Phantasmaphile

Alan Moore article

Neil Gaiman's wonderful blog pointed to me to this phenomenal Alan Moore article.  Some choice quotes:

"The first step into magic is the human imagination. The world of the mind and the world of matter are both real, but in different ways. In fact, if one is more important than the other, it's probably the world of the imagination, where the world of human artefacts, well, all of it, actually originates. The basic paradigm of science tends to rule out consciousness, imagination, because they're not repeatable in empirical laboratory conditions. So it struck me that perhaps through magic there might be a different way to interact with the mind. This might in fact have been what magicians were talking about all along."

"I thought that...I ought to concentrate upon a couple of square blocks of Northampton, where I actually grew up...I suppose it's a gradual realisation that the actual place where I'm sitting is about the most fantastic spot in my universe."

"People have asked me why I made the first chapter of my first novel so long, and in an invented English. The only answer I can come up with that satisfies me is, to keep out the scum." 

Great Patti Smith Quote

"I used to have this, this idea, that I was sort of like, part of, like, this alien race that were part Venus and part American Indian. Now this sounds kind of funny now, but I was very serious about it as a child. [Laugh.] I had a whole cosmology and a whole universe, formed around these thoughts. But, I definitely didn't feel at home on the planet. I felt much more at home when I'd read books about the Aztecs, or about, or if I'd read stories about aliens on other planets. Or I just, I didn't really feel like I belonged... Those private thoughts I had, were part of my creative energy, or the complexity of my mind, but I wasn't a disturbed child, I was just, a little off-beat, I guess." 

-Patti Smith, being interviewed on NPR

Quote

"What do they call it … the primordial soup?  The glop?  That heartbreaking second when it all got together, the sugars and the acids and the ultraviolets, and the next thing you knew there were tangerines and string quartets."

-Edward Albee

Good Quote

"An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all."
-Oscar Wilde

Inspiration

"It is not news, even though it is continually shocking to see, just how much envy insidiously corrodes our pleasure in other people's gifts and talents. What is more difficult to apprehend is just how fearful people often are of their own inspiration, of their own odd and unfounded thoughts, and therefore how prone they are to sabotage it and attack it and trivialise it. Often just by ignoring it. If to be inspired means, as Eliot said, to be even momentarily unintelligible, unrecognisable to oneself, then inspiration is akin to possession, to being taken over. And this, for some reason that is worth considering, does not come naturally to most people." - from a great article in The Guardian, written by Adam Phillips

Mr. Campbell

"Art is the transforming experience.  The revelation of art is not ethics, nor a judgement, nor even of humanity as one generally thinks of it.  Rather, the revelation is a marveling recognition of the Form of forms that shines through all things...The goal of life is rapture.  Art is the way we experience it...The frame is a border hermetically sealing-off the object, so that all you are experiencing, all that matters, is within that border.  It's a sacred field, and you have become pure subject for a pure object.  You no longer have to know what these things are named or what can be done with them."  - Joseph Campbell from Reflections on the Art of Living: A Joseph Campbell Companion

Words

"In my head, as a kid I always had this romantic idea of me in a lighthouse with a pipe organ, being a composer, and kind of doing it all by myself.  I didn't need any outside stimulus.  Also, because I enjoyed being on my own so much, I never really understood the word 'loneliness.'  As far as I was concerned, I was in an orgy with the sky and the ocean, and with nature." - Bjork

 

Love This

"you have to fight every day to stop censoring yourself. and you never have anyone else to blame when you do. what happens to artists is that it's not that somebody's standing in their way, it's that their own selves are standing in their way. the compromise really isn't how or what you do, the techniques you use, or even the content, but really the compromise is beginning to feel a lack of confidence in your innermost thoughts. and if you don't put these innermost thoughts on the screen then you are looking down on not only your audience but the people you work with, and that's what makes so many people working out there unhappy. these innermost thoughts become less and less a part of you and once you lose them then you don't have anything else. so many people have so much to say and there are so many really worthwhile things to say that it seems impossible that we could cut ourselves off from this whole avenue of enormous excitement." 

from cassavetes on cassavetes
edited by raymond carney 

via Mark Romanek's site.  He's an utterly amazing director in his own right, by the way.  He's the genius behind dozens of videos like the Nine Inch Nails video for "Closer," and my personal favorite: Madonna's video for "Bedtime Stories."  There's a new anthology of his work out on DVD which I highly recommend.