Here's the thing about earnestness. Our culture discounts it; but people are yearning for it.
It's obvious that the rest of the world loves high African culture - African culture, period.
Hollywood is designed to check the box office on Monday morning and see: "How'd we do? How much?" It's another facet of this whole culture of accumulation and consumption. Black people are caught up in it, white people are caught up in it, white actors, black actors, female actresses - everybody's caught up in it.
I started with the book Boardwalk Empire and then immersed myself in the history of Atlantic City, World War I, the temperance movement, Prohibition, pop culture. I even read the news and magazines of the period just to soak in it. That was before I even started thinking of the story.
It's overshadowed, the art. We're in a really argumentative, black-and-white-thinking culture right now. There's not a lot of time to take things in.
There's a reason why trainspotters are not girls, there's a reason why there's the myth of the slightly autistic male genius, there's a reason why Gertrude Stein believed that her self-presentation was male. One could argue that was Susan Sontag also. The things that we associate with femaleness are not the single-minded, exclusive pursuit of a vocation, whether it be art or anything else. It is not a model that is widespread in our culture, it's not something we think of for women.
Male supremacy is fused into the language, so that every sentence both heralds and affirms it.
There's this whole debate about whether being PC is just being like political or whether it's just being a good person, and I feel like that's something that people need to take into consideration because, you know, people are like, "Oh PC culture is ruining America. " It's being a good person. If you're offended when people are not, you know, sexist or racist, then you're a part of the problem.
Cultures, for better or worse, are very stable.
Indian culture certainly gives the Indian mind, including the mind of the Indian scientist, the ability to think out of the box.
In its relation to the reality of daily life, the high culture of the past was many things opposition and adornment, outcry and resignation. But it was also the appearance of the realm of freedom: the refusal to behave.
The culture cannot evolve faster than the language. The language is the flashlight that shows the path.
I think everyone is very surprised at how matrix has become the pop culture phenomenon that it is.
A culture must be reasonably stable, but it must also change, and it will presumably be strongest if it can avoid excessive respect for tradition and fear of novelty on the one hand and excessively rapid change on the other.
Part of me has always resisted the Western clichéd image of Muslim women, depicting them as nothing more than silent victims. My art, without denying repression, is a testimony to unspoken female power and the continuing protest in Islamic culture.
As one might expect in a society with mass communications and mass markets, the pseudo-ethic says that whatever is popular, is right. Where the traditional ethic derives its sanction from the superiority of a few, the pseudo-ethic derives its sanction from the inferiority of a great many. The pseudo-ethic is keyed, not to the spiritually gifted, but to the spiritually ungifted.
Culture drives great results.
Hopefully we'll get to a point where people realize movies don't cause violence. It just reflects the violence going on in the culture.
Science starts with preconception, with the common culture, and with common sense. It moves on to observation, is marked by the discovery of paradox, and is then concerned with the correction of preconception. It moves then to use these corrections for the designing of further observation and for more refined experiment. And as it moves along this course the nature of the evidence and experience that nourish it becomes more and more unfamiliar; it is not just the language that is strange [to common culture].
Most of the monsters. . . are based on some sort of mythology. Every culture and even some geographical areas have monsters and mythology that is their own.