Quote of the day

[iambiguous]

Croupier

[first lines]
Jack: [self reflection] Now he had become the still center of that spinning wheel of misfortune. The world turned 'round him leaving him miraculously untouched. The croupier had reached his goal. He no longer heard the sound of the ball.

You tell me.

Jack: "The world breaks everyone, and afterwards, some are strong at the broken places". Ernest Hemingway.
Matt: Wasn't he the one who shot himself?

Yeah, what about that?

Jack: [voiceover] A wave of elation came over him; he was hooked again...watching people lose.

That'll do it.

Jack [voiceover]: Marion saw life differently. She was a romantic. And thought he was too.

Balls!

Jack: If I see you cheating again, I’ll report it.
Matt: I don’t get you. Even if it was true, which it isn’t, what the fuck difference would it make to you?
Jack: Because if a supervisor knew I’d seen you and I hadn’t reported it, I’d lose my job as well. And I can’t afford that.
Matt: So it’s Mr Clean. Wise up, Jack, this whole business is bent. The casino is nothing but legal theft. And that’s OK. It’s the system. Half the punters who come in are using stolen money, drug money, they haven’t earned it. We earn our money.
Jack [voiceover]: Matt was an escape artist. Like Jack’s father.

Of course, little does Jack know what Dad has up his sleeve.

Woman at table [to Jack]: What’s that aftershave you’re wearing?
Jack [voiceover]: Never converse with the punters. It slows things down. Speed is volume, and volume is profit for the casino. Aim at 40 spins an hour.

Or 40 posts.

Marion: I don’t like it at all. You had a wonderful character before, the Gambler. He was so romantic.
Jack: He was a loser. This guy’s a croupier. He can’t lose. People have shat on him all his life. Now he’s in control. He’s a winner.
Marion: Is that your idea of a winner? He doesn’t give a shit about anyone. He uses people and…
Jack: It’s because of the sex, isn’t it? You don’t like the sex in it.
Marion: I don’t give a fuck about the sex. Most men’ll fuck a lamppost. He’s just a miserable zombie. Is that the way you feel now? Is that what’s happened to you?
Jack: Marion. It’s a book.
Marion: Oh really. Then why is he called Jake. Why don’t you come clean and call him Jack. There’s no hope in it.
Jack: It’s the truth.
Marion: Without hope there’s no point to anything.
Jack: Now wait a minute. What’s so hopeful about your job? Spending the day catching poor people stealing. You said yourself the organised gangs get away with it. At least in the casino everybody gets caught. Rich or poor, the odds are the same. It’s all relative.
Marion: Crap. It’s not relative. It’s unfair. Like your casino. It’s designed unfair. And your croupier’s a little shit because he goes along with it.

Revels in it!

Bella [to Marion]: Your boyfriend fucked me, smoked my dope, then shopped me. What do you think of that? I can’t get a job now. [to Jack] You bastard. You’re no different from Matt. A pair of vicious little shits, that’s what you are.
Jack: Look Bella, I don’t know anything about this. You should talk to Matt.
Bella: You’re all scumbags.
Marion: I agree.

Of course, we know how that turns out.

Jack [voiceover]: Jack wondered why he was even considering it. Ten grand. In cash. That was why. But Jack didn’t need the money. His father would have taken it, like a shot. But his father was a gambler. He was always broke. Jack suddenly realised…it was Jake who was considering it.

Like father, sort of like son, it turns out.

[iambiguous]

Suicide

“To look at yourself in the mirror and want to die is a feeling that cannot be described to those that have never existed in such darkness.” Logan Duane

Cue Robert Eroica Dupea?

“My entire life I have sought for ways to vanish from existence. Yet here I still sit, breathing myself right into it.” S.A. Quinox

Tell me about it.

“To lift the curtain and step behind it! That is all! And why this hesitation, this loss of heart? Because there is no knowing what lies behind it, and there is no coming back? And that it is a quality of our mind to have a foreboding of confusion and darkness wherever we have no definite knowledge.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Next up: the quality of your mind [when push comes to shove].

“I’m more focused on other people, and how they ultimately come to the decision to just end their own lives. Do they ever regret it? In the moment after letting go and the second before they make impact, there has to be a little bit of remorse in that brief free fall. Do they look at the ground as it rushes toward them and think, “Well, crap. This was a bad idea.” Coolleen Hoover

Truly, it can't get much grimmer than no turning back when that is no longer an option.

"I don't understand why only suicides should write farewell letters when we all die one day." Sebastián Wortys

Let's explain that.

“Maybe for the ones who get good at pretending, it won't come out for years and years...Or they'll, quite without warning, walk into the ocean until their life disappears. And everyone will be stunned. And everyone will blink in perplexed anger. She was so happy. Always so happy.” Stephanie Oakes

Personas we call them.

[iambiguous]

Kinsey

Alfred Kinsey: Mac, did I ever tell you about the Mbeere?
Clara McMillen: No, not that I recall.
Alfred Kinsey: They're an ancient East African tribe. They believe that trees are imperfect men... eternally bemoaning their imprisonment. The roots that keep them stuck in one place. But I've never seen a discontented tree. Look at this one! The way its roots are gripping the ground. I believe it really loves it.

See what I mean? Believing something is true not the same as demonstrating it is true.

Alfred Kinsey: I'm trying to find out why people hate this book so.
Clara McMillen: You told them their grandmothers and their daughters are masturbating, having pre-maritial sex, sex with each other. What did you expect?
Alfred Kinsey: Some respect!

I hear that!

Alfred Kinsey: Hello, I'm Professor Kinsey form Indiana University and I'm making a study of sex behaviors. Can we sit and talk?
Effete Man in Gay Bar: I assume you're joking.
Alfred Kinsey: No, I'm not. I'd be grateful if you'd answer some questions about your sexual history.
Effete Man in Gay Bar: [to his arriving friend] Mary here is a Professor. She says she wants to study my sex behavior.
Effete Man's Friend: Well, tell him to stick around and watch.

You know, before HIV exploded.

Alfred Kinsey: What are we to do? We turn away from matters of the flesh. We turn to things of the spirit. Lust has a thousand avenues: the dance hall, the ice cream parlor, the tenement saloon, the Turkish bath. Like the Hydra, it grows new heads everywhere. Even the modern inventions of science are used to cultivate immorality. The gas engine has brought us the automobile joy ride. And an even more pernicious menace, the roadside brothel. Electricity has made possible the degrading picture show. Because of the telephone, a young woman can hear the voice of her suitor on the pillow, right next to her! And lets not forget the most scandalous invention of all, the talon slide fastener; otherwise known as the zipper, which provides every man and boy speedy access to moral oblivion/

And capitalism, of course. Sex...the commodity.

Alfred Kinsey: I can assure you, there's no relation between oral sex and pregnancy.
Ben: But, how do you know?
Alfred Kinsey: How do I know the earth is round? It just is.
Ben: But, has anyone actually proven that there's no connection?
Alfred Kinsey: If you're asking if there's been a scientific study devoted to the subject of oral copulation and fertility, well, frankly I don't know.
Ben: Well, then how can you be sure?

We are sure today, right?

Alfred Kinsey: If something pleasurable and strongly desired is prohibited, it becomes an obsession.

Next up: obsessions here?

[iambiguous]

The Player

Griffin Mill: It lacked certain elements that we need to market a film successfully.
June: What elements?
Griffin Mill: Suspense, laughter, violence. Hope, heart, nudity, sex. Happy endings. Mainly happy endings.
June: What about reality?

What about it?

Griffin Mill: I was just thinking what an interesting concept it is to eliminate the writer from the artistic process. If we could just get rid of these actors and directors, maybe we've got something here.

AI!

Larry Levy: I'll be there right after my AA meeting.
Griffin Mill: Oh Larry, I didn't realise you had a drinking problem.
Larry Levy: Well I don't really, but that's where all the deals are being made these days.

And, needless to say, on the golf course.

June: I like words and letters, but I'm not crazy about complete sentences.

Let alone whole paragraphs.

Detective Susan Avery: Mr. Mill, have you been going to detective school?
Griffin Mill: No, actually, we're doing a...a movie right now, called Lonely Room, and Scott Glenn plays a detective much like yourself.
Detective Susan Avery: Is he a black woman?

Nowadays, he might actually be.

Griffin Mill: So, what's the story?
Walter Stuckel: Twenty-five words or less? Okay. Movie exec calls writer. Writer's girlfriend says he's at the movies. Exec goes to the movies, meets writer, drinks with writer. Writer gets conked and dies in four inches of dirty water. Movie exec is in deep shit. What do you think?
Griffin Mill: That's more than 25 words and it's bullshit.

Well, it is more than 25 words.

[iambiguous]

Slavoj Žižek

No wonder that tantra is so popular today in the West: it offers the ultimate "spiritual logic of late capitalism" uniting spirituality and earthly pleasures, transcendence and material benefits, divine experience and unlimited shopping. It propagates the permanent transgression of all rules, the violation of all taboos, instant gratification as the path to enlightenment; it overcomes old-fashioned "binary" thought, the dualism of mind and body, in claiming that the body at its most material (the site of sex and lust) is the royal path to spiritual awakening. Bliss comes from "saying yes" to all bodily needs, not from denying them: spiritual perfection comes from the insight that we already are divine and perfect, not that we have to achieve this through effort and discipline. The body is not something to be cultivated or crafted into an expression of spiritual truths, rather it is immediately the "temple for expressing divinity.”

Go ahead, fit me in there somewhere.

Individuals reduced to the panic of mere survival are ideal subjects for the introduction of authoritarian power.

COVID-19 Shakes the World...

The moment we think in the terms of 'Yes, the WTC collapse was a tragedy, but we should not fully solidarize with the victims, since this would mean supporting US imperialism', the ethical catastrophe is already here: the only appropriate stance is unconditional solidarity with all victims.

In other words, up in the intellectual clouds.

What if eternity is a sterile, impotent, lifeless domain of pure potentialities, which, in order fully to actualize itself, has to pass through temporal existence?

How convenient?

....art is not just a heightened procedure of providing sensual pleasures, but a medium of Truth...

And what Truth might that be?

All too often, when we love somebody, we don't accept him or her as what the person effectively is. We accept him or her insofar as this person fits the co-ordinates of our fantasy. We misidentify him or her – which is why, when we discover that we were wrong, love can quickly turn into violence.

Anyone here love me?

[iambiguous]

Melancholia

John: Gaby, I’m sorry to disturb you, but we’re ready to cut the cake.
Gaby: [behind the bathroom door] When Justine took her first crap on the potty, I wasn’t there. When she had her first sexual intercourse, I wasn’t there. So give me a break, please, with all your fucking rituals.

Not counting the fucking rituals here, of course.

John: Those bitches have locked themselves in their bedrooms or are now taking a bath. Is everyone in your family stark raving mad?

Like that's a bad thing.

Justine: The problem is how do we effectively hook a group of minors with our sub-standard product, preferably in a habit forming way. And I’ve reached a conclusion with respect to a tagline. I was just thinking what if instead we try to sell you to the public, Jack. Then surprisingly I was right back where I started from: with nothing.
Tim: Nothing is not such a bad tagline Jack.
Jack: Would you please expand on that a little.
Justine: Nothing is too much for you, Jack. I can’t find words to describe it. I hate you and your advertising firm so deeply. You are a despicable, power-hungry little man, Jack.
Jack: Is that a resignation? Because there are not too many jobs out there now, I’ll tell you.

Next up: Jobs and The Big One.

Justine: The earth is evil. We don’t need to grieve for it.
Claire: What?
Justine: Nobody will miss it.
Claire: But where would Leo grow?
Justine: All I know is, life on earth is evil.
Claire: Then maybe life somewhere else.
Justine: But there isn’t.
Claire: How do you know?
Justine: Because I know things.
Claire: Oh yes, you always imagined you did.
Justine: I know we’re alone.
Claire: I don’t think you know that at all.
Justine: 678. The bean lottery. Nobody guessed the amount of beans in the bottle.
Claire: No, that’s right.
Justine: But I know. 678.
Claire: Well, perhaps. But what does that prove?
Justine: That I know things. And when I say we’re alone, we’re alone. Life is only on earth, and not for long.

Is this going too far or not far enough?

Leo [Claire’s young son]: I’m afraid that the planet will hit us anyway.
Justine: Don’t be. Please.
Leo: Dad says there was nothing to do and nowhere to hide.
Justine: If your Dad said that then he’s forgotten about something. He’s forgotten about the magic cave.

Not to mention Heaven?

Leo: [reading] It is a planet that has been hiding behind the Sun. Now it passes by us. It's called a flyby.

Tell that to the dinosaurs.

John: I would like to raise a toast. To life.
Claire: To life? What do you mean, to life? You said it was going to be okay.
John: Well, there was no sense in alarming everybody.
Claire: So, you're saying that our lives were in danger?
John: No, I was saying - No. I was saying that when dealing with science and calculations of this magnitude, you have to account for a margin of error. That's all - that's all I'm saying.

Some errors being more consequential than others.

[iambiguous]

Time

“The Universe is very, very big.
It also loves a paradox. For example, it has some extremely strict rules.
Rule number one: Nothing lasts forever.
Not you or your family or your house or your planet or the sun. It is an absolute rule. Therefore when someone says that their love will never die, it means that their love is not real, for everything that is real dies.
Rule number two: Everything lasts forever.” Craig Ferguson

Not much that doesn't cover.

“I always felt like I was meant to have been born in another era, another time.” Johnny Depp

A more swashbuckling time.

"Have you also learned that secret from the river; that there is no such thing as time? That the river is everywhere at the same time, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the current, in the ocean and in the mountains, everywhere and that the present only exists for it, not the shadow of the past nor the shadow of the future.” Hermann Hesse

Time to update that, perhaps?

“Inelegantly, and without my consent, time passed.” Miranda July

And then, without our consent, it stops.

“Determine never to be idle. No person will have occasion to complain of the want of time, who never loses any. It is wonderful how much may be done, if we are always doing.” Thomas Jefferson

Said the slave master.

“I'm afraid of time...I mean, I'm afraid of not having enough time. Not enough time to understand people, how they really are, or to be understood myself." Ann Brashares

She ought to be.

[iambiguous]

Kinsey

Alfred Kinsey: For years, women have been told that the clitoral orgasm is immature, neurotic. So, they've struggled with great anxiety to relocate the orgasm in the vagina. When, for many, its a biologic impossibility.

Next up: for years men have been told...

Kenneth Braun: Don't worry, Dr. Kinsey. I trust you. We're actually a lot alike, you know.
Alfred Kinsey: How so?
Kenneth Braun: I record everything too. The depth of every vagina I've encountered. The length and circumference of every penis. The time to reach orgasm. The distance of ejaculation. I've written it all down. This is a record of my life's real work. Which is sex, by the way. I find that recording is a way to experience things a second time, don't you?

There are worse jobs I suppose.

Paul Gebhard: How old were you when you first tried to pleasure yourself?
Alfred Kinsey: No! No. No euphemisms. If you're talking to a college graduate use masturbation, testicles, penis, vagina, vulva, urination, defecation. With a lower level male, it's jacking off, balls, p****, ****, piss, shit.

And the pinheads?

Alfred Kinsey: I felt like a blundering amateur. I couldn't imagine where those kids' crazy idea came from until I discovered this, "Ideal Marriage: Its Physiology and Technique."
Clara McMillen: Oh, dear.
Alfred Kinsey: [reading from the book] "Oral contact, while acceptable as a means of stimulation is pathological if carried through to orgasm and possibly injurious."
Clara McMillen: I must be in grave danger then.

"And she still has Hell to look forward to."

Alfred Kinsey: It's all just hooey! Morality disguised as fact.

Don't get me started, right?

Alfred Kinsey: Why offer a marriage course? Because society has interfered with what should be a normal biological development, causing a scandalous delay of sexual activity, which leads to sexual difficulty in early marriage. In an uninhibited society, a 12 year old would know most of the biology which I will have to give you in formal lectures.

Nature's way, let's call it.

[iambiguous]

The Player

June: Tell me about the movies you make.
Griffin: Why?
June: Because I want to know what you do.
Griffin: I listen to stories and decide if they’ll make good movies or not. I get 125 phone calls a day and if I let that slip to 100 I know I’m not doing my job. Everyone who calls wants to know one thing. They want me to say yes to them and make their movie. If I say yes, they think that come New Year’s it will be just them and Jack Nicholson on the slopes of Aspen. That’s what they think. The problem is I can only say yes…my studio can only say yes…12 times a year. And collectively we hear about 50,000 stories a year. So it’s hard. And I guess sometimes I’m not nice and make enemies. That’s what I was to David.

Unless, perhaps, it wasn't David at all?

Lawyer: Mr. Mill, Gar Girard. I’m here to represent you. Here’s the situation. They’ve got a witness and want you to do a lineup. If you say no, they’ll arrest you. Even if you get identified, I’ll get you off on bail. This witness lives across the street from the parking lot. Even if she makes an identification a positive I.D., it was very late at night. By the time I’m finished with her, we’ll have a new legal standard for blindness.

No, really.

Bonnie: You sold it out! How could you let him sell you out? What about truth? Reality?
Tom: What about the way the old ending tested in Canoga Park? Everybody hated it. We reshot it, now everybody loves it. That’s reality.
Bonnie: But you had an ending which was true. You didn’t even give it a chance.
Andy: Who is this person?
Larry: Bonnie, goddamn it. This is a hit. This is what we’re here for.
Bonnie: It didn’t have to end this way.
Larry: I want you out of here.
Andy: Good thinking, Larry.

Wow, what if Hollywood was really like that?!

Writer [on phone]: Hi, Griff. Remember me? I’m the asshole who was in the postcard business.
Griffin: You.
Writer: The king of suspense. You remember.
Griffin: I haven’t heard from you for a while.
Writer: I’ve been busy writing a script. It’s great! It’s a Hollywood story, a real thriller. It’s about a shit-bag producer, studio exec who murders a writer he thinks is harassing him. The problem is, he kills the wrong writer. Now he’s got to deal with blackmail and the cops. But, here’s the switch. The son of a bitch gets away with it.
Griffin: He gets away with it?
Writer: Absolutely. A Hollywood ending. He marries the dead writer’s girl and they live happily ever after.
Griffin: Can you guarantee that ending?
Writer: If the price is right, you got it.
Griffin: Guarantee that ending, you got a deal.
Writer: I guarantee it.
Griffin: What do you call this thing?
Writer: The Player.
Griffin: The Player. I like that.

The happy ending!

Griffin: Can we talk about something other than Hollywood for a change? We're educated people.

Snicker, snicker.

[after watching The Bicycle Thief]
Griffin Mill: Great movie, huh? So refreshing to see something like this after all these...cop movies and, you know, things we do. Maybe we'll do a remake of this!

Uh, run it be Larry?

[iambiguous]

Madness

“You don't understand, you fool' says Yegor, looking dreamily up at the sky. 'You've never understood what kind of person I am, nor will you in a million years. You just think I'm a mad person who has thrown his life away. Once the free spirit has taken hold of a man, there's no way of getting it out of him.” Anton Chekhov

And, of course, my own even more maddening take on that.

“If we feel our way into the human secrets of the sick person, the madness also reveals its system, and we recognize in the mental illness merely an exceptional reaction to emotional problems which are not strange to us." Carl Gustav Jung

In other words, it could happen to anyone?

“Some were brilliant bordering on genius. Others, genius bordering on madness.” Erich Segal

When you can tell them apart.

“Passion often makes a madman of the cleverest man, and renders the greatest fools clever.” François de La Rochefoucauld

When you can tell them apart.

“...My point is, I went crazy. When I saw what a black, awful joke the world was. I went crazy as a coot! I admit it! Why can't you?” Alan Moore

Anyone not crazy here?
You're up.

“Today’s milestone is human madness...The modern political domain is massively, in totalitarian fashion, social, leveling, exhausting. Hence madness is a space of antisocial, apolitical, and paradoxically free individuation” Julia Kristeva

See, I told you.

[iambiguous]

Love and Human Remains

Candy: Do you ever feel like you’re nothing like anyone else in the world?
David: Only all the time.
Candy: Somewhere there’s one person waiting for me…feeling like me.
David: A lot of people in the world feel like that.

In fact, they'll go to the grave feeling like that.

David: Bern, where did everybody go?
Bernie: Who?
David: Everybody we used to know.
Bernie: I don’t know. Away.
David: It’s funny how people just disappear.
Bernie: Yeah, it’s fucking hilarious.

Still, only one of them is a serial killer.

David [entering his apartment]: Honey, I’m homo.

Next up: Criminal Law

David: I worry about you darling. You should get out more.
Candy: With the men in this town? You’re joking.
David: No, no, we have some fine men.
Candy: I need someone who will hang around for my orgasm.
David: Then stop dating straight men.
Candy: I’ve already tried that, remember?
David: I was just a trainee fag at the time.

Now he's being tested for HIV.

Candy: I want more than just sex.
David: That’s why God invented television.

And what we do here.

Kane: That was coke wasn’t it?
Benita: Junk.
Kane: Heroin?!
David: It’s alright. I won’t let anything bad happen to you.

Cue the happy ending?

[iambiguous]

Zadie Smith from On Beauty

Art is the Western myth, with which we both console ourselves and make ourselves.

Although for some it's still philosophy.

You can feel bad...I mean, that's not illegal.

Feel bad about what though? Because any day now it might be.

These children spend so much time demanding the status of adulthood from you - even when it isn't in your power to bestow it - and then when the real shit hits the fan, when you need them to be adults, suddenly they're children again.

You get this or you don't.

It hurts to look at what you can't have.

Like hell for some of us.

When, on their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, Jerome had played his parents an ethereal, far more beautiful version of 'Hallelujah' by a kid called Buckley, Kiki had thought yes, that's right, our memories are getting more beautiful and less real every day. And then the kid drowned in the Mississippi, recalled Kiki now, looking up from her knees to the colourful painting that hung behind Carlene's empty chair. Jerome had wept: the tears you cry for someone whom you never met who made something beautiful that you loved. Seventeen years earlier, when Lennon died, Kiki had dragged Howard to Central Park and wept while the crowd sang 'All You Need is Love' and Howard ranted bitterly about Milgram and mass psychosis.

Or not bitterly enough in this day and age.

The lady was old, the lady was ill. It didn't matter what the lady believed.

Okay, but what did she believe?

[iambiguous]

Kinsey

Alfred Kinsey: Stimulation, lubrication, erection, increased sensitivity, orgasm, and nervous release. Both sexes experience all six stages equally.

Okay, but in that exact order?

Alfred Kinsey: Most people think that what they do sexually is what everyone does or should do. But, I might remark that nearly all the so-called sexual perversions fall within the range of biologic normality. For examples, masturbation, mouth genital contacts, and homosexual contacts, are common among most mammals, including humans. Society might condemn such practices on moral grounds. However, its ludicrous to call them unnatural. But, based on the first book of Genesis and according to public opinion, there's only one correct sexual equation: man plus woman equals baby. Everything else is vice. But, the orgasm record of the males in this classroom alone, prove the ineffectiveness of social restrictions and the imperativeness of the biological demand.

Unless, of course, he's wrong.

Alfred Kinsey: Why are some cows highly sexed? While others just stand there? Why do some men need 30 orgasms a week and others almost none? Because everyone is different. The problem is most want to be the same. They find it easier to simply ignore this fundamental aspect of the human condition. They're so eager to be part of the group, that they'll betray their own nature to get there.

Next up: "the group" here.

Alfred Kinsey: One key toward understanding a foreign culture is its pornography. Every culture produces its own peculiar sexual imagery as distinct as its cuisine. As you can see, Brazil's imagery tends towards zoophilia, while Italy favors nuns and priests. And England, one often sees depictions of the stern head mistress, wankers and spankers. While in the Far East it's soft flage and light bondage.

Go figure?

Alfred Kinsey: In the bonobo chimpanzee, our nearest primate relation, sex is the glue of social cohesion and peace. Cleared of notions like romantic love or religion or morality, their society's behavior hangs together as a coherent unit of biology and conditioning.

Pick one:
1] genes
2] memes

Alfred Kinsey: Based on the experiences of females who have contributed to our histories, we have observed a wide range of motivations for extra-marital coitus. At times it is a conscious or unconscious attempt to acquire social status. In other instances, it gives them a variety of experiences with new sexual partners who are sometimes superior to their marriage partner. There are occasions when it is done in retaliation of the partner's extra-marital activity or for some sort of nonsexual mistreatment. Some females discover new sources of emotional satisfaction. While others find it possible to share such an intimate relationship with more than one partner. We have also encountered a considerable group of cases in which husbands encourage their wives to engage in extra-marital activities in an honest attempt to give them the opportunity for additional sexual satisfaction.

Different folks, different strokes, different wokes.

Alfred Kinsey: Sexual morality needs to be reformed - and science will show the way.

Unless philosophers beat them to it?

Alfred Kinsey: The fact is, America is awash in sexual activity -- only a small portion of which is sanctioned by society.

Back then?

[iambiguous]

Kalifornia

Early Grayce: Momma? What are you crying for? I'm the one who got hit.
Adele Corners: Cos I decided, Early, I'm not gonna climb up that Hollywood sign with you.
Early Grayce: And why not?
Adele Corners: Cos you're mean, Early.
Early Grayce: No, I'm not.
Adele Corners: You hurt those people, Early. I don't wanna do it with you. I loved you, Early. You just be quiet. You are mean.

And she's about to find out just how mean.

[last lines]
Adele Corners: Hi... Guess who this is... It's me, Adele. Um, I know I'm probably not supposed to be talkin' on the tape recorder, but um, I just wanted to say thank you for taking me and Early with you on your trip, cuz me and Early is havin' a really good time. And um, I just hope when we get to California, that you guys don't forget all about us. Cuz friends are important, and well, you're the only friends we got. Bye.

Adele...adele...adele. And there must be thousands of them.

Brian Kessler: I'll never know why Early Grayce became a killer. I don't know why any of them did. When I looked into his eyes I felt nothing, nothing. That day I learned that any one of us is capable of taking another human life. But I also learned there is a difference between us and them: it's feeling remorse. Dealing with guilt. Confronting a conscience. Early never did.

Pick two:
1] Genes
2] memes

Brian Kessler: I remember once going on a school trip to the top of the Empire State Building. When I looked down at the crowds of people on the street they looked like ants. I pulled out a penny and some of us started talking about what would happen if I dropped it from up there and it landed on someone's head. Of course I never crossed that line and actually dropped the penny. I don't think Early Grayce even knew there was a line to cross.

Of course, Early's dropping rocks the size of basketballs.

Early Grayce: Tell me, big shot, how you gonna write a book about something you know nothing about?

Killing people, for example.

Brian Kessler: I'd always wanted to be a writer, but there's a big difference between writing a magazine article and writing a book. I know I wrote a magazine article. Everything I ever wanted to know about serial killers fit nicely on those four pages. The article got me a book deal with a little cash up front, but between the rent and the convertible the advance was gone. I owed a book and I was stuck. What little I knew about seial killers I learned in a university library. The only thing I knew for certain was that people didn't kill each other in libraries.

And we're probably relatively safe here.

[iambiguous]

Death

“Do you not know that a man is not dead while his name is still spoken?” Terry Pratchett

Even here?

“It's true, I am afraid of dying. I am afraid of the world moving forward without me, of my absence going unnoticed, or worse, being some natural force propelling life on. Is it selfish? Am I such a bad person for dreaming of a world that ends when I do? I don't mean the world ending with respect to me, but every set of eyes closing with mine.” Jonathan Safran Foer

Ah, the way it should be.

“No one here gets out alive.” Jim Morrison

Well, so far, anyway.

“When we die, we will turn into songs, and we will hear each other and remember each other.” Rob Sheffield

So, what would your song be?

“People rarely bring flowers to a suicide.” Jennifer Niven

Let's explain that.

“He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.” W. H. Auden

Next up: the four weddings.