【每日阅读训练第四期——速度越障17系列】【17-17】文史哲

kudoucliff

SPEED
[Time1]

THE strongest is never strong enough to be always the master, unless he transforms strength into right, and obedience into duty. Hence the right of the strongest, which, though to all seeming meant ironically, is really laid down as a fundamental principle. But are we never to have an explanation of this phrase? Force is a physical power, and I fail to see what moral effect it can have. To yield to force is an act of necessity, not of will -- at the most, an act of prudence. In what sense can it be a duty?


Suppose for a moment that this so-called "right" exists. I maintain that the sole result is a mass of inexplicable nonsense. For, if force creates right, the effect changes with the cause: every force that is greater than the first succeeds to its right. As soon as it is possible to disobey with impunity, disobedience is legitimate; and, the strongest being always in the right, the only thing that matters is to act so as to become the strongest. But what kind of right is that which perishes when force fails? If we must obey perforce, there is no need to obey because we ought; and if we are not forced to obey, we are under no obligation to do so. Clearly, the word "right" adds nothing to force: in this connection, it means absolutely nothing.


Obey the powers that be. If this means yield to force, it is a good precept, but superfluous: I can answer for its never being violated. All power comes from God, I admit; but so does all sickness: does that mean that we are forbidden to call in the doctor? A brigand surprises me at the edge of a wood: must I not merely surrender my purse on compulsion; but, even if I could withhold it, am I in conscience bound to give it up? For certainly the pistol he holds is also a power.


Let us then admit that force does not create right, and that we are obliged to obey only legitimate powers. In that case, my original question recurs.
(355)

[Time2]

The cinema is the great compensatory art, the one that natural-born artists who lack any particular technical skill, craft, or knowledge gravitate toward, because it’s the one where the equipment itself supplies most of the needed technique. The artists need only bring their being—because being is the cinema’s very stuff and subject. That’s why it’s wrong to call movies a visual medium; it’s a shorthand that I’ve indulged in, too, but there’s actually no such thing as a beautiful image. If a director happens to be endowed with a visual gift (such as Stanley Kubrick, who started as a photographer), so much the better, but what makes an image beautiful is that it’s infused with a beautiful soul. That’s why there’s no formula for recognizing or identifying a beautiful image; it’s not definable as a geometric or formal quality, but rather, essentially, as a communion of kindred spirits that’s describable only in terms as literary as literature itself.


In other words, movies that are any good save people’s lives, and the 1967 film “Portrait of Jason”—which opened at IFC Center on Friday, in a deep-toned, richly textured, and (most importantly) sonically sharp restoration by Milestone Films—is one of the greatest cinematic salvations of all time, because it helped to save two people, one in front of the camera (its eponymous protagonist—indeed, its soloist), and the other behind it (the director, Shirley Clarke). I wrote a capsule review of it in the magazine, but it’s worth revisiting the movie in detail because its details are so extraordinary, starting with the question posed, at the very start, regarding the title.


The entire movie was filmed in a single all-night session in Clarke’s apartment in the Hotel Chelsea, at the start of which its performer introduces himself, twice, to the camera, first as Jason Holliday and then, with laughter, as Aaron Payne, which, he says, was his given name. He launches into the tale of how he changed it—an instant picaresque, involving his encounter in San Francisco with Sabu (“Jason was created in San Francisco—and San Francisco is a place to be created, believe me”).
（358）


[Time3]

Holliday (1924-98) is on camera for an hour and forty-five minutes, but he fills them with his whole life. He’s a monologuist of mercurial, Falstaffian genius—a gay black man who says that what he does is “hustle” and explains, “I’m a stone whore” (and adds, “I’ve been balling from Maine to Mexico”).


He speaks at length of his frustrations—of his longstanding desire to perform (“as I’m doing right now”), of his arrest (he tried to pick up a man on Sixth Avenue who turned out to be an undercover cop), his incarceration on Rikers Island along with drag queens, his legally enforced psychiatric treatment. He worked as a domestic, or “houseboy,” doing cooking, cleaning, and errands for the wealthy, and describes stifling anger at the smiling racism he encountered. He delves into his failed attempts to perform—the money that he borrowed from friends and family to put a night-club act together, the co-signature of a psychiatrist for his bank loan—and, to prove his point, he delivers a version of his act, with extraordinary, uproarious impersonations of Mae West and Katharine Hepburn, as well as a scene from Otto Preminger’s “Carmen Jones” and a song (his voice is somewhere in style between Nat King Cole and Johnny Hartman). He also talks about his family, and, in particular, his father, nicknamed Brother Tough (“a big-time gambler, bootlegger, and I’m out in the street skipping rope”), who beat him habitually with a strap.
（246）

[Time4]

Holliday’s exuberant, floridly expressive personality and extravagantly uninhibited self-revelation was also an act of self-creation; it’s as if he created, on screen, in real time, a new identity from the scattered and broken pieces of his life. The voice in which he does so is a miracle and a treasure. In discussing the movie, I’m tempted simply to pass along as many of his zingy quotes as I wrote down—and, if there were any justice in the world of awards, Holliday would have won that year’s Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, not William Rose for “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.”


But for all the riotously expansive energy that Holliday delivers under pressure, his wall-rattling laughter at his own tribulations is a mask for his lifetime of scrutiny, evasion, and turmoil. It isn’t just ambient legal and social racism and the sanctioned persecution of homosexuals that drives him into frenzy, it’s the pressure to pass as a proper citizen in white society. (In one anecdote, he says, “As long as the white boy finds out that you don’t want to screw the white girl, then you’re in,” and he tells a remarkable story about Miles Davis’s response to seeing the great drummer Philly Joe Jones at the Village Vanguard in the company of a white woman.) It’s also the dangers he faces as a prostitute who often more or less masks his intentions (“You can always out-talk them”).
（238）

[Time5]

Holliday tells stories about life outside the official channels of mass media—pickups on the prosperous streets of the East Fifties, liaisons with workingmen, the ways and wiles of drag queens who sold stolen goods on the corner of Fourteenth Street and Third Avenue. He restores the term “hip” to its basic sense—being knowledgeable about deep, arcane, and vital things, having a survivalist sensibility in the menacing corners of society high and low. “Portrait of Jason” is, among other things, a classic of wisdom literature, not a bildungsroman (because Holliday remains, until the time of the filming, essentially unformed) but an unfurling of knowledge about parts of America, and parts of the soul, that few would acknowledge and fewer would discuss openly.


“Jason Holliday,” the character in the film, is the performance of the frustrated performer who performs everywhere but where he wants to (on stage), the mask for a man who lives with masks, whose very persona is that of the mask and whose most scathingly self-revealing stories concern his ruses, his evasions, his deceptions—and Shirley Clarke, the director, played a key role in composing that mask and revealing its essential authenticity. There’s no biography of Clarke (there ought to be one), and the most substantial text I’ve read about her, and, for that matter, about Holliday is Milestone Films’s ample and lovingly assembled press kit (it can be downloaded here). Clarke (1919-97)—born Shirley Brimberg to a prosperous New York family (her sister was the novelist Elaine Dundy)—was a dancer who took up film by accident in the early fifties (she “had received a 16mm camera as a wedding present”) and was nominated for an Oscar (for the short film “Skyscraper”) in 1960. She and Holliday were friends, though her relationship with him was fraught with conflict; she said in a 1983 interview (cited in the pressbook) that she ran into him in the street and told him, “I’d like to film you doing what you do, telling those stories you tell and talking about your life. It would just take one day.” The idea came to her suddenly, and, when the camera was rolling, she had an idea of the stories that she wanted him to tell (and can be heard frequently on the soundtrack, prompting him).
（384）

[Extension]

Her own career was centered on identity. In “The Connection,” her first feature, set in a loft where jazz musicians are waiting for a dealer to arrive with their heroin, she turned a character from a visiting playwright to a documentary filmmaker shooting footage of the musicians. She thus turns the actual connection in question to that of the filmmaker to his or her subjects and makes the film pivot on the radical identification that the filmmaker makes with them. (I’ve got a scattershot dossier here of capsule reviews of her films “The Connection,” “Robert Frost: A Lover’s Quarrel with the World” (scroll down), “The Cool World,” and “Ornette: Made in America,” as well as “Rome Is Burning,” a superb 1970 documentary about Clarke by Noël Burch and André S. Labarthe, in which she discusses the making of “Portrait of Jason.”)


In “Portrait of Jason,” Clarke invests herself in Holliday’s tales as a meticulous yet passionate insider; it’s as if she and he were involved in a mutual possession, Clarke unfolding her own psychic marginality and spontaneous artistry in his own dangerous self-dispersal and recovering her own artistic identity in his self-discovery—even as Holliday delivers himself, vulnerably and trustingly, to Clarke as the “material” he knows his life to be. Midway through the film, he delivers a sort of epilogue on the wing: “I’m doing what I want to do and it’s a nice feeling that someone’s taking a picture of it… I will have one beautiful something that is my own.” He could as easily be speaking for Clarke as to her. In a fairer world, “Portrait of Jason” would have done what her earlier works didn’t—it would have launched her, turned her into one of the most sought-out, most admired, and busiest directors of the time. Instead, it was something of the beginning of the end. She began her film on Ornette Coleman soon thereafter but didn’t finish it; she worked in video, taught at U.C.L.A., finished that film in the mid-eighties. The utopian project of self-composition through cinema was too far ahead of its time, but very much of ours. Had she lived longer (and had her health held out longer), she would likely have been the era’s endlessly rising new filmmaker.
(377)

OBSTACLE
Is Boston Like Columbine?Werethe Tsarnaev brothers a “dyad” like Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, with acharismatic leader and submissive follower?
My Twitter feed has been flooded with this theme today: The Tsarnaev brothers seem more like the Columbine killers than al-Qaida.


Maybe. Either, neither, or it could easily be a combination. It’s way too early to know. The first thing I learned covering Columbine all those years was that most of the theories that gain traction this week will be wrong.


But we do have an interesting situation developing with a pair of brothers as suspects: potentially, the classic dyad scenario. Notorious dyad examples include Bonnie and Clyde, Leopold and Loeb, and the D.C. snipers. The dyad tends to be a twisted, particular relationship that plays out very differently than the lone gunman or the terrorist team.


Since that idea is getting a lot of attention, let’s explore the “dyad” phenomenon and how dyads typically play out. Whether that pattern was relevant here will be determined later. We could be looking at a fusion situation, where Tamerlan Tsarnaev trained as a traditional terrorist, and followed the dyad model in the way he integrated Dzhokhar.


We don’t even know whether this was a true dyad in the sense of joint planning. For all we know, Dzhokhar (or Tamerlan) learned the contents of the duffel bag only 20 minutes before the attack. His older brother could have asked him to carry the bag for him and drop it over there. Dzhokhar could have suspected a little, a lot, or anything in between. All we know is that they were both there at the scene—and then became fugitives together. What came before is all still conjecture.
The good news: There is a typical dyad pattern. That’s in contrast to lone killers, who run the psychological gamut. Every study has drawn the conclusion that there is no typical mass murderer. Mass killers are mostly not loners or outcasts, and the Columbine killers were neither.  


Killer dyads are more consistent. And the popular conception of the dominant, charismatic leader roping a submissive follower into his diabolical scheme—surprisingly, that usually turns out to be true. The leader is commonly a sadistic, dehumanizing psychopath—not always, but far more often than is the case with lone gunmen/bombers, where that personality type is relatively rare. The follower is often depressive, submissive, or otherwise dependent.


When there is a significant age difference—as with one killer just out of high school—we can’t be certain the older partner plays the lead role, but it usually works that way.


Dyads usually contain contrasting personalities. A psychopathic killer generally does not link up with another psychopath. Nor do depressives pair up. Thrill-seeking psychopaths have been known to pair up, but most are looking for the qualities they lack.
Here, Columbine is highly illuminating. It’s a lousy example for understanding most school shootings, because it’s so atypical: It wasn’t even intended primarily as a shooting—the main event was the failed bombs. But Columbine is a perfect illustration of the classic dyad: Eric Harris wanted a minion to march behind him; Dylan Klebold was looking for someone to lead a parade.


Psychopaths like Eric Harris crave excitement and have difficulty sustaining it. An ambitious killer may crave a pliable, excitable assistant. He is not in the market for argument, criticism, or someone to share the glory. A No. 1 fan would be super.


Dylan was unlikely to hook up with another kid wallowing in self-misery. Eric radiated confidence, charisma, and the vision of a glorious bloody way out.


I have often wondered why Eric even recruited a partner. Their writings indicate that Eric sought out the arms, collected the ammo, researched the big bombs, built all the pipe bombs, drew up the plans and diagrams, conducted the reconnaissance, calculated how to maximize the body count, cooked up batch after batch of failed napalm, and generally devised the plan. What exactly did he need Dylan for?


To carry one of the duffel bags and shoot additional people? Couldn’t Eric have coaxed his buddy into dropping a duffel bag in the cafeteria without mentioning the propane bomb inside? Didn’t he have enough firepower with his two guns to kill hundreds? He could have killed far more than 13 people if he focused on work instead of laughing it up and gabbing with his partner the whole way through.


Which is the nub. The shooting was superfluous anyway—it was to be dwarfed by the bombs. The shooting was supposed to be the fun part. “Have fun,” they wrote on the schedule for their last act.
Almost 14 years to the day after Columbine, I would say Dylan’s main purpose in the whole tragedy was for Eric to have fun. What’s the fun of a shooting spree on your own? And more importantly, how does it entertain you the entire year leading up to the attack?


Serial killers don't space out their murders for efficiency. They do it to maximize enjoyment. Death and torture are the amusing parts. They want to relish the screams over and over. They want recognition. They sometimes assist the police investigation, not to get caught, but to toy with the cops, and to sneer at them.


Sadistic killers who go the event route, as with Columbine, need to plan for months, and they are hungry for satisfaction during that planning period. When you only get one bomb blast, the thrill of the plot is everything.  Dylan offered Eric a highly intelligent audience of one. They were laughing for month after month at the fools missing the plot unfolding right under their noses.
The boys videotaped themselves at an afternoon of target practice with several friends six weeks before the attack. They shot up a bowling pin and then a tree trunk, “Imagine that in someone's fucking brain," Eric said. They all laughed, but only he and Dylan got the real joke.


Months it went on. An entire year of satisfaction. None of that would have been possible without one hapless follower in on the joke.


That’s how dyads typically operate. Whether that model ends up fitting the Boston massacre is something we may discover soon.
（1017）

晓野的野

2:25
2:18
1:43
1:32
3:02
8:23
1 It talks about the reason why force does not creat right.
2 The cinema is the compensatory art. Movies is one of the greatest cinematic salvations of all time.
3 A introduction of Holiday.
4 Holiday's self-creartion and the mask for his life time.
5 How dooes Holiday tell story.
6 MI: Explore the “dyad” phenomenon and how dyads typically play out.
  Structure:
>>>>>>>>>>>From a hot theme today, the author introduce the main idea.
>>>>>>>>>>>A contrast about some kinds of killer.
>>>>>>>>>>>Roles played by E and D.
>>>>>>>>>>>What’s the fun of a shooting spree on your own? And how does it entertain you the entire year leading up to the attack?
>>>Serial killers
>>>Sadistic killers

枣糕兔

占！座！


——————————————————————————————作业的分割线——————————————————————————————

Speed
01'43
02'01
01'16
01'20
02'10
the rest 02'12

Obstacle
06'27

Main idea: Society's attention focus on the Boston bombing accident-----Patterns for the dyad's bombing crime is still unclear.
Attitude: Negative(-)
Structure:
>>>Phenomenon: Days after the Boston bombing incident and tragedy, people are tweeting all over their pages about the two guys who were responsible for it, discussing about why they did it and trying to analysis their criminal mind. Everyone wants to be Sherlock right now.
>>>Analysis of the suspects: But the author thinks that none of these theory about their patterns can hold because it's still too soon to jump into conclusion. The brothers don't fit any of the patterns right now. It looks like the brother was told to drop the bag there and then became fugitives together. They don't seem to have fun like other criminals at all. And they are not working for al-Qaida and are not pair of sociopaths because sociopath doesn't connect with another.
  The popular theory that looks like the truth is they are working like Columbine killers----killer dyads, which refer to a pair of people commit crime together and one being the leader and a psychopath, the other being the follower.
---->So the author refer back to the Columbine case, analysing the criminals: Eric and Dylan.
There is a significant age difference between them. This case wll usually turn out to be the older leading and ordering the younger.
Why is it necessary that Eric recruit another person for his crime? The author thinks that Eric needs someone to make him feel great about himself and what he is doing. For psychopaths like Eric, killing is the excitment they crave. They want to repeatedly enjoy someone's screams because it feels so good. Just as they wrote "have fun" at the end of their schedule.
And Dylan just fit right in for Eric's precise need. He followed Eric and laughed on their "inside joke". Even Dylan himself is the type of person who wanted someone to lead the parade.
---->That's how dayd operate during a planned crime.
------>But the Tsarnaev brothers are none of them.
>>>Conclusion: It's still too soon to conclude their criminal pattern. We might discover the truth later.

kimwang53

占座....  kudoucliff辛苦了 上帝给我点时间让我补作业吧TT

无聊起义

第一天来。。看郁闷了 T-T

cookiezwy

占座！！

cookiezwy

Speed
1. 00‘02’55(so abstract T T)
Force does not create right, and obdience does not create duty, because every force that is greater than the first
succeeds to its right.
2. 00'02'08
People without any particular technical skills, craft and knowledge gravitate towards movie, because the only thing
needed is the being of artists. There are no such thing as a beautiful image, a beautiful soul is more highlighted.
Movie saves people's lives.
3. 00'01'36
Holliday fills the movie with his whole life. He speaks at length of all the frustration--from desire to perform, to failure and to
any trials he have encountered.
4. 00'01'32
The movie is a self-creation of holliday, who creates the a new identity from scattered and broken pieces from his life.
Under his laughter was his lifetime pressure to pass as a proper citizen in the white society.
5. 00'02'22
Holliday has a rich knowledge and sensibility of what is high and low in American society, and he well adapts that into
the movie. In the movie the character is a man performs everywhere but where he wants to. The director runned into
him accidentally, when an idea came to her to make a movie about Holliday.
Extention
00'02'18
Her movies are centered on identity. In that movie, she released her own artistry and identity. She lived in an era when
self-composition was ahead of its time.
Obstacle
00'06'47
MI: How does dyad operate?
A: Neutral
Intro: It seems that criminals in Boston massacre are dyad killers.
>>>One of the brothers is a trained terrorist, while the other is asked to follow, which is the dyad model
>>>Killer dyads are more consistent, among whom there is a leader who is sadistic, while the follower is depressive and
submissive.
   >>Dyads usually have contrasting personalities. Each needs someone to make up the qualities lacked.
   >>It can be illustrated in the case of Dylan and Eric.
>>>Dyads seek for fun both in the attack and in the preparation process for that.

spencerX

Thx for sharing!

1'57
1'52
1'27
1'21
1'50
1'42

5'43

beckybei11

谢谢LZ~~~~~辛苦

                        

222

Peopleyield to force not because it is people's well but because it isnecessary for people to do so.

Righthas no effect on force, and force will not create force.

208

Cinemais a place full of the technology the artists are looking for. But wecannot simply say a movie is a simple visual museum. As there is nosuch a thing called beautiful picture but beautiful soul. Thebeautiful soul of the director and artists of a movie can not onlysave themselves but also save others.

511

3，4and 5

Hollidayis an actor who is always full of energy for his acting career.Acting is also his way of self-creation. His had lived a rich andcolorful life. He tried to find a new identity for his screenperformance.

Theactors he performed in the screen seems to wear a “mask” to hidetheir real feelings. In real life he also need to hide his realfeelings in the white people's social circle.

Thestories he told are always from places where mess media will notcover.

Oneof a female director want to put his life experience and his ideas onthe screen.

Obstacle

718

Theauthor are trying to find what kind of killers did the Bostonmassacre.

Whatwe know now is that two brothers did the massacre together but wedon;t know what the did before.

Theauthor consider the two brother killers as dyad killers, because theyfit the pattern.

• Typical dyad pattern: Mass killers are not loners.
• The killers of dyad kill need to be consisted of a leader and a follower.
• The two killers have contrasting personalities. The killers are looking for the quality they lack.
  
  

A questions raised as if the leader did everything, why need afollower? In this case, the dyad killers need to have fun and theycannot have fun along, therefore, the leader need the follower tomaximize the enjoyment.

杀G给猴看

1 - 01:58
2 - 01:55
3 - 01:15
4 - 01:22
5 - 02:03
obstacle - 05:49

最近发现文史哲也不行了TT