molecular enthusiasm

And all of the characters spend much of their time on trains, as if to suggest that being in the city means moving through it. While another film might cut directly from location to location, Café Lumière is more concerned with how people get to where they’re going, and what happens in such moments of transition. The space of the city, it contends, is not made up of the closed interiors of homes and buildings, but in the interstitial connections of the train, its fleeting encounters, and the possibilities that arise from the closeness of strangers. (Kōhī Jikō)

I started daydreaming and having real dreams about this character because it was so good. It affected me. I would wake up and go, “He should look this way and he should weigh this much and he should have a silly mustache. His clothes should all be beige and sand colored and taupe. He should blend into the scenery because he’s invisible to society.” The amount of work is… I didn’t work at all. It was instant. That’s what good writing does…. If you’re a brilliant chemist as he was and you decide I’m going to drive a truck, people would say you’re wasting your talent. But if I said I was going to teach chemistry to the next generation and try to inspire them. No one can criticize the profession of the teacher. It’s honorable. So he hid out in academia so that he didn’t have to face his losses. (link)

“My conscience wants vegetarianism to win over the world. And my subconscience is yearning for a piece of juicy meat. But what do I want?”

-Tarkovsky

“We were getting ready to go home today for hospice care, when he looked at us, smiled, and passed away,” said his wife, Chaz Ebert. “No struggle, no pain, just a quiet, dignified transition.” (Sun-Times)

“You are an ill-made, devious, disobedient, spiteful little creature full of envy, lust, and low cunning. Men’s laws give you right to bear my name and display my colors, since I cannot prove that you are not mine. To teach me humility, the gods have condemned me to watch you waddle about wearing that proud lion that was my father’s sigil and his father’s before him. But neither gods nor men shall ever compel me to turn Casterly Rock into your whorehouse.”

Somewhere in Krakow.

Alternating rice plots in the Bac Son Valley, Vietnam. Photographed by Hai Thinh Hoang, of Hanoi

(In Focus)