Thoughtful Preparations: Media Spin Blog

Came across this inspirational passage by D. H. Lawrence in a recent New Yorker book review:

Dying of tuberculosis in the winter of 1929-30, unable to walk, and rendered sexually impotent by his disease, he wrote these words on the last page of his last book:

“Man wants his physical fulfilment first and foremost, since now, once and once only, he is in the flesh and potent. For man, the vast marvel is to be alive. For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive. . . . The dead may look after the afterwards. But the magnificent here and now of life in the flesh is ours, and ours alone, and ours only for a time. We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh, and part of the living, incarnate cosmos.”

He died on March 2, 1930, aged forty-four and weighing all of eighty-five pounds, in Vence, where Frieda, Aldous and Maria Huxley, and some others buried him, Frieda wrote, “very simply, like a bird.”

Let’s dance!

Once again, congratulations to Reid on your accomplishment in getting Broken Arrows made. Cannot say enough for someone who manages to realize the long road from the idea to the screen.

Fortunately Reid is one of those people like myself who has been known to take a few risks, but they are carefully calculated risks. On the other hand, there is a man I know of who died by jumping backwards from his roof onto trampoline, only he missed. He broke his red neck; the thoughtless party stunt killed him. For him we have a Darwin Award.

The Darwin Awards:

“We salute the improvement of the human genome
by honoring those who remove themselves from it.
Of necessity, this honor is generally bestowed posthumously.”

Comical tales of the unwitting demise of fools who try to build their own rocket cars, drink from bottles found at the dump, or who drown in their kitchen sinks may have served as inspiriation for HBO’s Six Feet Under, and no doubt for their own movie, The Darwin Awards, to be screened later in January’s Sundance Film Festival. The film version written and directed by Finn Taylor, stars a quirky cast including Joseph Fiennes, Winona Ryder, David Arquette, Ty Burrell, Kevin Dunn, Nora Dunn, Judah Friedlander, Lukas Haas, Tom Hollander, Brad Hunt, Juliette Lewis, Julianna Margulies, Tim Blake Nelson, Alessandro Nivola, Chris Penn, Max Purlich, D.B. Sweeney, Robin Tunney and Wilmer Valderrama.

More details in a San Francisco Chronicle article.