Free Solo

"That’s the most magnificent crack on planet earth."

https://fsharetv.co/movie/free-solo-episode-1-tt7775622

The Unknown Masterpiece, Balzac

Nature’s way is a complicated succession of curve within curve.

wolves on love

But the wolves, Deleuze and Guattari insist, are a multiplicity.

They live in packs and as such their existence is only partly individual.
A pack of forever variable intensities, wolves express the way bodies
are continually composed and recomposed through desire. They are
linked together as a multiplicity in which ‘each element ceaselessly
varies and alters its distance in relation to the others’ (Deleuze and
Guattari 2004: 34). To become-wolf is to surrender the unity of
the supreme self to the multiplicities that make the subject but one
intensity in a larger pack. Held together and fueled by desire, such
packs are fluent and irreducible to the One. This is also how we must
understand making love. To love somebody is ‘to find that person’s
own packs’. These packs are the multiplicities enclosed within that
person. Love is joining these multiplicities together, ‘to make them
penetrate mine, and for me to penetrate the other person’s’ (Deleuze
and Guattari 2004: 39). Such ‘heavenly nuptials’, created by moving
through so many bodies in each other, is making love through a
body without organs (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 40).

Joshua Ramey, Gilles Deleuze and the Powers of Art (2006)

Desert Islands and Other Texts (2004)

on repetition

If repetition exists, it expresses at once a singularity opposed to the
general, a universality opposed to the particular, a distinctive opposed to
the ordinary, an instantaneity opposed to variation, and an eternity
opposed to permanence. In every respect, repetition is a transgression. It
puts law into question, it denounces its nominal or general character in
favor of a more profound and more artistic reality. (DR 2-3)

deleuze on art

Art

. . . does not imitate, above all because it repeats; it repeats all the repetitions, by virtue of an internal power (an imitation is a copy, but art is simulation, it reverses copies into simulacra). Even the most mechanical,the most banal, the most habitual and the most stereotyped repetition finds a place in the work of art, it is always displaced in relation to other repetitions, and it is subject to the condition that a difference may be extracted from it for these other repetitions. For there is no other aesthetic problem than that of the insertion of art into everyday life. The more our  daily life appears standardized, stereotyped, and subject to an accelerated reproduction of objects of consumption, the more art must be injected into it in order to extract from it that little difference which plays simultaneously between other levels of repetition, and even in order to make the two extremes resonate—namely the habitual series of consumption and the instinctual series of destruction and death . . . [art] aesthetically reproduces the illusions and mystifications which make up the real essence of this civilization. (DR 293)

Trancendental Empiricism

Empiricism truly becomes transcendental, and aesthetics an apodictic discipline, only when we apprehend directly in the sensible that which can only be sensed, the very being of the sensible:  difference, potential difference and difference in intensity as the reason behind qualitative diversity.  It is in difference that movement is produced as an “effect,” that phenomena flash their meaning like signs.  The intense world of differences, in which we find the reason behind qualities and the being of the sensible, is precisely the object of a superior empiricism.  (DR 57)

becoming

But they had been young once. The odor of their armpits 
and haunches had mingled into a lovely musk; their eyes had 
been furtive, their lips relaxed, and the delicate turn of their 
heads on those slim black necks had been like nothing other 
than a doe’s. Their laughter had been more touch than 
sound. 

Then they had grown. Edging into life from the back 
door. Becoming.

- The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison

It's a Power Constellation: Macolm Gladwell on Country Music

http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/16-the-king-of-tears

“THE THING THAT PUSHES US OVER THE TOP INTO TEARS IS DETAILS. WE CRY WHEN MELANCHOLY COLLIDES WITH SPECIFICITY. AND SPECIFICITY IS NOT SOMETHING EVERY GENRE DOES WELL.”

“THAT’S HOW YOU GET TEARS. YOU MAKE THE STORY SO REAL AND THE DETAILS SO SHARP AND YOU ADD IN SO MANY EMOTIONAL TRIGGERS THAT THE LISTENER CANNOT ESCAPE…[IT’S] FAR EASIER JUST TO FALL BACK ON THE BLAND CLICHE THAT ‘WILD HORSES COULDN’T DRAG YOU AWAY.’ COUNTRY MUSIC MAKES PEOPLE CRY BECAUSE IT’S NOT AFRAID TO BE SPECIFIC.”

https://twitter.com/ninthstbakery/status/1155483383864201216

Bridges

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9-yfeA2JZs

James Salter, a Sport and a Pastime

"I see myself as an agent provocateur or as a double agent, first on one side — that of truth — and then on the other, but between these, in reversals, the sudden defections, one can easily forget allegiance entirely and feel only the deep, profound joy of being beyond all codes, of being completely independent, criminal is the word."

"The sum of small acts begins to unite them, the pure calculus of love."

Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquisition

A Ring in Which Combray was Locked

We would follow the tow-path which ran along the top of a steep bank, several feet above the stream. The ground on the other side was lower, and stretched in a series of broad meadows as far as the village and even to the distant railway-station. Over these were strewn the remains, half-buried in the long grass, of the castle of the old Counts of Combray, who, during the Middle Ages, had had on this side the course of the Vivonne as a barrier and defence against attack from the Lords of Guermantes and Abbots of Martinville. Nothing was left now but a few stumps of towers, hummocks upon the broad surface of the fields, hardly visible, broken battlements over which, in their day, the bowmen had hurled down stones, the watchmen had gazed out over Novepont, Clairefontaine, Martinville-le-Sec, Bailleau-l'Exempt, fiefs all of them of Guermantes, a ring in which Combray was locked; but fallen among the grass now, levelled with the ground, climbed and commanded by boys from the Christian Brothers' school, who came there in their playtime, or with lesson-books to be conned; emblems of a past that had sunk down and well-nigh vanished under the earth, that lay by the water's edge now, like an idler taking the air, yet giving me strong food for thought, making the name of Combray connote to me not the little town of to-day only, but an historic city vastly different, seizing and holding my imagination by the remote, incomprehensible features which it half-concealed beneath a spangled veil of buttercups.

-- Marcel Proust, Swann's Way

Deleuze #1

Deleuze #1

What is the shape of a flower without petals?

A frame without a door? 

Or a donut with no hole? 

Life is overwritten by consciousness, filled with excuses,

Excavated 

Leaving 

Railroad ties without rails

And a body without organs.  

you know who you are

Human

"I made you in my image"

possession, delusion, vision, hypnotism, trance, hallucination, and narcosis

Indeed, Artaud likens the cinema to possession, delusion, vision, hypnotism, trance, hallucination, and narcosis because, in all of these experiences, we are inhabited by an "other" logic, our brain and bodies given over to a force that lies outside of us.  With respect to the moving image, Artaud's question is not, What is the nature of thinking? but, What is this thing that thinks inside of me?

G-d inscribes a "law" in us that makes us equal to the incredible variety of nature.

-- from Gregory Flaxman, "This is Your Brain on Cinema"