The collector's set André Gregory & Wallace Shawn: 3 Films-including MY DINNER WITH ANDRÉ, VANYA ON 42ND STREET, and A MASTER BUILDER-is now available from the Criterion Collection.
My Dinner With Andre was the first time in my life that I felt familiarity with another person in relation to my own inner thoughts and feelings which I've had for so long now. It was truly a gift and I was honestly in tears of relief, just knowing there were other people out there who actually and honestly spoke of these things with one another. It's so difficult to do today, most people either don't care, have time/energy/capacity to do so and it's been a struggle to deal with internally for decades. So glad for this film, it was truly stimulating and just astonishing intellectual provocation I simply thrive in. Thank you Mr. Gregory and Mr. Shawn.
I could listen to Wallace Shawn talk forever! There doesn't seem to be a minute that he's not contemplating something. His mind and his senses are constantly working.
I would love to meet up with these three to share a bottle of wine and just listen. Shawn was one of the best things on young Sheldon and his pairing with Annie Potts was genius casting!
Maybe because their stimulating head waiter at the upscale restaurant has passed. And fresh, non-GMO, natural, free-range quail are only available during the quail-hunting season.
I once briefly walked behind a college age woman, just by chance, we were going in the same direction, she was on her phone, and in the course of 2 minutes said "like" 30 times. there were so many I felt compelled to count.
It's so sad when I'm having what I feel is a deep conversation with someone and then, about a minute in, I ask their opinion and all they can tell me is how many times I've said 'like'. I understand people's issues with the word, but I find the observation is very surface level and rude.
I love so much about Fran Lebowitz but she has such a disdain for "fly over country." She doesn't believe there are any good colleges between NY and LA.
Fran Lebowitz is such a brilliant thinker and talker. I love her on the Q and As. Of course, she is the A.I don't care for this interview piece though.
I'm a fan of Fran Lebowitz but she's a terrible interviewer... if you watch the whole interview on the Criterion Channel she keeps trying to push her own (and sometimes hackneyed) points and doesn't let Wally and André talk. This is not about you!
Stoner talk for some, I imagine. One should consider contemporary psychopathy and the new brain that's been designed by our times. If something is classic in it's depiction of the human condition, you need to consider the reorganized shapes of humanity that do not hold the form of the known. Are there stories of antipathy and conditioning from the Iliad that parallel ours situation now, being surrounded by technology? Even things can be thought of in traditional limitation, what of the net of consciousness we have now that gets tossed into our reality? If there's a hole in that net, nothing smaller than that hole will be captured. And nothing larger than that net will be either. Look at Donald Trump's brain. What I may be saying is that there will always be humans that go their own way; that have sociopathic tendencies that have been enhanced by our systems. I realize our minds are millions of years in development, but I also see how malleable they are. In the future, parts of our brains may go dormant.
sclogse1 > Narrow talk by ironically parochial intellectuals living in the great metropolis of New York City (Manhattan -- Upper East Side). The human brain, mind and consciousness are demonstrably malleable, flexible, fluid, plastic and responsive. Individuals who have become partly or totally robotic or zombie-like will not notice. The discussants are not The Three Stooges or The Three Blind Mice, but they appear to be three relatively clueless souls. Our reptilian brain includes the main structures found in a reptile's brain: the brain-stem and the cerebellum. The limbic brain emerged in the first mammals. It can record memories of behaviors that produced agreeable and disagreeable experiences, so it is responsible for what are called emotions in human beings. At this time, based on verified scientific research documents publicly available on the internet, highly advanced technology is being applied to human beings that morphs them into transhuman robots as a result of the pandemic "injection" of nano-scale chemical compounds and biological entities that create the Intrabody Nanonetwork and Internet of Bodies which connect all human beings in one global A.I. network for remote, continuous, global surveillance and control of all thought, speech and behavior. Those who have taken the injections and use an internet-connected cellphone literally will no longer have a mind of their own.
0:24 - Important observation by Lebowitz that underscores why this material should still be taught in schools, regardless of student attempts at “decolonization”. Because whether it’s the colonizer or the colonized, human nature indeed does not change.
spb 78 > This conversation among three intellectuals expresses opinions, not facts. It has been reasonably argued that so-called "human nature" is not a fixed thing. Rather, human beings are a part of nature, and all things in existence in our universe are connected in the energy field; and thus human beings are not apart from nature, which puts humanity in the position of dominating nature following the biblical command. In this sense, so-called human nature is fluid, plastic, dynamic and responsive to the rest of nature, just as the human mind and human consciousness is malleable and can grow and develop.
COMMON GROUND IS SOCIAL ILLUSION André Gregory and Wallace Shawn have two things in common on which they base their dinner conversation in MDWA. First, they both have a love of the theater. "All the world is a stage" as Shakespeare wrote. The art of the theater is the art of imitation of life, of staging scenes by actors who play the role of characters. At the time of MDWA, Wallace was an unemployed playwright, and André was a play director who taught workshops on acting and directing. Second, they both said that the goal of their work was to "wake up" more people. Ironically, both Wallace and André create illusions to "wake up" their audiences from their illusions, and more ironically, neither of them was fully awake in MDWA or in this later interview. Being "awake" or in a conscious state of mind is measured better on a spectrum or continuum than a polar dichotomy. Very few individuals have fully integrated their unconscious mind with their conscious mind in the Jungian sense. In addition, an individual can be fully conscious only in the present moment here now, which is real, not in the past of memories or the future of plans and wishes, which are not real, but illusions. Furthermore, all words and alphabets are man-made inventions that are not real; rather, they are illusions like magic. In MDWA, André mentions a several examples of his experience of "being really alive", but they fall somewhere in the middle of the awake-asleep continuum. In one example, his hands began shaking involuntarily, an allusion to the ecstatic dancing of the Egyptian Therapeutics in their ritualistic dancing to raise their energy frequency vibrations to a peak, as demonstrated by Helena-Salome, "daughter" of King Herod the Great, a/k/a "Jezebell", who danced seductively for Herod and pleased him enough to reward her with the literal head of John the Baptist on a platter. In another example, he experienced Tantra practices. And in yet another example, he practiced meditation, seemingly without knowing that meditation of any kind is useless at best or even counter-productive without prior inner work to remove the energy blocks, as described by Wilhelm Reich, Chris Thomas and Carl Jung. Meaning, purpose and goals are creations of the ego-mind, where the world "ego" is the idea of separation from the whole, which is impossible and thus an illusion, not real. His other examples of various forms of questioning, "Who am I, whither, what and whence"" were weaker than these, and merely suggested the possibility of an ultimate reality that is deeper or higher than the reality that is socially constructed by all persons. If André and Wallace really wanted to see their true identities, which takes great courage, they could cut to the chase and ingest LSD in two sessions, spaced about six months apart. That has the potential of self-realization, self-actualization and experience of the super-conscious state of consciousness which is the highest point of awareness on the spectrum.
Wallace Shawn, a declared socialist who did not think twice before cashing Disney checks. André Gregory, the theater unknown. Fran Lebowitz, the lesbian without a mobile phone who only got her 15 minutes thanks to Scoresese.
FL's "15 minutes" may be new to you but in fact she's been active and prominent in the world of writing, cultural criticism and commentary, and the arts for nearly 40 years. That's YEARS, not minutes. So please understand that while *you* may have only become aware of this icon due to her latest project, which also involves Scorsese, some of us have known, loved, and revered her as the genius she is for decades. Your remarks about Shawn and Gregory are similarly inaccurate. I do not wonder why.
@@l.a.8475 She's been on the NY Times Bestseller List, and has literally made millions on the lecture circuit. But the original poster was correct about one thing: she doesn't own a cell phone.
