On the episode of Bret Easton Ellis's podcast I recently listened to, he had Illeana Douglas as a guest. She said that her parents had been a typical middle class suburban couple in Connecticut until they saw "Easy Rider." After which they dropped out, started a commune and lived off of food stamps. FREEDOM!
She also said her father, and every other man in the commune, wanted to be Dennis Hopper; not a Peter Fonda or Jack Nicholson among them.
Have you ever had a life changing reaction to a work of art? (Not necessarily as major as that.)
I think that reading "On the Road" encouraged me to travel and later to write about my travels.
I wish I could claim some life-changing revelation as the result of an inspiring work of high art or philosophy.
But no - right now, the most influential work for me is a Disney children's TV show, that got me to take up drawing as a hobby. Dunno if that counts. :lol:
North by Northwest.
It was my first day at film school, and I had this teacher that made a shot-for-shot analysis of the first 30 minutes of the film. Hitchcock's mise-en-scene is sheer genius, and I knew nothing "scholarly" about movies at the time (I just really really really liked them), so it totally blew up my mind. It changed the way I watch movies forever.
It remains one of my favorite films. There was even this Halloween where I dressed as Tornhill/Kaplan putting on a suit and attaching a toy airplane on a wire to my back :P
Embarrassing, but I wanted to be a lawyer because LA Law made it seem like a cool career when I was a kid.
Obviously by the time I went to law school the show was long off the air and generally out of my mind, but it started me to thinking about it...
Reading The Richest Man in Babylon in my early twenties had a dramatic impact on my behaviour, although it hardly qualifies as a work of high culture.
As a black sheep I felt existential comfort after reading Bukowski's Post Office.
Can't think of anything major. Nothing really changed my plan to study and find a job to achieve financial independence.
If I really have to say something, then it is "greed is good". Obviously I agree with it.
Probably the Bible. For better and for worse.
Quote from: Barrister on July 19, 2019, 03:27:22 PM
Embarrassing, but I wanted to be a lawyer because LA Law made it seem like a cool career when I was a kid.
This is probably true of like half the lawyers of your generation. :D
I read an article the other day about the 'Scully Effect'... apparently a huge number of women were inspired to go into the sciences and/or medicine by Agent Scully. :huh:
My answer is going to sound much more ridiculous, but here goes: Superman III.
Why? Because I had just gotten a Commodore 64 when I saw that movie, and if you recall Richard Pryor played a computer nerd con man who was able to do all kinds of neat stuff with computers.... so seeing it made me wonder if I could program on my C64, and lo and behold I could! So that's why I started teaching myself how to code on the Commodore, and now I've been doing it for decades (though mostly I code in SQL now...)
I never really thought about it before this thread and it took me a while to come up with an answer, thinking back to what started to push me in the direction of my career.
Probably Carl Sagan's Cosmos. I was a small kid, and it was aired well past bedtime, but my father would let me stay late to watch it. It was my first window into science and history.
It would probably be something at an early age, that being where people are made.
I'll say Thomas the Tank Engine.
To this day I curse Beaching and privatisation.
Quote from: Tyr on July 20, 2019, 01:12:34 PM
It would probably be something at an early age, that being where people are made.
I'll say Thomas the Tank Engine.
To this day I curse Beaching and privatisation.
If you find yourself ordered around by a "Fat Controller", I'd suggest counselling. Unless you enjoy it. :P
As a teenager, I found a little book in the library called "How to Live on Nothing" which was an idea I had never heard before. Not that being poor is a good idea, but what was important to me was the radical concept that there's a lot of ways to have a rich, interesting and good life outside of the social norm.
Quote from: saskganesh on July 21, 2019, 12:50:27 PM
As a teenager, I found a little book in the library called "How to Live on Nothing" which was an idea I had never heard before. Not that being poor is a good idea, but what was important to me was the radical concept that there's a lot of ways to have a rich, interesting and good life outside of the social norm.
:cool:
I might well check that out.