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Do we need a moral framework?
For Matthew Weiner, the creator of AMC's Mad Men, ours is the golden age of television. Quickly it has become one of the central places for the artist to participate in cultural discourse. "If Dickens were alive today," Weiner stated in a recent interview, "he'd probably be a show writer."
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When does wonder happen?
“Holy shit... I didn’t know how to handle it.” This was producer Rick Rubin's commentary after seeing the Johnny Cash Hurt video for the first time. Trent Reznor, who wrote the song, said (midst a few tears) "I wasn't prepared for what I saw – I knew it… was not my song anymore." Michael Stipe commented: "The power of [Hurt] is something I can barely talk about – it really had a profound impact on me. A four minute video – that amount of emotion… deeply moving."
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How do you convey experience?
Our experiences are never objective; that’s what makes them wonderful, idealized, less than credible, more credible than mere facts, our own, and shared all at once. So imagine trying to capture the experience of an entire geographical region, not only in its vastness of space, but also in the vastness of time. If that seems daunting, try doing it fifty times.
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Is love a choice?
I was first introduced to the work of Terrence Malick by an Art Professor and mentor a little over a year ago in Orvieto, Italy, where I was studying abroad for the semester. He brought our drawing class into a tiny little theater in the town’s library, and before he popped Days of Heaven - Malick’s 1978 debut about love and loss on the depression-era Texas plains, into the projector - he gave us a brief pep talk. He told us a little bit about what to expect when watching a Malick film, but beyond that, he didn’t give much more than this simple admonition: “When you find yourself wondering if you’re missing something, wondering if this film is just airy, incoherent, pretentious eye candy,” he said, “I suggest you err on the side of wonderful.”
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What makes change?
But what if we're missing it? What would happen if our fascination with change shifted to an obsession of same? We wake up in the morning at the same time. We wear the same clothes. We take the same route to work. And we work the same job. Each and every day. Over and over again.