Last week I wrote that the reason Hollywood films are so bad last 10 years is that all the better scriptwriters were hired by the Pentagon. Today in the news: Pentagon refused to cooperate with movie 'Avengers' for it found its script 'not realistic enough'.
Martijn BendersIf you ask me, I think Jerry Springer destroyed the public image of the USA. I mean up to early in the nineties I still imagined it like it was presented in hollywoodfilms and stuff. But then, early in the 90's they started broadcasting that freakshow in the Netherlands, and that new idea of entertainment, where you put the biggest morons you can find on screen so you can watch it and feel superior. Later on, politics also discovered the same formula. We want politicians we feel superior to. The very idea of anything being 'better' or 'higher' than us makes people extremely uncomfortable.
Martijn BendersTag: jerry-springer
I think i am too chaotic to ever get depressed. Depression somehow requires an ordered mind where the depression can get hold. Depressions just give up on me, usually at first sight. It's mutual - I find them really tedious and boring.
Martijn BendersTag: chaos-theory depression-quotes
Every writer on this planet THINKS he is a great writer (why waste your entire life writing when you believe you are mediocre?) but its deemed socially unacceptable to actually speak out such thoughts. So, modesty is always a public concept and not an inner one. For that reason alone 'modesty' can actually be said to be the product of a large ego, for the ego is primarily concerned with survival and society rewards this dishonesty and tends to punish honesty (see Camus)
Martijn BendersTag: modesty writers-on-writing camus
In 2009 i was nominated for the 'best dutch poetry debute' called 'the buddingh award'. It's supposed to be the most important debut price. However the event proved rather hallucinogenic. It started with my publisher expressing 'great surprise' that 'I still managed to get nominated'. The surprise was out of place, since my book simply got the best reviews of all books that year. I went to Poetry International and noticed only 2 of the 3 jury members where present, and the female one kept looking at me in sort of a guilty fashion. Then the award was granted to Misscha Andriessen, which was sort of weird since his book was not seen as universally the best by critics. 'Too lightweight' one review of an important critic read. Later on I read that jurymember Wim Brands one year prior to the price already made clear that 'he is a big fan of Mischa Andriessen'. I always assumed that they were friends somehow but this morning I solved the mystery: they are from the same little village, so it had nothing to do with poetry, just tribal culture at its best. Kind of a relief to know that.
Martijn BendersTag: buddingh-award wim-brands
Something went greatly wrong in our collective history and the starting point of it was the industrial revolution. Our school systems are focussed on a single objective: to produce model citizens for society in order to feed this machine and prevent its breakdown. That’s why our school systems have no interest in developing models that actually require and stimulate useful values in people, such as courage or imagination or inventiveness.
None of these are taught in our schools, on the contrary the system focuses on memorizing. Memorizing is a way of overloading the mind with mental baggage it doesn’t really need. Besides being horribly dull and stiffening the effect of 20 years of abundant memorization training is modern man: an unimaginative creature stuffed with useless knowledge and unable to clean his mind of this information dirt: our school systems are purposely constructed to deliver mental automatons that are unable to think creatively.
Tag: creativity school-system
After we eat of the Apple of Knowledge, however, all of us start to be aware of ourselves, and our consciousness starts to be divided from our being. We start to have an image of ourselves which blocks our true expression.
How do we go from there? There are two ways of dealing with this situation. The first is to find a self-image one is comfortable with. This is what most people do. It has some advantages since it causes the mind to operate reasonably undisturbed and it brings some peace to most people. People who find and maintain a self-image they are comfortable with are generally known as ‘happy people’.
It doesn’t mean a whole lot, because in fact this image they are comfortable with is completely fake. There is another road, the road of learning to get rid of all self-imagery. This is a hard road however and requires one to pretty much battle for the rest of ones life (which isn’t a bad thing at all since the sense and meaning of life are essentially to put up a good battle). One develops techniques to stop identifying with ones self-image. The more these mechanisms behind self-imagery are mastered the more easy it becomes to switch and correct ones identities. At some point we can simply get rid of the self-image and be reborn as the child we once were, but a different child who has the triumph of knowledge in his pocket.
Tag: awareness tree-of-knowledge
Talent is 98% hard work - even Brel said so. The best signal for lack of talent is therefore quite simply low production. That does of course not mean high production guarantees talent, so something does exist that needs to be present - what is that? Talent and Drive - both are quite useless without the other, but what exactly is 'talent'? I would say its a form of the unconditioned: in some people it survives, even unto old age. Some learn to focus it on a particular craft. But without drive, it still goes nowhere.
Martijn BendersTag: talent drive jacques-brel
Why do most people write poems about nature? For the same reason that every community center is propped up with industrious, self painted landscapes: you have no need of any imagination to simply describe what is around you, and the amateur naturally thinks an idyllic picture is best, not the dirty city around him. What makes van de Waarsenburg special is that he crams a hundred idyllic scenes into a single poem, as if he does not trust a single boathouse would be poetic enough for the reader.
Martijn BendersTag: poetry landscapes van-de-waarsenburg
The people on television scoffing and laughing at mediocrity - they are the real mediocrity.
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