The Tarantino Terminal State ; also known as Gauss' Queasiness in a different field.

Let's start with that different field, tis older (and please excuse the structure).

• gabriel_laddel "On the historical evidence I shall be short. Carl Friedrich Gauss, the Prince of Mathematicians but also somewhat of a coward, was certainly aware of the fate of Galileo —and could probably have predicted the calumniation of Einstein— when he decided to suppress his discovery of non-Euclidean geometry, thus leaving it to Bolyai and Lobatchewsky to receive the flak. It is probably more illuminating to go a little bit further back, to the Middle Ages. One of its characteristics was that 'reasoning by analogy' was rampant; another characteristic was almost total intellectual stagnation, and we now see why the two go together. A reason for mentioning this is to point out that, by developing a keen ear for unwarranted analogies, one can detect a lot of medieval thinking today." -- cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/
  • mircea_popescu for the record, ascribing purpose to phenomena is basically animism 2.0, and just as medieval as the other thing. for all you know gauss was not "a bit of a coward", and your p[rojection into the future whebn discussing einstein more indicative of an anachronistic mind than some sort of valuable intuition. for all you know gauss just didn't think the idiots around him were worthy of being told about it. for all you know the notions of "progress and science" incumbent in the perspective you propose are so much masturbatory jizz, and in point of fact intelligent people share their thoughts exactly like a comedian shares his routine : to friends, in a social environment, for the same reasons in the same ways.
    • asciilifeform this is an excellent point, and the standard narrative of 'progress, science' is very much reminiscent of the old claptrap re: 'building communism together!!11!!!11' see also canonical thread :

      asciilifeform: people who regularly have ideas usually have fat notebooks full of strange. when these get published posthumously, quite a bit of strange is revealed. e.g. karl friedrich gauss had a big fat binder that contained, among other things, both types of non-euclidean geometry. but it also had a good bit of crap. hard to find good material about an inventor's 'dwarf star' phase because the real demented folks inevitably pick it up and add flourishes of their own. some 'idea people' don't have these 'coffin liner' binders, they just publish everything, and tend to end badly. oliver heaviside's notebooks, it is said, stoked a furnace for many years. (heaviside, the fellow who turned maxwell's equations from 23 in about that many unknowns, into the 4 that we learn in school, and coughed up terms like 'impedance'). re: invention, for the impatient: the greatest heroes who ever lived, who none of us are fit even to be beheaded by, had terrible signal-to-noise ratios, because that's simply how it works. the most one can hope for is to get one or two major ideas 'out'. if you dive into the binders, you're almost certainly doomed to be lost in the noise. if you don't believe this, get thee to a dusty book store and buy bucky fuller's 'synergetics' I and II. that was his coffin notebook, that some lost soul printed up. more or less unreadable - as they tend to be, using 1000s of terms known only to the dead man. after all, he was writing for his own self. you can try to read this stuff and make sense of it, but more often than not you'll just be 'rorschaching' your own mind.

Quentin Tarantino went through the exact same process : started a director's career late in life, burned incredibly hotⁱ for a few brief years, then went away in the saddest quagmire of animated Kill Bill and pointlessly insane that-other-thing-with-nazis-or-niggers-or-whatever-it-was.

It'd be heartbreaking to watch, I suppose, if film critics actually had a heart somewhere among that writhing mass of all-consuming tentacles. As it is, we don't care, and this article isn't about Tarantino anyway, not any more than it's about Gauss at any rate. In fact, this article is about Giuseppe Tornatore, not that you'd have guessed by the title.

Giuseppe Tornatore is, or should I rather say was, a contemporary Italian director with all the talent, with all the wisdom, with the fine eye and the careful hand of the greats of his nation (such as Visconti). So when I saw the very deeply inept "The Legend of 1900" a coupla days ago I was displeased, but nothing too serious - certainly nothing a slice of pie can't fix.

Unfortunately, I've also just seen The Best Offer, and with that my gullet turned. Imagine : the supposedly expertly expert dude looking through a field magnifier with his glasses on. That's how you use those things! Imagine - the office staff trained to such a point of absurdity that they know not to pick up the first phone call on the guy's birthday. As rare as this feat may be (trust me, I'd know), at the same time the most senior fellow in that lot insists against his master's wishes, three times. Three fucking times, I'd have skinned him alive. Why ? To blather out the ridiculously contrived, nonsensical story of some woman nobody knows.

Imagine, the pretentious, insane ruler of some sort of insignificant domain (art auctions o.O) becoming somehow so important in the world that whatever random waiters in some restaurant cater to him like he's Messiah. Not in his field, nobody cares about the head of Sotheby's anymore than they'd care about the CEO of some obscure midwestern electricity co. Imagine, the pretentious, insane auction house strategist being too important to appear in person for a first evaluation, then breaking that. And for that matter - not being too important to hold the fucking auction personally. Because yeah, that's how it goes, the hospital director doesn't have the time to do guard duty (hey, never trust a hospital where the director isn't a doctor, or where any doctors get to skip guard), but he personally supervises materials delivery and unloading every day. That'll go over well.

Imagine for that matter the deeply poor taste of naming the aspirant "Oldman". Or for that matter the extreme poor taste of pretty much every single choice made throughout the construction of this whole movie. It is sad to see how low this fellow sunk - I understand he lives among UStards and expects to eat out of their money, but a scarcely less satisfactory excuse for the immund offal he's been peddling could be had.

It happens, and it especially happens to people. What can you do ?

1. Hot enough to create a career for nobodies like John Travolta, and in the process burning off the greatest of existing taboos in the field. Supposedly "luck" aka the good fortune of being in communion with overpowering talent could make an anonymous blondy's career, but not even god himself should be able to re-start the career of a has-been. Except in this particular case, the Tarantino-power come-back of Travolta was degrees of magnitude above his original foray. Such deeds are nothing short of miraculous, in the most plain reading of the term "miraculous".

   Also hot enough to have blazed a trail for assorted imitators, such as Madge's boyfriend back in London. His early work, while exquisite and certainly in a different time able to stand in for a masterpiece nevertheless magically went away at the same time Tarantino went away. Is this a coincidence, then ? Or is Guy Ritchie merely a large sort of gas giant, a Jupiter which could readily be mistaken for luminous should light off the actual star fall on it just right ? [↩]