid to be weak. Do not be ashamed to be tired. You look good when you’re tired. You look like you could go on forever. Now come into my arms. You are the image of my beauty.

— Leonard Cohen

Klaus Kinski ist Fitzcarraldo; dir. by Werner Herzog in 1982

sqq. *

If you ever ask me how many times you've crossed my mind, I would say once. Because you came, and never left.

— Ritu Ghatourey

[Sonntagmorgen; die Frisur sitzt.]

She. Silent, fawn-eyed. Clever.

— Sylvia Plath

[Sunday plans; with Jimmy McGill.]

A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman. She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life. Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another. [...] One might simplify this by saying: Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: The surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object – and most particularly an object of vision: A sight.

— John Berger, Ways of Seeing

[Feel the Juche; thank.]

Don't waste your time with explanations: People only hear what they want to hear.

— Paulo Coelho

[...] The U.S. warmongers are hysterically trying to ignite a war by mobilizing nuclear strategic assets without any measure to deal with the consequences to be entailed. The U.S. has now gone seriously mad. It is mulling frightening the DPRK and achieving something with nuclear strategic bombers, nuclear carriers, etc. However, the army and people of the DPRK will never be browbeaten by such bluffing. It is utterly ignorant of who its rival is. Gone are days never to return when the U.S. could threaten the DPRK with nukes. We do not regard the U.S. as something very threatening and fearful. [...]

— Ri Hak Nam; Rodong Sinmun

When something bothered me, I didn't talk with anyone about it. I thought it over all by myself, came to a conclusion, and took action alone. Not that I really felt lonely. I thought that's just the way things are. Human beings, in the final analysis, have to survive on their own.

— Haruki Murakami

Der ist in tiefster Seele treu, wer die Heimat liebt wie du.

— Theodor Fontane

sqq. *

BROCKENBOW

I am a museum full of art but you had your eyes closed.

— Rupi Kaur