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Free throws and Miniatures

in
Like taking a free throw, painting miniatures is a work of reduction. Both basketball player and miniaturist look back upon a bodily tradition, and a memory of practice, and each tries to free himself from the present: for the basketball player, it is the anxiety of the moment, but also those "other working parts" -- the heavy limbs and beating heart -- which constitute his prison, while for the miniaturist, it is the temptation to innovate, and the eyes that might lead one astray, that mean that the highest art of observation is practiced by those than cannot see.
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Sunday Film Notes

in

What we talk about when we talk of the weather (something approaching a review of Margin Call)

I.

As much as I love the darkened space of the cinema, where I can be anyone, if just for a moment, when I turn up, unannounced and cold, outside one of those big commercial duplexes, and tell myself that inside, in the warmth, there shall be miracles awaiting me, I always feel as if I am acting in bad faith.

I’m not really expecting to see film. I just want to find the world outside, inside that dark, welcoming room.

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On Hunting

in
People get hunters all mixed up, and think they are looking for what is rare or elusive – the thing that might give them the slip, and scurry away down some furtive alley if it were not for the hunter’s state of constant awareness. On the contrary, for the hunter, there is too much world, and all of it is clamouring for attention. Nothing rare or elusive here.
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Droning On

in
I used to work in a call center in which we were instructed to make 50 calls an hour. Our pay depended on us fulfilling this quota. Most hours, this didn't prove to be a problem. At 7pm, there was a list of thousands of old grannies eager to be divested of their retirement fund. Things got trickier, however, on the night shift. At 3am, who do you call to fulfill your quota?
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