Plastic Quotes - page 17
This mechanical element, which one is sorry to see disappear from the screen, and which one is impatient to see again, is discreet; it appears only at intervals, and far off, like a spotlight that flashes on in a long, intermittent, harrowing drama of totally uncompromising realism. The plastic event is non-the less there and seems to me be laden with consequences both in itself and for the future. [on the filming of Abel Gance's La Roue, 1922].
Fernand Léger
Parker saw his first ASP unit in a Texas shantytown called Judy's Jungle. It was a massive console cased in cheap plastic chrome. A ten-dollar bill fed into the slot bought you five minutes of free-fall gymnastics in a Swiss orbital spa, trampolining through twenty-meter perihelions with a sixteen-year-old Vogue model, heady stuff for the Jungle, where it was simpler to buy a gun than a hot bath.
William Gibson
Glenn brought an extraordinary awareness and imagination – he had a very plastic mind - and he was capable of growing, of changing too. Bach offers a very rich field for differentiation of approaches because he was so unspecific about what he did, in terms of performance. But every time one plays a piece, it's an opportunity not so much to go where the composer didn't, but to come closer to what one conceives of as being the experience of the composer or the intention of the composer.
Glenn Gould
Inasmuch as the soul is present, there will be power not confident but agent. To talk of reliance is a poor external way of speaking. Speak rather of that which relies, because it works and is. Who has more obedience than I masters me, though he should not raise his finger. Round him I must revolve by the gravitation of spirits. We fancy it rhetoric, when we speak of eminent virtue. We do not yet see that virtue is Height, and that a man or a company of men, plastic and permeable to principles, by the law of nature must overpower and ride all cities, nations, kings, rich men, poets, who are not.
This is the ultimate fact which we so quickly reach on this, as on every topic, the resolution of all into the ever-blessed ONE. Self-existence is the attribute of the Supreme Cause, and it constitutes the measure of good by the degree in which it enters into all lower forms. All things real are so by so much virtue as they contain.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Dr. Plot, in his 'Natural History of Oxfordshire.' (1677) attributed to a 'plastic virtue latent in the earth' the origin of fossil shells and fishes; and Lister, to his accurate account of British shells, in 1678, added the fossil species, under the appellation of turbinated and bivalve stones. 'Either,' said he, 'these were terriginous, or if otherwise, the animals they so exactly represent have become extinct. This writer appears to have been the first who was aware of the continuity over large districts of the principal groups of strata in the British series, and who proposed the construction of regular geological maps.
Charles Lyell
In the flesh Vladimir Putin is nattily-dressed, very short and a dead ringer for an Auton, the ultra-creepy monsters in Doctor Who that morph into wheelie-bins and gobble you up and spit you out as plastic. His cosmetic surgery is not a great advert for Botox but if you get to be the master of the Kremlin no one's going to tell you your skin-job sucks.
John Sweeney (journalist)
If I had to pick one year to represent the Fifties, I'd pick 1958. For one thing, it was the year that the folks at Wham-O, always looking for new ways to raise the level of American culture, gave us the Hula Hoop. This was a bright-colored plastic hoop that you spun around your hips using a hula-type motion. I realize that this sounds stupid, but you must trust me when I tell you, as one who participated extensively in this fad, that it really was stupid. In terms of intellectual content, the Hula Hoop made the Frisbee look like international championship chess.
Dave Barry
