Ah Man

Oh, come, come, come. Without a monster or two it’s hardly a quest. Merely a gaggle of friends wandering about.

Pooh’s Grand Adventure: The Search for Christopher Robin (1997)

Buster at the premiere of ‘Hell’s Angels’ (1930)

Just a clip of his beautiful voice in preparation to submit it to the next round of the hotvintagepoll

I can remember if I’ve posted this edit on here before, but here it is again anyway. For the purposes of propaganda for Buster’s entry in @hotvintagepoll

Buster Smiles and Laughs in the Roscoe Arbuckle films

Music: When You’re Smiling by The Benny Goodman Trio

God, the Yuki episode of Pen15 is so good. It's like a brilliant short movie completely seperate from the show. Most of the time when a TV show does an episode concentrating on a side character it feels a bit like a filler, but this is the exact opposite. From the opening shot of Yuki at the merch stand, to the disability sign & her playacting the leg injury to the juxataposition of the breakfast and the dinner, it's all done with so much care. The Japanese dialogue was so Japanese, so "different" from the rest of the American dialogue that it really made it feel like watching a Japanese art house movie and drove the point home about how torn she felt - even if there hadnt been the heartfelt ending. Wow, what an exploration of culture clashes and aging and family in 30 minutes. In a "cringe humor" TV show.

Buster Keaton in His Wedding Night (1917)

“Wanna chase you ‘round the table, wanna touch your head”

Music: This Is Love by PJ Harvey

“Human beings appear to be the only mortal finite beings who wish to transcend their finitude. Thus they are the only emotional beings who wish not to be emotional, who wish to withhold these acknowledgments of neediness and to design for themselves a life in which these acknowledgments have no place. This means that they frequently learn to reject their own vulnerability and to suppress awareness of the attachments that entail it.”

— Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought

East of Eden is a tale that is remarkably Stoic.

So far, I think this book is a masterwork. Just thinking about it makes me weep. It's a contemporary Stoicism story with a sprinkle of everything else tossed in for good measure: Nihilism, Absurdism, Existentialism, and so on. John Steinbeck has just become one of my favourite authors. At one point in the book, one of the characters fondly flips through Meditations. Some quotes: “You're going to pass something down no matter what you do or if you do nothing. Even if you let yourself go fallow, the weeds will grow and the brambles. Something will grow.”

“We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the neverending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal. Vice has always a new fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is.”

“I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one, that has frightened and inspired us so that we live in a Pearl White serial of continuing thought and wonder. Humans are caught - in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hunger and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too - in a net of good and evil. I think this is the only story we have and that it occurs on all levels of feeling and intelligence. Virtue and vice were warp and woof of our first consciousness, and they will be the fabric of our last, and this despite any changes we may impose on field and river and mountain, on economy and manners. There is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well - or ill?” “The Hebrew word, the word timshel - 'Thou mayest' - that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open... Why does that make a man great... He can choose his course and fight it through and win... I have a new love for that glittering instrument, the human soul. It is a lovely and unique thing in the universe. It is always attacked and never destroyed - because 'Thou mayest.”

“Buster doesn’t wear his heart on his sleeve does not mean that he doesn’t have one. Acting both through and around his deadpan, he knew how to let the audience figure out what he was trying to hide.

In The Haunted House, when a woman comes into the bank where he works and exerts her wiles to seduce him into opening the time-lock safe early for her, his face remains as set as granite, but every time he shakes his head in refusal we know exactly how much his resolve has weakened. Here the stone face hilariously counterpoints a spine of jell-o.”

- Buster Keaton: The Persistence of Comedy by Imogen Sara Smith