i think being lobotomized and having anything resembling human surgically removed and and then integrating whatever’s left of me into a finely tuned machine honed to excel at carnage on a scale that’s hard to reckon would fix me, actually
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i think the turning point in my life both academically and professionally was realizing that. If you Go First, be it a presentation or an interview or whatever. If you go first, you are being judged based on NOTHING but yourself. They aren't comparing you to anyone else, you don't have an act to "follow". You are the Bar. You can literally just do the best you can and at that point it will automatically be the best they've seen so far. And once you're done you're done. You can mentally and emotionally check out.
Game changer insofar as being stressed about presenting because now I just bulldoze over everyone else to go first like a feral hog.
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The Amazing Devil truly knocked it out of the park with Fair in terms of love songs i mean its got everything. Domesticity, deep adoration, confessions of love when youre sure no one else can hear, a that's what she said joke, yogurt, genuinely dont think there's a more romantic song on the face of the earth
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this is my interest in Russian cultural history showing, but I think it's really fascinating that the characters in Scorsese's Goncharov exist as imagined Soviets, particularly as articulated from an American perspective in the early 70s.
Scorsese was, then as now, a great appreciator of world cinema, and he absolutely was aware of how the archetype of the Soviet man underwent a transformation during Gorbachev's Era of Stagnation. Gone was the clean-cut, traditional wartime hero, always holding Soviet values aloft. Even the fictional Soviet woman became more adrift, lost in a modern tide of isolation, loneliness, and individual despair. (This is so so brilliantly brought to bear in Katya, and really gives lie to the old canard that Scorsese doesn't imagine the inner lives of female characters.)
Goncharov is a grey, almost temporally unmoored character, one that was previously unimaginable in Soviet cinema, and what does it mean that this new archetype was articulated, by perhaps THE American director of the late 20th century, at such an intentional cultural remove?
Idk, I think the resurgence of interest in the film really gives us an opportunity to ask questions about a piece that has previously only been discussed through a broadly Marxist lens, instead of reckoning with wider forces within the Eastern European imagination. Put more simply, what did it mean for Americans to watch a transformation of the Soviet zeitgeist through a glass darkly, and what light does that shed on the "Russian" in the American mind today?
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