Alan J Gerstle

@0xleegenz I have ADHD, and even with medication and coaching and medication, it is not fun. I hate the term 'neurodivergent.' Youay has well call a dead person "terminally challenged."

@AdraM98501 Where did you go?

What do you think 🤔💙

Some people will write anything to get tenure @TheOtherRBG

I am looking for a text filter that will detect the word Odyssey and hide the entire post in which it is embedded.

@TheLostElla I read an entire 26 volume edition of an encyclopedia, but I began having trouble following the plot.

What's the longest book you've ever read, and was it worth it....???

@PhysInHistory 'God does not play dice with the universe.' A. Einstein. {But he/she has been known to play a few hands of poker}

"The basic laws of the universe are simple, but because our senses are limited, we can't grasp them. There is a pattern in creation." - A. Einstein

@Acyn Watters could use a good kick in the ass and I would be more than happy to provide him with one.

Watters: I want to talk about these college-educated, downwardly mobile women, because it’s mostly women… You’re going to become bitter because you are single, and if you are a woman, men don’t care if you have a Ph.D. So you are going to get angry, and then you are going to get ugly, and you are going to have a bad attitude. No one wants to hire anybody with a bad attitude. Nobody wants to date anybody with a bad attitude.

@OutlawsPoetic Joseph Campbell had many good insights. However, he was a lifelong anti-semite. This was well known and he was not shy about discussing it. The mind works in interesting ways.

"Read myths. They teach you that you can turn inward, and you begin to get the message of the symbols. Read other people’s myths, not those of your own religion, because you tend to interpret your own religion in terms of facts — but if you read the other ones, you begin to get the message. Myth helps you to put your mind in touch with this experience of being alive. Myth tells you what the experience is." — Joseph Campbell

@NewYorker When tv commercials were more of an essential part of TV, it was counter productive to create TV series about poor people since if the shows attracted demographics that skewed towards people struggling financially, it wouldn't bode well for big ticket items in commercials.

Television has historically presented affluence as the norm. Recent shows like “Succession,” and “The White Lotus,” have taken this tendency even further, inviting viewers to hate the über-rich while coveting their five-star amenities. A new set of shows, however, have taken a different approach. Three new offerings center on society’s sinking middle, portraying financial woes and their resultant emotional tensions. They're also the best series of the year thus far, Inkoo Kang writes. Read about how “DTF St. Louis,” “Beef,” and “The Comeback” feel tailor-made to meet our moment of inflation anxiety, affordability crises, and fiscal doomerism: newyorker.com/culture/on-tel…

@jhendersonYT Sounds good. Did you have a good teacher?

My book on autodidacticism and the contemplative life has a cover now. Featuring Aristotle, Arendt, Montaigne, and many more. Coming in February.

I attended the first night the Film Forum opened in NYC. I think it was on 88th Street and their was a doc called 'Chicken Soup.' @FilmForumNYC

@Oklahoma_Brave People are so hung up about names. If someone is American, it means they were named after an Italian.

Just a FYI for those interested, only liberal clowns care if you call us "Indians". We don't mind. The best way to refer to us collectively is by our nation. 99% of us never gave any thought to the Redskins, and all my friends thought changing the name was the bigger slap in the face. We don't care if hot White/Adian/Hispanic chicks dress up as NDNs. Just so long as they're hot. We don't really care if you call us Chief, but Tonto will probably earn you a punch. We remain the demographic that enlists in the military more than any other, but rates of domestic violence and other crimes on the reservations continue to be a major problem, indicating that maybe it's not the best way to go. NDNs like Whites, Asians and Hispanics. We're not as relaxed around Blacks and we generally really hate [dot] Indians. Sometimes in film and TV shows you'll see NDNs wearing what may seem like a strange mix of western and classically Native attire. This isn't a mistake. Around the time that the first Yellowstone prequel was set, the majority of Comanche wore "mixed" White/Hispanic and Native clothing. Interestingly, at the same time, the bulk of the Navajo were stubbornly clinging to buckskins and furs. Just some trivia for you.

@letterboxd @IndieFilmCom Blue Ruin was a good movie. I don't think many people saw it.

Ten films that influenced Potsy Ponciroli’s Motor City. 💥 View the list and accompanying notes here: boxd.it/VBEss Motor City is in theaters this Friday via @IndieFilmCom

@jhendersonYT It depends on how many languages you know already. I know someone who learned to speak Spanish in two hours but she is an outlier.

Realistically, how long would it take me to go from zero knowledge of Greek to being able to read Homer?

@mikemovies I saw him in Return of the Secaucus Seven.

Is it fair to put Chris Cooper in this category?

Who is a character actor who has delivered consistently excellent, scene-stealing work for years without ever becoming a household name, and deserves far more recognition?

@mikemovies I have a Ph.D. in Linguistics and I'm not a nerd.

I should mention that the science elements are excellent. Plenty of microbiology, astronomy, and nitty-gritty physics and even linguistics stuff for the nerds.

I watched PROJECT HAIL MARY [2026] last night. Going into it, I was a little skeptical that the Gosling™️ brand of humor would be too much, or the heartstring-tugging might be too heavy. I was proven wrong by a very well-balanced combination of those elements that drew me into this movie and kept me hooked. Truth be told, I shed tears a couple times. It's tough to get me that emotionally invested, especially for a CGI alien! But the writing was tight and thoughtful, never heavy-handed, and how the story unfolded and where it led was solidly and satisfactorily executed. I would definitely rewatch, and I recommend to all movie fans, not just sci-fi lovers.

@etrommater @bernardtjoy I have seen representative films from these film movements, but I don't find them to have much breadth of distribution. Although they offer a different form & function than mainstream film, their viewership has not had much impact.

@ajgerstle @bernardtjoy Neo-realism and Commedia all'italiana, Poetic Realism in France, The Pure Film Movement in Japan, Free Cinema in Britain, Third Cinema in Africa and many more examples. I don't pay for X so I don't have enough characters to list them all.

When would you say the infantilisation of cinema audiences began?

@SusanSavageLee1 Not discussing my current writing projects to others.

What writing habits helped you improve the fastest? #writingq #WritingCommunity

@Chaleck @DannyDrinksWine I'll mention one last thing about Mitchum. I have a friend who worked with Mitchum on one of his last films. He mentioned Mitchum repeatedly used the "N" word & "J" word on set. Typecasting I guess.

@ajgerstle @DannyDrinksWine Mitchum in Cape Fear & Night of the Hunter defined bad guy cred. De Niro is a poser by comparison.

This eerie 10-minute sequence in "Cape Fear" (1991), where Robert De Niro's 'Max Cady' tricks Juliette Lewis' 'Danielle' into meeting with him at the high school is what convinced Martin Scorsese to do the movie. He considers it "the crux" of the entire film and said, “It was the scene that made me make the movie. I realized if I can pull off that scene, with the actors and the writer, it'd be great." De Niro explained that he wanted Max Cady to have the ability perform Charles Manson-like “mind trips” on his victims. So, he felt the necessity to have this scene. Lewis said, "When [the scene] was over, it was like I had to come down. I just went straight to [De Niro] and said, 'God, that was fun.'” The sequence became one of the film's most talked-about moments and helped Lewis nab an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress. When Spielberg and De Niro were trying to convince Scorsese to direct the picture over dinner, he rejected it as he "didn't want to get involved in remakes. It's a really difficult thing to do, especially if [the original film] is a good picture.” To convince him somehow, Spielberg said to him, "Listen, if you don't like the script, you can rewrite it." Scorsese, who was suffering from fatigue after post-production work on "Goodfellas" (1990) jokingly said that he had forgotten about that part (Screenwriting) of the process. Martin Scorsese said high-energy chase sequences like this weren’t in his filmmaking wheelhouse, and he praised Spielberg for doing scenes like that “so beautifully,” while claiming his approach would have “become a cliche. I couldn't even bring myself to think about doing that sort of thing.” There wasn't any preparation for the scene. It was done in one take. About filming the scene, Scorsese said, "We froze and it was like magic." ("'Cape Fear' at 30: Why Martin Scorsese Needed Convincing to Direct Iconic Thriller (Flashback)", Joe Bergren, ET, 2021)

@praxiss I think Orwell 's statement, "Anything worth writing about is worth writing about clearly" is all one needs to say on the subject.

This is one of my favorite papers because it calls out the biggest bluff in academia: the idea that sounding complicated is the same thing as having “intellectual depth.”

@adrianmckinty @AlanJParks I thought the bargain decal on the dust jacket was part of the art direction.

@AlanJParks what are you going to spend that 3 quid you saved on?

Looking forward to this....