Minutes of a Monday #9

Brain Food > A synthesis of tradition & revolt

“You must have seen children playing with a string and pebble. They tie a string and the pebble and they start swinging it over their head. And slowly they keep loosening the string, and it makes bigger and bigger circles. Now this pebble is the revolt from the tradition, the string is the tradition the continuity. It’s holding it.

But if you break the string the pebble will fall. If you remove the pebble the string will fall. If you remove the pebble the string cannot go that far. This tension of tradition and revolt against the tradition…are in a way contradictory, but as a matter of fact are a synthesis. You will always find a synthesis of tradition and revolt from tradition together in any good art form.”

Javed Akhtar, co-writer of Sholay, one of the most successful Indian movies of all time.

Soul Food

"Out of our quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry."

W.B Yeats

Rare Air

"You don’t know what you’re going to say. You don’t even know your way to the end of the sentence. You don’t know anything. Then suddenly you do know. You have to walk blind. And you walk slap into the truth."

The late great Dame Hillary Mantel

Appendix

Saturday Night Live, creator and producer Lorne Michaels, likes to walk the floor when Saturday Night Live is filming. “I once asked him why he does that,” Seth Rogan said. “His answer is something I think about almost more than anything as a general piece of advice when it comes to making things.”

Lorne told Seth, “I like to let the audience know they’re in good hands.” Seth said that when his collaborators make movies, “it’s something we talk about so much. How do we make it so that in the first few minutes of the movie, the audience knows that they’re in good hands? And that they can just relax. That they don’t have to worry about whether or not this is going to be a good movie. We want them to just know, ‘you’re in good hands. We got you. Don’t worry about it.’”

Seth Rogan in conversation

LOL

Lee Evans gets to know his front row during a toilet break.

AOB

Have a great week - Niall