Transcribed Inspiration

Passages from films I’ve found particular poignant / relevant / inspiring of late.
Adaptation
John Larouche’s pollination monologue

Note: skip to 3-minute mark
“Point is what’s so wonderful is that every one of these flowers has a specific relationship with the insect that pollinates it. There’s a certain orchid looks exactly like a certain insect, so the insect is drawn to this flower, its double, its soul-mate, and wants nothing more than to make love to it. After, the insect flies off, spots another soul-mate flower, and makes love to it, thus pollinating it. And neither the flower nor the insect will ever understand the significance of their lovemaking. I mean how could they know that because of their little dance the world lives, but it does. By simply doing what they’re designed to do something large and magnificent happens. In this sense they show us how to live, how the only barometre you have is your heart. How, when you spot your flower, you can’t let anything get in your way.”
The Devil in Denim: Spider
By Carson Mells

BOBBY BIRD
Me and my new friend Rodney Buckinghorse had just been let out of a dryin’ out clinic in Fresno and were fighting ourselves with sugar, each of us with our own pie. I was telling old Rodney that as far as Rock was concerned we were in a pussy period.
RODNEY BUCKINGHORSE
What’s a Pussy Period?
BOBBY BIRD
Pussy Period is where music sounds like it’s being made by a guy who was breast fed till the age of 12 playing a $20,000 guitar with mittens on while the sound engineer squeezes his balls with one hand and cools them with a Chinese fan with the other.
RODNEY BUCKINGHORSE
What do you think Rock ‘n’ Roll should sound like?
BOBBY BIRD
I think Rock ‘n’ Roll should sound like a wad of jagged of steel rolling down the highway spitting hot glass on the broken rocks. And at the centre of this, the nucleus to this, is the softest woman the world has ever seen, open motherly arms and just a whiff of sex. And then what does this fucking genius do? This awesome Indian with a feather in his hair to tell you Yes I am a native American and Yes fuck you for taking my land? He turns over his napkin and makes a perfect drawing of exactly what I’m talking about. Then outside guy just peels off his shirt like we’re going swimming and shows me his tattoo, tells me: ‘I know Rock ‘n’ Roll, also.’
So what do yo do after that? Your first night back in society after 48 days straight talking about your feelings, three point five pounds of cherry pie in your gut. I tell you what you do: you take that drawing to the first tattoo artist you see even if he does look like some Alfred E. Newman nightmare and you tell him ‘Put this shit smack dab in the middle of my chest.’
And what does he do? He fucks it up.
Then what do you do after that? Well two months later you meet a decent tattoo artist living out of the back of his van and you trade him two cases of Bud to turn it into a spider. And there you are, walking around a spider on your chest, everyone thinking, ‘Wow, that guy really digs spiders.’
Stephen Fry on language
From Episode 3 of his ‘podgram’
“Words are your birthright unlike music, painting, dance and raffia are work [raffi artwork?], you don’t have to be taught any part of language or buy any equipment to use it. All the power of it was in you from the moment the head of daddy’s little wiggler fused with the wall of mommy’s little bubble. So use it. Use it. If you’ve got it, use it. Don’t be afraid of it it, don’t believe it belongs to anyone else, don’t let anyone bully you into believing that there are rules and secrets of grammar and verbal deployment that you are not privy to. ”
Via BoingBoing
From Comfort with meaninglessness the key to good programmers
“To write a computer program you have to come to terms with this, to accept that whatever you might want the program to mean, the machine will blindly follow its meaningless rules and come to some meaningless conclusion. In the test the consistent group showed a pre-acceptance of this fact: they are capable of seeing mathematical calculation problems in terms of rules, and can follow those rules wheresoever they may lead. The inconsistent group, on the other hand, looks for meaning where it is not. The blank group knows that it is looking at meaninglessness, and refuses to deal with it.”
Malcolm Galdwell
From his blog, adding after-notes to Outliers
” What makes an idea thought-provoking, to my mind, is the extent to which we are forced to make an effort to assimilate apparently contradictory or at least antagonistic notions. Roger Martin, the dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, has a wonderful book out on this very idea (“The Opposable Mind”). He argues that what distinguishes successful business leaders is their ability to reconcile apparently irreconcilable options. ”