DISQUS

Interesting play. I saw it last year in the UK. My review is here

I want one of those. USB converter, is that what it's called? Where do you get such things? I've got tons of old stuff I haven't heard for years. Did it cost an arm and a leg, this white box? Does it have a name?
Oh, yeah, and by now you'll know . . . does it work?

I'm not in the least bit surprised by any of this. Ringing support at any of these companies is an act of desperation, at least an act of last resort.
You will almost always be connecting yourself to the least paid and the most junior person in the organization. Or more often than not you will be connecting yourself to someone, similarly, badly paid, who has nothing to do with the organization who supply the product or service for which you need support.
(lack of) Support stories are legion in modern technology. Whatever happened to you, someone else will be able to cap it.
But keep them coming. This one, in particular, was great. I'm gonna link to it.

Tom, is the two-paragraph quotation from The Road?

“There is no ‘good art’ or ‘bad art.’ There is only art, and precious little of it.”
Raymond Chandler.

I dunno, Jerry, no one can promise you'll get an easter egg. But most of us are agreed you deserve one. I've got my fingers crossed for you.

The concept of suppressing bad writers has not entered my neck of the woods yet. And my experience suggests that if someone really wants to write, you wouldn't be able to stop them anyway. The urge is often all-consuming.
Having said that, I do believe that there are at least some objective criteria by which we might judge a certain kind of goodness and a certain kind of badness.
And I also think that all writing, apart from obviously formulaic stuff, is experimental writing. But is it all art? A tentative answer would be, no. Writing is a craft. It sometimes aspires to be art and there are certainly some novels which are works of art. But only a small proportion of written narratives can claim that distinction.

There's nothing wrong with the form of the film. Art happens in stranger places. Theatre is also a collaborative form and that has not stopped it from realising artistic ambitions from time to time.
OK, not much good has come out of Hollywood in recent times, but independent film-makers all over the world have been coming with good examples of film-as-art.
We'll always be swamped with macaroni and cheese and the stuff that MacDonalds exports, but there's no reason, because of that, to say that no food can cut the mustard.

I still like the John Stuart Mill quote, despite what you say, Dan.
But politicians have understood that voters have an allegiance to a certain party and that they don't, usually, think about it very much, and have taken advantage of it frequently.
One of the best examples is Tony Blair, because his 'natural' party would have been Conservative. But instead of going with them he changed the name of the British Labour party to New Labour and pushed its policies to the right while retaining the traditional labour party voters.

“To this day, most Protestant countries reject the Copernican theory.”
That's a real beauty, capped only by the ending to the article on Jesus:
"believed by Christian followers to be God's dad, who came to earth as a human c 2 AD. However, God has recently revealed on His blog that Jesus is actually His nephew, not His son."

How hard do you have to try to make conservatives look silly?
On the other hand you might be right. What if, no, I can't believe it, but . . .what if some liberal-faggot-atheists have been messing with the text . . .

I can't say I'm terribly worried by Conservapedia, feeling much the same as the other commenters on this thread.
It's good to note what you have to say, though, B Tween. A rebellion, eh? Lovely.

Jennifer, I don't want to stifle free speech or stop anyone from expressing their opinion. I only want somewhere to escape from drivel from time to time. OK, it's not possible, but a guy can dream . . .

If there's one thing that actor’s know . . . other than that there weren’t any WMDs . . . it's that there is no such thing as best in acting. Sean Penn.

I went to have a look at that pink palace of opinionated-ness and got stuck. It's pretty pink, there's no getting away from that. Disconcertingly so for a man. But all those pictures and comments and opinions drew me in and after a while I started to think . . .

I can buy the Santa Claus thing, Ralph, if you're really sure about it but I'm not gonna be bullied into abandoning the Easter Bunny . . ..

Thanks for the comment, Kathleen. You are right in so many of the things you say. Let us hope that you are not wrong in the hope that opposites converge.
Also, it's good to hear something positive, though difficult after an evening of celebrity-led self-indulgence and cringing banality.

Ten out of ten for the right answer. But how will we know when we're scraping bottom? Feels very much like that to me right now. On the other hand, after taking a peek at the commentary by St John of the Cross, I worry that the real Dark Night of the Soul could last a whole lot longer than any of us expect. Could be something like Bush's war: once it's been won, then the violence and the killings begin . . .

For Fitzgerald the idea of 3-o-clock in the morning, day after day, contained that idea of eternity. The interminability of things. Relentless immensity. A novelist's sensibility is to be caged in time. Give us this day regular working hours and the ability to sleep through the night.

I'm reminded of the famous quote from Raymond Chandler: "There is no 'good art' or 'bad art.' There is only art, and precious little of it."
But I believe we can only judge an artist by the work. Adding Scott-Fitzgerald to The Great Gatsby does not make it a better or worse book. We don't even know who Shakespeare, the man, was - at best we have a series of guesses - but, incontrovertibly, we have an important masterpiece in Hamlet.

Tom - the other thing I was trying to get at here is the way that what is written takes on a life of its own - Pirandello's play, Six Characters in Search of an Author, comes to mind - but there are other examples. Your metaphor of parents and children might be apt; that children grow up and achieve a kind of independence, make themselves free of their 'creators'.
Some writing, the very best, can travel so far away from its origin that it almost transcends authorship altogether and becomes part of a culture, even the mainstay of a culture.

Listening to Dylan, his old songs, new songs, his voice wrestling with other people's songs, the sporadic interviews, the guy playing at being a religieuse or a dj, it's like hunting down jettisoned parts of our own past or potential.
There is an unconscious and residual hope that he'll still speak the word. He keeps telling us he wasn't there, that what we saw and experienced was an illusion, and inwardly we nod knowingly, accepting the inevitable, but hope is the last of our witherings.

Sounds like one to miss, then? I haven't seen a better film than Volver in the last twelve months.

Revolver was seminal, no doubt about it. But these things happen incrementally, don't they. We'd already had Norwegian Wood, Nowhere Man and In My Life on the Rubber Soul album. So Revolver, with the startling Eleonor Rigby and the innovative Tomorrow Never Knows were not a complete surprise.
OK, the signs were all there, and hindsight is a wonderful thing, but could anything have really prepared us for Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band?