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Sir James Jeans...wrote, summarizing a series of findings in physics, "The world begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine." The world could be, then, in (Sir Arthur Stanley) Eddington's word, "mind-stuff." And even the mind, anthropologists tell us, is not so much a cognitive instrument as a cultural artifact. The mind is itself an art object. It is a Mondrian canvas onto whose homemade grids it fits its own pre-selected products. Our knowledge is contextual and only contextual. Ordering and inventing coincide; we call their collaboration "knowledge." The mind is a blue guitar on which we improvise the song of the world.
-- Annie Dillard
MOVIES
"Whoever invented spending millions of dollars has absolutely ruined the picture business," Allan Dwan told [Peter] Bogdanovich in the late sixties. It might have sounded like an old man's bitterness then. Said today, it would simply sound accurate -- except, of course, for the amount of money. For "millions" read "hundreds of millions." A mere million buys you one pout from Val Kilmer in "The Saint" and maybe two drops of sweat from Tom Cruise in "Mission: Impossible" as he hangs there reprising the heist scene from
"Topkapi" at a hundred times the outlay for a tenth of the impact. Today's blockbusters, despite the technical bravura of their components, rarely strike us as being very well put together: the tornado twists, the mountain blows up, the dinosaurs eat the scenery, and you are supposed to be lost in wonder, but instead you are left wondering why you are meant to care, because the characters risking death have never been alive and there would be no story without the scenes that interrupt it. The special effects leave NASA looking
underfunded, yet the general effect, despite oodles of expertise, is one of a hyperactive ineptitude -- of the point missed at full volume, as in the unstoppable monologue of a clever, spoiled child. Mountains of money in labor give birth to ridiculous mice.
-- Clive James, in the New Yorker
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