1 
They work there in their little rooms and workspaces to make their art look different, but they all catch the same buses and ride the same cycles, home to the same suburbs, wearing the same clothes, and socialising amongst themselves whilst consuming the same art and alcohol. Now let’s have a look at their work. It’s so different!

2 
You have to hurt the audience so that they know it’s working, so they participate and convince themselves. It is the greatest mnemonic.

3 
Wants his audience to say that movie was so boring. I want to be entertained! I ‘remember’ being bored. I ‘felt’ really bored. And then, one day: I remember that I felt something. (But this is not who love you, these people will not be compassionate.)

4 
That useless ‘psychoactive’ drugs have side-effects is a necessary condition to their true powers as placebos. Patients need the bad affects to prove that something good is being done. Like any good art, the audience is encouraged to treat themselves using their own pain and horror. I imagine religion works in the very same way.

5
What is a greater form of hurt in the modern age than boredom? We are the least protected from it. We are the least accepting of it.

6
The art of metaphor is that of risk and reward. Of climbing ropes and the highwire.

7 
The application of oneself for significant amounts of time, increases the chance of getting to the wrong answer. All answers are felt and known already.

8 
The will to be one is still the rarest urge. But it’s the most well known and respected. That is if respect was a form of congratulatory spitting in the face.

9 
The surface of the art world is a glittering array of actions, and performances, and intentions so bright that they hurt my eyes.

10 
When they question you about what you mean by the ‘art world’, look at them in the eye and say, I mean you.

11

Joining art school isn’t the problem, it is the act of a healthy psychology, a critical will. But, after the first week, staying there is cowardly. It’s unseemly and ultimately disastrous to fit in, get along, be liked, be successful. All states which will make it nearly impossible to make significant art, that is, feel different.

12 
Do you want to know deeper and wider? If so, don’t act politically on your knowledge, because it comes with two crucial downsides: 

1. You have less time to think. 
2. You become attached and it is harder to navigate (if you’re any good) the inevitable changes of your mind, not only because you become ‘committed,’ but your very environment, and the people around, become antagonistic to free thought. Commitment is a form of incipient dishonesty.

Of course, everything should be tried once. (This advice is only for the very greatest thinkers. Others are perfectly fine to change the world.)

13 
I don’t want my ideas to be smiled at and nodded with and agreed to with a smile. I want such violent disagreement that they never forget me. They remember pain. So hurt.

14 
To be by yourself, alone, single, only tenuously friendly, is there any better preparation to be unmodern? And so, to say what is not being said? (The great enemy: is something not being said?)

15 
The great disaster for an artist: to be of his time.

16 
I’ve come to your art school,
To destroy your pieties, to be cruel,
To liberate you from from looking, and talking, and feeling you’re a community,
To cause havoc and uncertainty,
To stoke fears and animosity,
To make you afraid,
That you are alone and the world is indifferent
You’re not unique, but could be, different,
To make you hate,
And be incontinent.

17 
Structured curricula is curricula that is not structured for you. It engenders a meekness, a drive to coalesce and collectivise. It reeks with the idea of democracy and forward movement, of reducing yourself for the good of others, which in the end is the most insidious, disturbing danger to real progress. Or, progress is the greatest danger to progress. It traps. But not only your body with imprisonment and pain, but more importantly the freedom of becoming and not being.

18 
Attach yourself to a group? Are you afraid of getting lost?

19 
There is nothing more important than the Global Warming, except me.

20 
An idea is born, and then it must be molded. Do not send out your newborns out to die.

21 
If no man is an island, what are islands for? If no man is an island, are we to be landlocked? If no man is an island, do we need boats? If no man is an island, are then all woman islands? Are men boats? If no man is an island, then how does one feel the lapping waves and the brushing breeze and the glorious sunshine, in peace? Are we meant to be bothered?

22 
One must never appear in an art magazine, have a gallery show, or be liked by anyone. But not for the lack of trying.

23 
What is missing is a compassion. All truth comes from the archaeology of an action or norm as it rose out of slow adjustments to our contexts. How did the consciousness of the ‘I’ arise? Is it a surprise that something so precious and newly found, something so entertaining and engrossing would be protected? In its variety? Can we be as harsh then towards examples of self-protection, like hypocrisy, or greed, or violence? The Evil are doing the best they can.

24 
A terrible thought: was that Austrian ‘necessary?’ Did the twentieth century need to release some pent up bad blood?

25 
I’m not really interested in the objectivity of your opinion, I’m interested in it’s deep subjectivity. I’m interested in whether your opinion is really yours, that is, is it healthy and good for you? If you believe in death and war, fine, but is it good for you? And if you believe in peace and kindness, great, but is it good for you? Will it sustain you to your death?

26 
In Bangladesh I have to work harder than usual to prove that I’m different. I’m at my most hysterical.

27 
I’ve been feeding my brain the wrong foods. Look at it now, working on the right problems! It’s shaking off the grime of computing. A dirty work!

28 
Evenhandedness, something I have to kill in myself, makes my ideas practical, understandable, agreeable! And so, ineffective and impractical for me.

29 
My desire for x wasn’t actually a desire for her, it was the desire to have someone along to experience all of the amazing changes I was going through. She knew that. And of course, no one can come this time.

30 
You don’t read Nietzsche, you live him. And if you don’t, then you haven’t read him.

31 
There are two kinds of men, those who look for a thinker to guide them, and then there are those who look for which thinkers will follow them.

32 
Wittgenstein is like a sports doctor who won’t shut up whilst you’re watching the big game. Kinda missing the point. But … ‘the big game’? What do you know what I mean?

32a
He showed that all of philosophy was a misunderstanding of language. To do this he used language. When in Rome! 

33 
The great advantage of life is that logic is made up, and you can, at crucial times, disregard it.

34 
The spotted flaws in Nietzsche prove the point. Something perfect is remote, unreachable, inhuman, a lie. This lust for logic and a extrinsic perfection is a deep fear that we and our world and our very being makes ‘no sense.’ Except in that we exist, which is sense enough.

35 
Professors are the worst readers of Nietzsche you could think up, their constitutions are antithetical. Their physical cowardice is self-evident.

36 
Is madness to be only condemned? Isn’t it the natural resting point for N? The total Dionysian end? Did he, not even … plan it?

37 
What exactly has been N’s impact on the world? Besides some thinkers and some befuddled Nazi’s and some young students who go on to become bankers or actors, what impact has he had? Who has understood him? Who has applied him? Who has gone beyond him? The existentialists that came afterwards were a pale confused shadow. He is unknown!

38 
N could only read an hour a day. Was that his secret?

39 
The hardest truth: I am not special. I will die. It will not matter. Anything I do will also, in the course of time become outdated and die. So, who moved my cheese?

• aphorisms

Posted 7 months ago

1

Cinema must be work for the viewer, as it is for the maker. But it can be beautiful work, and it should be interesting work, but it must be work, otherwise the audience is not changed. Better: otherwise the audience does not change itself.

2

Making cinema is like setting an exam. You ask the questions, then give the viewer some time in a quiet room, and leave enough blank pages behind for good answers.

3

The artist is confronted by his dependence on society, and the obligations of that dependence. Like a naive child he rebels, but pray ask him, what would you put in the place of these obligations? Can you live without working, without breathing? Without the work of breathing? What greater right does art have above farming? It is merely a way to pass the time.

4

Difficult cinema, for the viewer, is about work, about effort. Directors say ‘I want the viewer to work, for it to not be easy, or relaxing.’ But why do they say this? Because if the viewer works there is the greatest chance for change in him. You cannot force someone to change themselves, it is the last, strongest fortification, but you can set the right environment for change, give the viewer tools to change themselves. By leaving cinema unfinished for the viewer to come and work at is the greater challenge.

5

If a film cuts too much and too quickly, and it moves too fast, it’s usually trying to tell you something, and has no time for what you might think or feel.

6

When shooting different mediums you have to be different people. With a stills camera you can be fast, quick as a flash, and gone. A dream,  a fleeting memory, or maybe a nightmare. But with video you have to be a friend, you have to be naive and childlike.

7

I’m against leisure in all its forms.

8

How do you tell an actor, ‘do not communicate this thing, I want to hide it.’ How do you tell someone not to think about an orange? An actor is for expressing things. Non-actors are for hiding things, something we’re all good at.

9

If you can’t make a non-actor feel an emotion, or give you something you want on screen, then that emotion is a lie, and would never happen in reality, it’s only true in your mind, and possible because of your limited knowledge and understanding and observation.

10

I can’t think of anyone less likely to make a good film than today’s film critic. They can’t speak the language!

11

To understand a character, film him doing nothing. Watch his body as it does nothing.

12

The great enemy in life and in art: distraction. But enemies make for good drinking partners, and sometimes we just need to drink.

13

In life we are lying, or pretending, or doing something in a predetermined way as often as we are being real. Why should films be any different? (But, we are never acting!)

14

Events have shadows. Capture that instead.

15

Modern Calcutta culture is embarrassingly backwards in nearly every possible way. They imitate the West but as they don’t have a history of it, they do a pathetic, hapless job. They have no care for the details. Everything, from their modern art, to their current films, to their music, to the clothes they wear, to their hair styles look simplistic and naive and badly crafted. This is not the case with their traditional arts, their classical music and dances and theatre and neo-realistic films from the 50s and 60s have amazingly well-wrought, restrained, sophisticated form. But they aren’t interested in that anymore, they desperately want to be like us, not better than us.

16

By taking myself physically away from my friends, I’ve made some great viewers of my work. They try to know me through my work. Splendid even if they are making a small mistake.

(these are wriiten by me.)

• aphorisms

Posted 7 months ago

1

What nourishes, encourages and incites the spirit? Two directions: the extremely rapid, and the extremely slow. Life is infinitely detailed and we must filter down to make it habitable. The spiritual transcends these filters. Look at drugs, religion, meditation, music as the precursor. Here the call to the spirit is clearer and more easily grasped.

2

I want to make films that affects people spiritually. The effects I’m looking for are similar to the use of hallucinogens, or extended prayer or religious ceremony, or meditation, or love (both at the beginning and the end). 

3

Religious ceremonies used to encapsulate all of our spiritual desires. They included narratives, the theatre, music, drugs, community, and connection to nature, etc, etc. Now these have been broken up and we get them separately. And although now we have greater choice, we have lost the shared nature of these spiritual experiences. But that isn’t totally true: people go dancing and to clubs, or to stadiums, or cinemas all the time to feel these things now.

4

He had a talent for nostalgia.

5

…

6

Has gotten it all wrong. He doesn’t want to make spiritual cinema. He wants to make the process of cinema spiritual. It’s only incidental if the scenes end up being that way.

7

The benefit of concentrating on affecting the spirit is that you have to look at the wide variety of things that do. Art, religion, music, community, sport, war etc. That is also the problem, where do you start? With yourself.

8

Narrative was a key part of ancient ceremonies. But since references and codes and symbols had been built up over time, there was less explanation. The great filmmakers like Bresson, Malick, Weerasethakul and Wong Kar Wai create their own symbolic worlds.

9

When you choose an actor you are choosing someone to paint with. Put as much care as the masters put into their subjects and explore them as fully. 

10

Look at narrative in the same way as you would look at colours and lines.

11

Let them brood over what they see! Let them wallow in it. Chain them to the artwork until they scream and faint and wake and see. When they do they see more. See Arnheim, Psychology of Art p. 293.

12

But if something remains unchanged it drops out of focus. Keep things moving but only slightly. Or let it all drop out.

13

Anyone can work hard, look at administrative clerks. It’s all about creating the right structure to do that in. The most difficult thing about the arts is that the structure itself must be created.

14

It’s harder for an artist to let go of a relationship not only because he feels more (sometimes this is not the case), but because his memory is so good.

15

A work is made in little pieces, carefully arranged together. Why should it not be read that way?

16

These fractured, detailed times are even harder for integrators and synthesizers. The fragmentation will continue and expand but there are plenty of fishes that swim against the tide (they don’t know why).

17

It’s important to do what cannot be done in any other medium.

18

A film is a dream of reality.

19

Had he kept quiet, and not said everything he knew, he would have remained an artist.

20

It was a lonely decade.

21

How one deals with one’s own beauty (and ugliness) is crucial. 

22

When they say that god made men in his image, what they mean is that men made god in their image.

• aphorisms

Posted 9 months ago

1

She prided herself on being analytical, on being Apollonian, but she was still young and was unfamiliar with the contours of her character and she was far more interesting than she knew. For in her was a deep desire for the Dionysian urge, to be emotional, to be irrational, and although it had been hidden from her consciousness like an underground stream, it nourished her, and on her soul grew flowers and trees of a vast and various splendour, but rather than bathe in the richness of the jungle that she was, she spent most of her time trying to find a straight, tarmac road out of herself (that is, out of her own thinking). Even on her death-bed, cassocked in her funeral sheets she still hadn’t figured out how to reconcile these two opposing and harmonious forces. She died with a smile on her faint, whited lips.

2

I’ve always wondered why writing works so well. I mean, why it’s so good at holding meaning, better than any other form. A painting can perhaps hold more emotion, or a film more feeling and atmosphere, but nothing has the capaciousness of writing. And then I think about how we think, in words, and how, despite the simplicity of writing, it is the very pared back-ness of it that makes it so effective. It works in the closest way to how we think to get by. I could be very wrong, perhaps there are artists who walk around thinking visually, constantly. But how do they think about getting the milk? Surely they don’t bring up a visual image of milk and the shops, and some change, and their coat, and of themselves walking? At base we think in words.

3

The urge to tell a story is the urge to be unsure of what you are saying. The form of a story, with language that tends towards actions, that tends towards description, towards the ambiguity and flux of a character stops the bad habit of positivism. That is it stops you from saying things like: ‘The form of a story, with language that tends towards actions, that tends towards description, towards the ambiguity and flux of a character stops the bad habit of positivism.’

4

A good reason to write: you are funnier, smarter, and more attractive in text than you are in person.

5

At base, the problem with consciousness is this one: we are constructed in a way to believe in our own uniqueness and primacy, and we lack the basic tools of empathy. We can only think through our own thoughts and memories and we can only feel through our own senses. There is a partition to others. We cannot know exactly what they are thinking and how, and what they are feeling and how. But we have to react to each other everyday under this opaque circumstances, and there are always misunderstandings. Does she love me? This is over and beyond the considerable problem of knowing what you want yourself. Do I love her? There is a continuum of compassion, and some can feel and understand others better than some others. But mostly, we are oblivious to the ego of the other person because we aren’t built to and so we grope through the murkiness of life just trying to understand.

[Eminem]

Fuck that! Do that shit! Shoot that bitch!
Can you afford to blow this shit? Are you that rich?
Why you give a fuck if she dies? Are you that bitch?
Do you really think she gives a fuck if you have kids?

— ‘Guilty Conscience’, The Slim Shady LP, Eminem

• aphorisms

Posted 1 year ago

1

If you love her, who is the victim, you or her?

2

Just because I let her doesn’t mean that she should have. Their’s no consent for a crime. Is there?

3

Black people are evil too!

4

He was a bad reviewer as he couldn’t pretend to have knowledge that he did not have. So he wrote for himself, there, he could be himself.

5

Everytime you masturbate and cum, you lose a page.

6

He was a man hell bent on making mistakes, and then settling down to enjoy all that he had lost.

7

And because he thought he was misunderstood he thought he could do what he wanted. 

8

It’s important that it not feel too important. That is, don’t get it tattooed to your arm.

9

For a long time, humanity did well by externalising our own happiness away from ourselves to an external God. Unfortunately, we got bored and started exploring the world again and found our old untruths to be untrue. What have we replaced the old gods with? Belief in science, freedom, democracy, wealth, well-being, hedonism, self-actualisation and fulfilment, aspiration, work. 

10

By thinking about a thing you end up killing that thing. I’m killing everything and I’m getting a little tired. 

11

Oh why am I so weak? I have to be strong for you but I’m so weak. Why did this happen. How did we let this happen. Didn’t we love each other?

12

And in his loneliness he flourished, like a monster in the dark.

13

Are you a realist or a stylist? Or are you … nothing?

14

You think you’re missing something but you’re not. You’re missing something, that’s enough.

15

A character must have such a ‘real’ private life, that even by the end of the story it must remain obscure. Especially to you. Just like with real people.

16

The story is in the minor details. Tell good details. Also, details aren’t descriptions, they are events and plot points.

17

She tended to have a positive affect on the lives of the men she met, until the very end, when she became disasterous.

18

True comedy is making the fantastic sound inevitable.

19

Characters should most often be talking to themselves. Even when they are talking to someone else. This is what happens in real life.

20

As the writer, you are a character too. That is, you have needs.

21

The brilliance of rap is that often it must be done so quickly, under such pressure, that there is no room for bland abstractions. And so it has an immediacy, and sincerity that few other current forms have. (The complete opposite to this is also true).

22

It’s unhealthy being around too many people—you start questioning the necessary fiction that you are unique and better. When that is lost, all is lost, you become a nice human being.

23

I’m dying, from too much living.

24

Has at a very young age been afflicted with futile, driving desire. In his old age he savoured his imprisonment.

25

Is both deeply in love with himself and is equally repulsed. He hovers in mid air.

26

Are you an interesting person? No? Well don’t write. Writing won’t make you so.

27

Life. One long foreign movie with badly done subtitles. 

28

He was always in love with the last girl he was seeing. 

29

This story you’re about to hear isn’t even worth listening to. It’s too small, too insignificant to matter and yet and yet.

• aphorisms

Posted 1 year ago

1

Cinema is the greatest art form of the last century BECAUSE it has had the greatest constraints.

2

How you tell an idiot filmmaker: he isn’t talking about what’s actually on screen, he’s talking about follow focus’s and file formats. Another way to tell an idiot film maker: he isn’t talking about what’s on screen, but about other idiot filmmakers.

3

Bresson called his actors Models. Ozu did a single line of dialog in 72 takes. They realised that acting must be obliterated. What is left is only the person who has chosen to call themselves an actor.

4

Film is so hard to make that the unambitious consider it enough to have made one at all. But the demands of significant art remains, what are you saying that has never been said before, and why hasn’t it been said in this way? Only people with small penises point out that origniality is an impossible task. They’re missing the point.

5

If you haven’t seen it, heard it or felt it then don’t write it, it’s certain to be second rate.

6

Resolution (both camera and narrative) is the haven of the uncreative.

7

Oh, you want a happy ending? Die.

• aphorisms

Posted 2 years ago

1

I have grown disinterested in facts, events, and happenings. I want to catch the inbetweens, the unnoticed, the unobserved. The feeling just before or after something happens is far more interesting to me then the climactic spike. And I distrust the effectiveness of words, of language to do justice to the complexity of reality. It is often the visual, the atmospheric aural, the passing of time that gets closest to the truth. More often then not, words are merely a disingenuous cover. Of course, sometimes they are the truth, but often, that’s when they are overlooked.

2

Stories are for children. But we are all children.

3

Although film looks like reality, it is not. Look outside the frame that it’s in and see that it is not. Although the two are not the same, the way we deal with both is very similar. We try to impute logical cause and effect flows on both reality and film. But significant human progress comes from mysteries, from questions we cannot answer, from breakdowns in logic. And so the highest ambition in film art must be to confound perception and thought, to reject the causual flow to whisper at unknowables. But that doesn’t give you license to confuse the watcher’s being, their sense of rhythm.

4

Characters should always be saying what they don’t mean.

5

Characters should rarely know what they are doing or why.

6

Characters should distrust themselves.

7

The narrator is the enemy.

8

Suspense comes from the the breaking or at least blurring of the causal flow. But the audience has to care first. And the audience cares for themselves. Hitchcock knew this well.

• aphorisms

Posted 2 years ago

1

Don’t wear your learning too lightly. It may fly off in violent conditions that are so common now.

2

The world doesn’t have any compassion for the artist when he most needs it, but is too generous when he needs it least.

3

Films are great. There’s money, women, power, fame, freedom, emotion. But, I can’t work the process of making sausages. You need a big factory and a lot of hands.

4

I believe in home schooling. For adults.

5

The worst thing is to be beaten comprehensively by yourself. Look at that poor soul, Robert Frank. Under-perform first up!

6

Everything has been done forever. Drawings begat pictures. Poetry begat prose. Theater begat cinema. Nothing is the ‘new’ art. Only the newest. And that’s not much to crow about.

7

Harold Bloom is no more a man. He has turned himself into a great, grieving mound of tears. He needed to for his criticism. What a good critic he is.

8

Nobody likes the age that they are in. The ones that fit want to have lived in an age before, and the ones that don’t want to live in a future that they’ve created.

9

Another thing that religion gives us: many reasons to despise and belittle ourselves. A necessary human trait for the best of us. You want to start out unworthy. Tommy Wilhelm is a good, but failed, test case. So is Marmeladov, that wily ascetic.

10

If you can’t convincingly argue for the opposite view of a position that you hold then you don’t really understand what’s going on. Some tests: argue both sides of why male gang rape is ok; next: rape of a female by a male; next, child rape. Of course, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have a position. That would just be immature.

• aphorisms

Posted 2 years ago

1

The biggest problems in my psyche, women (they either don’t love me or they love me too much), my father (he doesn’t know how to show me that he loves me), and my ambition (the love isn’t reciprocal). How very unique!

2

Art is built on the mundane foundation of discipline. The discipline to go out and work when you’re sick. When it’s raining. The discipline of skipping a party. Of saying no to pussy. And the toughest: the discipline of working when you’re bored of it.

3

Study sado-masochistic erotica. Watch their faces. When you’re working, make yours and your subjects faces, like theirs.

4

Start working before you know what you’re working on.

5

There’s something deeply unsatisfying about being just a consumer. It feels like you’re doing something but you really aren’t.

6

What disturbs me most about myself is I think about my career as a photographer more than what I want to photograph. The only saving grace is that I don’t dream about cameras.

7

Both you and the critic are fighting for space in the work. Leave the cunt only enough room to breathe. No more, no less. Boring artists give up everything, bad artists give up nothing.

8

That all is relative, is a simple, childish observation. Maturity is creating and coming to believe in necessary lies to overcome relativity. Of course, maturity is not necessary. And if you are going to be childish, at least play once in while.

9

Going to school to learn if you like something is impossible. What they teach you is not the same as the thing itself. If you must go to school, go do something you already like; something where you already know everything. Go and do something in which you cannot be hurt.

10

Tension in a photograph is really about expectation. Something is about to happen. Of course it never does, so the tension is always jarringly imminent. Or the action has just happened. Now the tension is in waiting for an explanation. But there never is one.

11

It’s easier to take an interesting picture in the dark because then you can’t see anything. It’s harder to fuck it up.

• aphorisms

Posted 2 years ago

1

Photography is ultimately for those obsessed with control. But of course, it’s only ever pleasurable to try to overpower those who don’t want to be controlled. Enter, reality.

2

The people I like the best are those that love me, and those that hate me. In both cases I get to talk passionately about myself.

3

Cinema is directing, it’s getting everybody together and in line. Photos are acting, it’s about becoming alone.

4

You can always tell a photographer from his shoes. They are indistinguishable from those of a hobo.

5

As a photographer you are the loser kid left out of the game. Now you can either muscle in, or make dark witticisms from the side. Either way you’ll never go back for ice cream afterwards.

6

Being a photographer is like running the 100 meters to the adulation of the crowd then finding out you’re actually in a marathon. Fuck.

7

A revelation: I like who I am. I couldn’t have predicted that in my teens. I’m growing less angry at the world. The corollary could be that those who are angry at world, just don’t like themselves.

8

Suddenly, when you’re least aware, when you have the least amount of control, you do good work. It’s not your head that takes photographs, but your eyes and some muscles.

• aphorisms

Posted 2 years ago