TCA Press tour is low-level insanity. No time during the day to do anything but go to sessions and write about them. No time even to write anything but sentence fragments.
Except to transcribe this passage from Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay "History," which reminded me of you know what:
"There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same. He that is once admitted to the right of reason is made a freeman of the whole estate. What Plato has thought, he may think; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has befallen any man, he can understand. Who has access to this universal mind is a party to all that is or can be done, for this is the only and sovereign agent.
"Of the works of this mind history is the record. Its genius is illustrated by the entire series of days. Man is explicable by nothing less than all his history. Without hurry, without rest, the human spirit goes forth from the beginning to embody every faculty, every thought, every emotion which belongs to it, in appropriate events…
"The human mind wrote history, and this must read it. The Sphinx must solve her own riddle. If the whole of history is in one man, it is all to be explained from individual experience. There is a relation between the hours of our life and the centuries of time. As the air I breathe is drawn from the great repositories of nature, as the light on my book is yielded by a star a hundred million of miles distant, as the poise of my body depends on the equilibrium of centrifugal and centripetal forces, so the hours should be instructed by the ages and the ages explained by the hours. Of the universal mind each individual man is one more incarnation. All its properties consist in him. Every step in his private experience flashes a light on what great bodies of men have done, and the crises of his life refer to national crises. Every revolution was first a thought in one man's mind, and when the same thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that era."
And now I must go. I am late to an E! press conference featuring Ryan Seacrest.
Emerson certainly comes to mind when considering Malick; so does, as pointed out in your review, Whitman, and Thoreau as well.
And then there's E!.
Wasn't that Emerson's nickname in college?
Nothing much to say except to chuckle at the jump from Emerson to that far more current muse, Seacrest. (You can guess which of them has the higher Q rating.)
From E! to Q. What are you, a sound engineer?
Logically I should be too tired to laugh at that. Maybe that's why it got an absolute ROAR. I always did believe in defying the odds.
(Sound engineering? Ha, ME? Sometimes I'm with John Cleese as described by one of his Python cohorts: "he doesn't even see the point of stereo." If I can hear it and it sounds right, good enough.)
(Actually I've sat in on more than one Hollywood scoring session, including a SIMPSONS; it was amusing that of all the gawkers, I was the only one who even recognized Yeardley Smith; and it's remarkable what they (studio musicians and conductors, pros from way back) can hear that you couldn't in a million years. Well, that's why they are musicians and we are not. Other than those of you reading this who ARE musicians, of course.)
(Final note about Yeardley Smith, aka Lisa Simpson: she is tiny and cute and shy in a charming way, and at that time, she drove a little unassuming bright red hatchback that had one of those unauthorized Lisa Simpson sticky-toys in her back window.)