Wes Vs. P.T.

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004)

Ned Plimpton: I'm gonna fight you, Steve.
[Steve hits Ned in the face]
Steve Zissou: You never say, "I'm gonna fight you, Steve." You just smile and act natural, and then you sucker-punch him.
Ned Plimpton: You fight your way, and I'll fight mine.
Steve Zissou: Oh, listen, Ned. Don't you try to...
[Ned hits Steve in the face]
Steve Zissou: I think your Team Zissou ring might've caught me on the lip.

Festival Director: [translating] That's an endangered species at most. What would be the scientific purpose of killing it?
Steve Zissou: Revenge.

Steve Zissou: Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go on an overnight drunk, and in 10 days I'm going to set out to find the shark that ate my friend and destroy it. Anyone who wants to tag along is more than welcome.

Steve Zissou: Don't point that gun at him, he's an unpaid intern.

Steve Zissou: Anne-Marie, do all the interns get Glocks?
Anne-Marie Sakowitz: No, they all share one.

Steve Zissou: Where'd you come from? You look pregnant.
Jane Winslett-Richardson: I am pregnant. I'm not even going to ask what you men are doing out here in your matching pajamas, by the way.

Ned Plimpton: Stevesy, what's going on? Are those hijackers?
Steve Zissou: Well, out here we call them "pirates," Ned.

Steve Zissou: Supposedly Cousteau and his cronies invented the idea of putting walkie-talkies into the helmet. But we made ours with a special rabbit ear on the top so we could pipe in some music.

Ned Plimpton: You don't know me, you don't want to know me... I'm just a character in your stupid film.

Steve Zissou: This bull dyke's got something against us.
Ned Plimpton: I don't think she's a lesbian. She's pregnant.

Steve Zissou: Are you finding what you were looking for... out here with me? I hope so.

Punch-Drunk Love (2002)

Barry: Healthy Choice and American Airlines got together and put this promotion: If you buy any 10 Healthy Choice products, they will reward you with 500 frequent flier miles; with this special coupon, they'll up it to 1,000 miles. So, I think they are trying to push their teriyaki chicken which is $1.79, but I went to the supermarket and I looked around and I saw that they had pudding... for 25¢ a cup... comes in packages of four. But insanely... the barcodes... are on the individual cups! So, quarter a cup, say you bought $2.50 worth. That's worth 500... with the coupon it's 1,000 miles. It's a marketing mistake but I'm taking advantage of it. If you were to spend $3,000, that would get you a million frequent flier miles. You would never have to pay for a ticket the rest of your life.
Lena: You... you bought all that pudding so that you could get frequent flier miles?

Barry: I have to get more pudding for this trip to Hawaii. As I just said that out loud I realize it sounded a little strange but it's not.

Barry: I didn't do anything. I'm a nice man. I mind my own business. So you tell me 'that's that' before I beat the hell from you. I have so much strength in me you have no idea. I have a love in my life. It makes me stronger than anything you can imagine. I would say 'that's that', Mattress Man.

Barry: I'm lookin' at your face and I just wanna smash it. I just wanna fuckin' smash it with a sledgehammer and squeeze it. You're so pretty.
Lena: I want to chew your face, and I want to scoop out your eyes and I want to eat them and chew them and suck on them.
[pause]
Barry: OK. This is funny. This is nice.

Barry: I didn't ask for a shrink - that must've been somebody else. Also, that pudding isn't mine. Also, I'm wearing this suit today because I had a very important meeting this morning and I don't have a crying problem.

Barry: I don't know if there is anything wrong because I don't know how other people are.

Barry: [out of breath to his love Lena] Lena. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry I left you at the hospital. I called a phone-sex line... I called a phone-sex line before I met you, and four blond brothers came after me and they hurt you, and I'm sorry. Then I had to leave again because I wanted to make sure you never got hurt again. And I have a lot of puddings, and in six to eight weeks it can be redeemed. So if you could just give me that much time, I think I can get enough mileage to go with you wherever you go if you have to travel for your work. Because I don't ever want to be anywhere without you. So could you just let me redeem the mileage?

I've been meaning to write this blog for some time, I saw the Darjeeling Limited the New Wes Anderson film a couple of weeks ago and both these guys have a handle on saying yo um... what the fuck, and I don't think that's what they mean to say, but then again I've never met them so I don't know. But regardless, the topic for today for them is identity. Their pictures in my opinion are identifiably their pictures. Both of these directors say their piece that is distictively their pictures. They have this way of awkwardly telling a story that is unsubtly their story. I like them both, except for PT's magnolia which I've taken hard-core criticism for not enjoying or relating to. Maybe I'll watch it again.

In my opinion, they have their identities on lock down. They tell the story cinematically, and visually the way I believe they wrote it without having to give up any artistic interpretation to anyone. Their weird but not too F'en weird that you can't enjoy it.

I've been reading a book. " How to be an adult in relationships". My cousin gave it to me last christmas and I believe it took till now to feel well enough to crack it open. It's brilliant in a lot of different ways. On one way it helps you get in touch with yourself and actually open up to way the criticism of others of you. What it has done also is give way to let go of my ego, which I think as good as my european experience was, my ego has gotten worse while I was there. I don't know how or why. I did'n't accomplish anything I set out to accomplish but I believe I adapted many of the locals traits and ego was definitel;y one of them. I thought it was pride. Nope it was ego, which I guess they are similiar in some ways, none of them good.

Even though I wouldn't say I'm happy persay since I've come home, I am content. I started a new script that I believe will be a good start before I attempt daydreams (another script) this summer. I'm moving in the same direction I was a year before I left, and crazy as it may soud, I'm happy with that. I'm content and happy that I'm back on track. I know how to do this, beyond what's been said of how it is done or could be done. I know my mistakes with this better then trying to understand my mistakes with people. I look to books and knowledge from now on to try and understand those. I believe the trial and error from here on out should be isolated into what I'm trying to make, what is the message I'm trying to say. How will it be recieved. On that notion I'm there, I'm getting good.

It's a harmony. Two voices, different pitch, singing the same words but singing, saying, speaking, conveying, differently. It is the most important. I feel it, like it is right. Like when we release this film it will be a black tie affair. Please come ;) Essentially, film wise, we will fix all the mistakes of before plus my charachters will have solid motivations, and those motivations will bring to life a much different way of life then you or I are accustomed to. I believe it, this picture will bring to life the simple pleasures of our lives. That is my disertation. What simplicity has to offer. I gotta say this off the last post, I just have to, cause I have no tact, god knows if I ever will, but when I say simplicity, or better yet when I call myself a name like truth, I think that truth is feeling. I believe in it like faith, like religon, and that faith and religon makes a certain set of oppertunities availible and those oppertunities will not have to be said, perhaps making the situation less truthful according to some, but those emotions that drove all of it into play, they were, they are.

Makes a bit of a contrast doesn't it.... Well it's pitch ain't so tightly threaded. I will cats cradle it before the day is through cause hey.. umm this is like my life and this is like the time that I need to understand it. I have a saying up on my myspace. Life isn't about finding who you are, life is about creating who you are. That saying, me tattooing "know thyself" on my arm, it's a process. I can't say for certain that these twon dudes that I've seen all their movies have it but what I can say is that they are still tring to do it. And I admire it. It's raining out, hard-core and shawshank redemption is playing, off the player, I recommend you listen to it, when it came on I stopped typing and went outside in the middle of the street and took on that rain. It felt soooo right, sooo now!

Kill The Batman

Batman (1989)

The Joker: Haven't you ever heard of the healing power of laughter?

The Joker: I have given a name to my pain, and it is Batman.

Knox: You know what they say? They say he can't be killed. They say he drinks blood. They say...
Eckhardt: I say... you're full of shit, Knox. Oh, uh, you can quote me on that.

Vicki Vale: You're insane!
Joker: I thought I was a Pisces!

The Joker: The pen, is truly mightier than the sword!

Dist. Atty. Harvey Dent: We've received a letter from Batman this morning. 'Please inform the citizens of Gotham that Gotham City has earned a rest from crime. But if the forces of evil should rise again, to cast a shadow on the heart of the city, call me.'
Alexander Knox: Question. How do we call him?
Commissioner Jim Gordon: He gave us a signal.

Vicki Vale: [distracting Joker] Mr. Joker, you say such beautiful things. Oh, you're so powerful. And purple! Oh, I love purple.
Batman: Excuse me.
[Joker looks]
Batman: Have you ever danced with the devil in the pale moonlight?

The Joker: Tell me something, my friend. You ever dance with the devil in the pale moonlight?

The Joker: Gotham City. Always brings a smile to my face.

Vicki Vale: A lot of people think you're as dangerous as the Joker.
Batman: He's psychotic.
Vicki Vale: Some people say the same thing about you.
Batman: What people?
Vicki Vale: Well, I mean, let's face it. You're not exactly normal, are you?
Batman: It's not exactly a normal world, is it?

Batman: You killed my parents.
The Joker: What? What? What are you talking about?
Batman: I made you, you made me first.
The Joker: Hey, bat-brain, I mean, I was a kid when I killed your parents. I mean, I say "I made you" you gotta say "you made me." I mean, how childish can you get?

The Joker: Joker here.
TV Technician: We got interference. Call the OB unit, will ya?
The Joker: Now you fellas have said some pretty mean things. Some of which *were* true under that fiend, Boss Grissom. He *was* a thief, and a terrorist. On the other hand he had a tremendous singing voice. He's dead now, and he's left me in charge. Now, I can be theatrical, and maybe even a little rough - but one thing I am not, is a *killer*. I am an artist. I *love* a good party. So, truce. Commence au festival!

Joker: I now do what other people only dream. I make art until someone dies. See? I am the world's first fully functioning homicidal artist.

The Dark Knight (2008)

Bruce Wayne: I knew the mob wouldn't go down without a fight. But this is different. They crossed the line.
Alfred Pennyworth: You crossed the line first, sir. You squeezed them, you hammered them. And in their desperation they turned to a man they didn't fully understand.

Gotham National Bank Manager: The criminals in this town used to believe in things. Honor. Respect. Look at you! What do you believe in? What do you believe in!
The Joker: I believe whatever doesn't kill you simply makes you... stranger.

Mayor: [regarding The Joker] What do we got?
Lt. James Gordon: Nothing. No DNA, no fingerprints. Clothing is custom, no tags or brand labels. No name, no other alias. Nothing in his pockets but knives and lint.

Bruce Wayne: People are dying, Alfred. What would you have me do?
Alfred Pennyworth: Endure, Master Wayne. Take it. He'll hate you for it. But that's the point of Batman, he can be the outcast. He can make the choice that no one else can make, the righteous.
Bruce Wayne: Well today I found out what Batman can't do. He can't endure this. Today you finally get to say "I told you so."
Alfred Pennyworth: Today, sir, I don't want to.
[pauses for several moments]
Alfred Pennyworth: But I did bloody tell you.

The Joker: [to Batman] Come on, I want you do it, I want you to do it. Come on, hit me. *Hit me!*

rvey Dent: You're Alfred, right?
Alfred Pennyworth: That's right, sir.
Harvey Dent: You've known Rachel her entire life.
Alfred Pennyworth: Well, not yet.
[chuckles]
Alfred Pennyworth: [small pause]
Harvey Dent: Any psychotic ex-boyfriends I should be aware of?
Alfred Pennyworth: Oh, you have no idea!

e Joker: Where do we begin? A year ago, these cops and lawyers wouldn't dare cross any of you. I mean, what happened? Did your - did your balls drop off? Hmm?

Two-Face: The only justice in an unfair world is chance.

The Joker: The only sensible way to live in this world is without rules!

The Joker: See, I'm not a monster...I'm just ahead of the curve.

The Joker: [speaking to Harvey] Do I really look like a man with a plan, Harvey? I don't have a plan. The mob has plans, the cops have plans. You know what I am, Harvey? I'm a dog chasing cars. I wouldn't know what to do if I caught one. I just *do* things. I'm a wrench in the gears. I *hate* plans. Yours, theirs, everyone's. Maroni has plans. Gordon has plans. Schemers trying to control their worlds. I am not a schemer. I show schemers how pathetic their attempts to control things really are. So when I say that what happened to you and your girlfriend wasn't personal, you know I'M telling the truth.
[hands Dent a gun]
The Joker: It's a schemer who put you where you are. You were a schemer. You had plans. Look where it got you. I just did what I do best-I took your plan and turned it on itself. Look what I have done to this city with a few drums of gas and a couple bullets. Nobody panics when the expected people get killed. Nobody panics when things go according to plan, even if the plans are horrifying. If I tell the press that tomorrow a gangbanger will get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will get blown up, nobody panics. But when I say one little old mayor will die, everyone loses their minds! Introduce a little anarchy, you upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos. I am an agent of chaos. And you know the thing about chaos, Harvey? It's fair.

The Joker: If you're good at something, never do it for free.

The Joker: You look nervous. Is it the scars? You want to know how I got them? Come here. Hey, look at me. So I had a wife, beautiful; like you. Who tells me, I worry too much. Who tells me, I ought to smile more. Who gambles, and gets in deep with sharks. One day they carve her face. We have no money for surgeries. She can't take it! I just want to see her smile again. I just want her to know that I don't care about the scars. So I stick a razor in my mouth and do this... to myself. And you know what? She can't stand the sight of me! She leaves. Now I see the funny side. Now I'm always smiling!
The Joker: [Rachel kicks the Joker away] A little fight in you. I like that.
Batman: Then you're going to love me.


The Joker: [Holding a knife inside Gamble's mouth] Do you want to know how I got these scars? My father was...a drinker...and a fiend. One night he goes off crazier than usual, and Mommy picks up a kitchen knife to defend herself. Well, Daddy doesn't like that. Not. One. Bit. So, me watching, he takes the knife and slices her up, laughing as he does it. And then he looks at me standing there, and says, "Why...so...serious?" And as he's walking over to me: "Why...so...serious?" And then he puts the knife in my mouth, like this, and says, "Let's put a *smile* on that face!"

The Joker: You just couldn't let me go could you? This is what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object. You truly are incorruptible aren't you? You won't kill me out of some misplaced sense of self-righteousness, and I won't kill you, because you're just too much fun. I think you and I are destined to do this forever.
Batman: You'll be in a padded cell forever.
The Joker: Maybe we can share one. Then we'll be doubling up the rate this city's inhabitants are losing their minds.


Batman: Sometimes, truth isn't good enough, sometimes people deserve more. Sometimes people deserve to have their faith rewarded.

Batman: Why do you wanna kill me?
The Joker: Kill you? I don't wanna kill you... you complete me.

I say a lot about contrast. I sit and think about it often, why people say one thing and all to often mean the exact opposite. I saw the dark knight at midnight a week ago. The first film in the longest time that I waited one hour in a line and another hour in the cineama before it came on. The advertising was seriously unreal. For a solid year I have been looking forward to this movie. I think the last movie that I went to the midnight show was Matrix revolutions and that movie fell slightly short of the expectations, so did the two towers. But the dark knight was on the money. Even if Heath didn't die the contrast is noteably. They are getting better in hollywood in that department. I know I've been sayinbg contrast all this time but what I should be saying is balence.

Balence, though not exactly a concise study more religious or buddist is so important."you just couldn't let me go could you? This is what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object. You truly are incorruptible aren't you? You won't kill me out of some misplaced sense of self-righteousness, and I won't kill you, because you're just too much fun. I think you and I are destined to do this forever." Is similiar to the matrix's pin of agent smith and neo. This is what us in the business (philosophy) call balence. This philosophy put into film isn't easy. With the lines of the original batman, which at the time and there after I loved, the idea that the joker was that batmans nemisis is doubtful. Like I don't believe it. It could be cause christian bale's batman is so modernlikely correct. That's a mouthful. The joker as well. The joker even more so I think, and I'm trying to separate feelings that I have for heath, which is hard cause he's our generation A-list talent, but more. There are a lot of A-list actors that my generation relates to, or likes but doesn't dismantle the way I think a true movie buff does.

I say true movie buff, cause in my opinion they're aren't that many of us. Especially now, and as the years catch up with us we will be replaced by better movie buffs then us. But as for right now we, movie buffs have our likes and dislikes but still have critical thinking to anchor us to what is good and what's not good. The Dark Knight and Batman begins stomps the old versions. The Val Kilmer and George clooney batmans are laughable, I'm sure reading this you who know know, they were BS marketing ploys, but the first two with michael Keaton and Tim Burton had a darkness and subtle motivation of the dark Knight. However that subtlity is trumped completely by the new installments. Completely without a doubt.

I say this because Batman, Two face, and the joker are grounded in believiable motivation. Believiable charachter driven plot. If you saw this film, movie buffs, action was the marketing, but the main reason it hasn't gotten bad critisizm is because it's charachter driven which is an indie movie thing, it's not an action movie thing. Charachter driven! It's important to highlight that. I saw Hancock the other night with my brother. As we were sitting in the movie theater he said tell me the synapsis of the dark knight cause he wasn't going to see it, he's hella busy, so I tried. And by this time I had seen it twice, and still, still had a hard time telling him the plot.

Why is that? I'd say it was because the trenches of charachter developement are so engrained in the story, the lines, and the motivation, that even after seeing it twice what exactly was going on elludes me a bit. I think I'd have to sit down with the DVD, remote in hand, a sheet of legal pad, and break that bitch down scene by scene of what was being said, done, and percieved, what the soundtrack, camera movement and guidelines told. All of it, is worth watching again, and again, and again. I say this because it's rare. I watch movies all the time and am rarely moved (with exception to love stories cause those are like my disertation or something). Anyway's contrast and balence is extremely hard to grab a handle on. It could very well just be me, but that mirror, some dark, some light, isn't ever what you think, and if capable, which I'm admitting in this moment that I'm not, at least not yet, is extremely hard to harness, but if capable, if balenced enought to see both at once and tell the story with the full force of both extremes, the impact of that message (really F'en complex) is completely worth it.

It's just like... singing, with your body. A place where there are no happily ever afters

Enchanted (2007)
Nathaniel: My most adored queen, where did you send her?
Queen Narissa: To a place where there are no happily ever afters.

Giselle: [singing] How does she know...
Robert: Awe, no, no, no.
Giselle: You love her? / How does she know...
Robert: People l-look-looking.
Giselle: She's yours?
Robert: [interrupting] Don't sing. It's OK, you know. Let's just walk. Can we walk?
Giselle: [speaks] Well, does she?
Robert: Yeah.

Prince Edward: [threatening Robert with his sword] Have you any last words before I dispatch you?
Robert: You have got to be kidding me!
Prince Edward: Strange words!

Prince Edward: [holds sword in front of construction worker's neck, trying to find Giselle] I seek a beautiful girl. My life partner, my one coquette, the answer to my love's duet.
Arty: [stuttering] I-I'd like to find one of them too, you know?

Giselle: Is that the only word you know? "No?"
Robert: No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I mean, No!
Giselle: "No! No! No!" Over and over! When you keep saying "No!" it just makes me so... Sometimes you make me so!... angry.
[laughs really hard]

Morgan Philip: Remember, when you go out not to put too much makeup otherwise the boys will get the wrong idea and you know how they are...
[off Giselle's wide-eyed look]
Morgan Philip: They're only after one thing.
Giselle: What's that?
Morgan Philip: [laughs] I don't know. Nobody will tell me.

Robert: [struggling to break free of her grasp] You're crazy!
Queen Narissa: No. Spiteful, vindictive, *very large*, but never crazy.

Nathaniel: [talking on the phone while in a taxi cab] No, uh... I've always treated her like a queen, but... lately I'm starting to feel there's this whole other side to her, like I... I don't even know her anymore.
Radio Therapist: [over the radio] I think you need to take her aside and find out how she really feels about you.
Queen Narissa: [peeks in through open taxi cab window] Hello, Worthless. Miss me?

Giselle: Why are you staring at me?
Robert: I don't know. It's just that... it's like you escaped from a Hallmark card or something.
Giselle: Is that a bad thing?

Robert: [tries to stop Nancy from leaving] What... what about taking Morgan to school, you know, for some grown-up girl bonding time?
Nancy Tremaine: What, so you can have some grown-up girl bonding time?
Nancy Tremaine: [glares pointedly at Giselle]
Nancy Tremaine: I don't think so.

Giselle: Is this a habit of yours? Falling off of stuff?
Robert: Only when you're there to catch me.

Giselle: [after leaving the shower] Good morning, Robert. I hope you had wonderful dreams.
Robert Philip: I think I'm still in one.

Nathaniel: Sire, do you like yourself?
Prince Edward: What's not to like?

Giselle: Nobody has been very nice to me.
Robert: Yeah, well, welcome to New York.
Giselle: Thank you.

Phoebe Banks: Everybody has problems. Everybody has bad times. Do we sacrifice all the good times because of them?
Phoebe Banks, Ethan Banks: [looking into one another's eyes] No.

Robert: So, what's the deal with this prince of yours? How long you been together?
Giselle: [wistfully] Oh, about a day.
Robert: You mean it feels like a day because you're so in love.
Giselle: No, it's been a day.
Robert: You're kidding me. A day? One day?
Giselle: Yes.
[wistful again]
Giselle: And tomorrow it will be two days.
Robert: You're joking.
Giselle: No. I'm not.
Robert: Yeah, you are.
Giselle: But I'm not.
Robert: You're gonna marry somebody after a day? Because you fell in love with him?
Giselle: Yes.
[grins]
Giselle: Yes!
Robert: [laughs as she drags him away]

------------------------------- ------------------------------- ------------------
Giselle: What about you? How long have you known your Nancy?
Robert: Uh, five years.
Giselle: And you haven't proposed?
Robert: Well, no, I...
Giselle: Well no wonder she's angry.
Robert: Well...

Morgan Philip: But I think she might be a real princess!
Robert Philip: Morgan honey, just because she has on a funny dress doesn't mean she's a princess. She's a seriously confused woman who's fallen into our laps.

Happy Feet (2006)
Ramón: Just a moment. I hear people wanting something... ME!

Ramón: Kiss my frozen tushy! Kiss it, kiss it!

Lovelace: Ladies, please avert your eyes... 'cause I've been known to hypnotize.

Ramón: We got personality, with a capital Y. Why? Because we're hot!

Norma Jean: [singing] You don't have to be beautiful/ to turn me on.

------------------------------- ------------------------------- ------------------
Norma Jean: You don't have to be beautiful, to turn me on. I just need your body, baby.
Male Penguin #1: Hello...
Norma Jean: From dusk 'til dawn.
Male Penguin #1: Is it me you're lookin' for?
Norma Jean: You don't need experience.
Male Penguin #2: Take...
Norma Jean: To turn me out.
Male Penguin #2: These broken wings.
Norma Jean: You just leave it all up to me.
Male Penguin #3: Let's talk about eggs, baby. Let's talk about you and me.
Norma Jean: Mm-mm, mm-mm. You don't have to be rich to be my pearl. Don't have to be cool to rule my world. Ain't no particular song I'm more compatible with. I just want your...
[turns to the huge crowd of males following her]
Norma Jean: Boys, boys! Give a chick a chance!
Memphis: [appearing on the crest of a hill] Well, since my baby left me I found a new place to dwell. It's down at the end of Lonely Street at Heartbreak Hotel. And I said, I'm feelin' so lonely, baby. I'm feelin' so lonely.
Norma Jean, Memphis: I'm feelin' so lonely...
Norma Jean: ...I could die.
Memphis: You don't have to be rich to be my girl.
Norma Jean: Don't have to be cool to rule my world.
Memphis: You rule my world.
Norma Jean: You're the particular song I'm compatible with.
Memphis: I just want your...
Norma Jean, Memphis: ...extra time... and your kiss.

Lovelace: I must retire now to my couch of perpetual indulgence.

Mumble: It's just like... singing, with your body.

I started reading this book. "How To Be An Adult in Relationships". My cousin recommended it back in Christmas and it was sitting here from then till I returned from Europe. If I had it then I probably wouldn't have read it. But of late I'm vastly interested in learning, growing, and teaching myself to make myself happy. I'm only on the first chapter but it says that meditation is key. Just with doing something as simple as montoring your own breathing the distractions of the past disappear. Just focus on you, your breathing and your environment, and things from your past or thoughts or emotions that are limiting your own happiness will disappear. The Power of Mindfulness "meditation is not a means of forgetting the ego; it is a method of using the ego to observe and tame it's own manifestations." - Mark Epstein.

With that said there is a manifestation that has stayed with me as long as I can remember. This manifestation is directly related to the two films discussed in today's blog. I really loved "Enchanted". First real Disney Disney like movie I've seen in quite sometime and it did in a lot of ways what Shrek did to Disney Movies. It played off our pre-conceptions of romance and happy endings. I know someone who can finish my duet. And in a lot of ways she is a fantasy. I've never met in her is person but can count on her the most. Everytime we speak the hope and belief that we were meant to be is conveyed. There is no one I can compare that to. I don't think most people would wanna even take that on. I haven't be able to not wear my heart on my sleeve like this with everyone, believing the best in people.

I've thought forever I need inspiration, acceptance, compassion. I've thought other people are the only true conveyers of these. Today and now I think it is all in me. If I can ward off my feelings towards things, games, rhetoric, the past, if I can see them for what they are, then maybe anything is possible. Especially forgiveness. Me included.At one point gizelle says is no the only word you know. And in a subtle way makes you think how impossible so many things that we may think that are fantastical are actually in fact improbable instead.

On one hand I'm excepting my fate and saying I don't need anyone again but on the other hand I think the direction I'm moving in presently is present. Like now, with some self assessment I think I can see what is at hand at what exactly is old baggage that has no business in now. I think I can keep my hope, virtrue, and beliefs. Just stop expressing them so much and often I might add when I've expressed them it's been expressed as the opposite.
At one point in enchanted Nathaniel turns to prince edward and asks him does he love himself and he's like what's not to love. I've been holding on to things that are not to love. It's about time to let them go and push forward.

It's fiction. It's fun cause it's not real... That night something came alive in me and it was from you... Art representing life representing art...

The Beauty of Life (1999 never produced)

Blank Stage with grand curtain closed behind. Nine people standing downstage left to right with spot lights from directly above each Nathaniel, Jerome, Matt, Tom, Melissa, Kara, Kate, Amanda. Down center is a little girl seated on the edge of the stage with her legs dangling off the edge playfully.

Nathaniel: In
Jerome: these
Matt: Warm
Tom: moments
Melissa: I
Kara: lose
Kate: my
Amanda: breathe
Kate: thinking
Kara: of
Melissa: your
Tom: persistent
Matt: Sweetness
Jerome: Here
Nathaniel: I
Jerome: can
Matt: confide
Tom: in
Melissa: you
Kara: I
Kate: feel
Amanda: The trust. I see someone I'll always
Nathaniel: Feel something for. My image in
Matt: Your eyes lets me know
Kara: I've reached you. I don't doubt
Melissa: You here
Everyone: I trust you
Tom: Maybe it's because I remember the look you gave me the first time you revealed your
Jerome: Love to me, or maybe I just know what
Kate: Goes on in your head, but if ever we were prohibited from speaking.
Nathaniel: one look in your
Everyone: eyes
Nathaniel: would tell me
Tom and Melissa: All
Matt and Kara: that
Jerome and Kate: I need
Nathaniel and Amanda: to know.
Little girl: For it is these eyes that hold and color my world. (pause) My mother always told me
Everyone except the little girl: Love was when you put someone else before yourself
Nathaniel, Jerome, Tom, and Matt: She was my light in the morning. I woke up
Amanda, Kate, Melissa, and Kara: Just to see his shining face
Nathaniel/Amanda: she/he
Jerome/kate: had this way about her/him
Matt/Kara: There was this one time she/he
Tom/Melissa: was so radiant, she/he was the
Little girl: one in the room I couldn't take my eyes off them. Words could not describe how they made me feel
Everyone: Words could not describe



The Favorite (2002)

Christian: To be truly honest with you I think it's a load of bullshit. I think you've gone hook line and sinker to the Disney Slash Hollywood magic of life.
Kevin: It's Possible. I mean Adam had Eve.
Christian: Adam didn't have any choice in the matter. A there were no other chicks at the bar of Eden. And B God didn't say "Hay Adam I know your probably getting horny so what do you say I take one of your ribs. No he just did it.
Kevin: Let's premise that god did just do it. Wouldn't it be fair to say that if god did it for adam then he would do it for all his children. Like Perhaps you and me?

Maria: Me neither. When you fall in love, you fall, at least I think so. It's not just a phrase. There's emotional magic on the first interaction.
Melissa: You don't think it's just a state of mind. Like you tell yourself. hey I really wish I was in love. And poof you meet someone attractive that compliments your personality and tell yourself I must be in love.
Maria: That's definitely possible. But without the heart the brain and body is nothing.
Melissa: Blah, blah, romantic nonsense. Please comfort my bleeding heart.
Maria: You can't reason with love. Most of the time there is no logic. Haven't you ever been in love?

Maria: I'm just kidding! But we do grow a little bit everyday. So much that I contend that we are children all the days that are pre- this moment.

Kevin: I'm turning my phone off
Christian: Good so when she realizes you've turned your phone off she can start calling me. Why don't you just be honest with her?
Kevin: Because I'm allergic to drama
Christian: This isn't drama

Maria: So I think you should break up with her.
Kevin: I will
Maria: Right Now
Kevin: I'm not breaking up with her right now.
Maria: Come on. Do You want me to do it for you?
Kevin: No I can break up with my own girlfriend. Thank you very much.

Christian: I don't want to come off as desperate.
Christine: But you are desperate.
Christian: But I don't want to come off as desperate!

Christian: This shit drives me nuts. What happened to the days of I like you do you like me?
Kevin: They have passed. Your in the real world. Everything is very methodical here. You just have to get used to it.
Christian: I don't want any drama
Kevin: Aren't you a writer? And you don't want any drama?
Christian: It's fiction. It's fun cause it's not real.

Five Houses (2005)
EMANUEL (V.O) : I guess I felt like I deserved to be punished or something. You know for being so introverted. I felt guilty. Guilty like catholic crucifixion guilt. I mean the sins that I’ve committed aren’t that bad, but guilt, in essence, what is that?emotion?

EMANUEL: High School. I keep looking for some kind of replacement I think in friends. I trusted everyone around me like everyone deserves to be trusted. How naive?

CLARK Listen to yourself. You don’t want to buy your friends but you’re willing to do what they say. You’re a fucking sell out.
EMANUEL I’m a fucking sell out!
CLARK Yup!
EMANUEL I’m a fucking sell out?

CLARK I’m sorry. I think you’ve just lost sight of what’s fun. Your right these people don’t care about you. I do though. I care. I don’t want you to leave this over priced university without having a great time.

GREGORY These days seemed still in precious windows deep within the safe corridors of this very campus. But mark my words with swift justice, treachery is afoot. The things I tell thee soon. These brick walls and concrete dorms hold back rain and sleet alike but when the storm takes up residency among it, the havoc it inflicts is life altering.

(V.O) GREGORY Even in a dream so gloomy, so strange, so mysterious, there is still some light. A teeny, tiny, iota, of inner purity and innocence. Like a candle in a barn, the silence, the perception of sweet bliss.

ELISA (O.S) Do you still feel that way?
EMANUEL Sometimes.
ELISA (O.S) What do you do?
EMANUEL I guess I try to use all my will power to wait for it to pass. My best friend Clark helps some of the time.

Daydreams: The Life of The Guard (2007 pre-production)

Maria: I don't think I should be talking to you
Kevin: I don't think you should have been looking at me that way either.
Maria: Looking at you how?
Kevin: Like aw....... shit! Marry me!


Mickey: It says here Kris that you were on a traveling swimming team?
Kris: Actually it was more like a drinking team with a swimming problem

Maria: Your a really nice guy. It's a shame that we kick your ass and demoralize all your friends at the lifeguardathon every year.
Kevin: You know your a real sweetheart, it sucks that you work for a cock sucking ass licking sonofabitch!

Maria: So what now?
Kevin: You could kiss me like I know you've been dreaming about all date.
Maria: Oh is that what we've been on? Why don't you kiss me like you've been fishing for the oppertunity all night?
Kevin: I won't say all night, there were a couple of key moments where I was checking out other girls. (maria smacks him on the arm)
Maria: (pause) this is the part where we have a long awkward silence and you lean in nudge, nudge.
Kevin: For your information, I (kevin pushes maria's hair back and grabs her neck and pulls her in for a kiss)

Mickey: The kids seem really beach prone.
Sheiley: Are you thinking what I'm thinking?
Mickey: If we put the other blanket on top of us no one will realize we're having sex?
Sheiley: No
Mickey: If we run back to the car we could have wild crazy monkey sex at the other side of the parking lot and no one would be the wiser.
Sheiley: No
Mickey: Ice Cream would be tasty?
Sheiley: My mom was right you I did marry a retard.

Mickey: You know Mark I know you've been carrying a grudge with me since we were younger about Sheiley (pause) and i just wanted to tell you I never meant to hurt you.
Mark: You used to be my best friend. You knew I liked her.
Mickey: We were kids! So innoscent, ya know it just happened. And look at your wife now!
Mark: You think she's hot?
Mickey: Hell's yeah! She's much hotter than...

Xenos (2007 pre-production)

Andreas's Father: Fast growing septic tank cleaning company seeks hard working college graduate for lucrative fast paced entry level position.

Lil G: Naw naw, tell her her ass is on fire, I wanna get all up inside it. Tell her I wanna lick her pussy like it's the last gulp of milk in a cat's bowl and I gots to find the right angle to lick it. I want to slurp all that shit up! slurp, slurp.
Andreas: Just give me a second.
Katerina: What did he say?
Lil G: Did you tell her?
Katerina: Are you having fun?
Lil G: Tell her I'll fuck her so good she wouldn't be able to walk tommarrow. (pause) Tell her! This is what I pay you for!
Andreas: Lil G says he's sorry he just gets nervious around really beautiful girls like you. (pause) He says he meant your eyes not your ass. We must have not translated very well.


Andreas's Mother: How does your boss feel about her?
Andreas: It's tough to say
Andreas's Mother: He hasn't said anything?
Lil G: I'd like to bend her over my table, lube up her thighs with oils, I'm mo then able to lickety lick lick dem smackety smack smack her with my huge hard....
Andreas: Nothing note worthy


Andreas: So what are you doing in Ayia Napa?
Katerina: Eleni and I were just spying on some friends.
Andreas: You were spying on your friends?
Katerina: Stalking them really.
Andreas: Why?
Katerina: Why not?

Bartender: Ah women say that all the time, especially when they're pissed off at you. I find when I've done something really bad to my girl the best thing to do is to try something really special to cross out the badness. Is there anything you and your girl have in common that you could...

Andreas: The truth is that night began a change in me that is still going on. Before that night...... I was a different person. I never pursued what I wanted. I was just another wandering asshole with no reason or direction. But that night something came alive in me and it was from you. I know that for sure.

Katerina: So what do we do now?
Andreas: We could start over.

Drama (2008 pre-production)

Andreas: We could just kill him.
Tasos: We can't
Andreas: We can
Tasos: How many more people that we love must die?
Katerina: As many as it takes to become whole again
Tasos: With each death the hole has gotten wider.
Andreas: It's strength
Katerina: It's moving on
Tasos: It's insecurity

Katerina: Remember your father.
Tasos: I remember him
Katerina: Really remember him, I mean it. (Tasos buries his hands in in face). You got him? Now know that there's only one reason why he isn't with us anymore.
Tasos: He was the best part of me, my strength, now I'm so weak.
Katerina: Our mother is that weakness, I feel it too

More Drama (2008 pre-production)

Andreas: You have no one to blame but yourself. You should have married a man like your brother, but instead you married image, you married shallow, vein, self service. You grew the worst parts of it in your belly, twice! How does that make you feel?
Katerina: Helpless
Andreas: You are helpless, this isn't the life you would have chosen for yourself if you would have reflected on the past just a little more. I'm a perfect example. blinded by my own hands. I know you were shocked and asked how I could do this to myself. But the glazed over look in your eyes, I know it. I know it like I know myself. You love and hate him, you love and hate yourself, and the only time the madness and pain will stop is when that balance of equality tips one way or the other.
Katerina: What can I do, what should I do?
Andreas: That is up to you child, let it burn, I don't have any answers for you. My experience has branded me for life. Take what you can from me.

Stavros: This isn't about the money anymore Tasos! This about respect. You thought you'd just come to Drama blow me away and live happily ever after. There is no happily ever after. There's Happily never after and you'll learn that. I'm immortal.
Tasos: Your fucking crazy!
Stavros: Your alone now. Haunted, stalked by your past but without any home, family, or hope.
Tasos: Why?
Stavros: Where's my fucking money, my cut grows everyday.
Tasos: I don't have it.
Stavros: Find it or live the rest of your days in pain and suffering.
Tasos: I'll kill you!
Stavros: If you do that there will be nothing left of you, you know where I'll be.

Tasos: How do I love so deeply all those who I keep close. I've tried to keep them so close, so dear to my heart. I've tried to live a honest, virtueous life. The more I love the less are around me. Constant fleeting moments in my mind of giving and losing. It perplexes me, of course these phantoms should stalk me, whatever my error, I am cursed if I can't see it to grab it and right it. I write to you euripedes in dire need of your wisdom. Any reason or logic has fallen short of my passions and these passions have set in motion countless tragedy that is barrelling completely out of control. Please direct me.
Euripedes: Fuck it all!

I haven't seen anything lately except old ass movies on the TV. These are all snibets of my work. The last Two need a lot of work. All of my work is inspired somewhat off real life situations, some more specific than others. The Beauty of life was the first play I wrote. I had a tight nich of close friends in high school. We were all in boyscouts and we all had serious relationships by our junior and senior year of high school but by the time we left for college not one of those relationships survived and I don't just mean the romantic ones, none of us talk anymore. Well I think Tom and Jerome might still speak cause their parents were friends but as for the rest, I haven't seen or talked to them in years. I thought for this blog I'd say something about how the fiction directly has shaped who I am and where and what I'm doing. When I purchased my first camera I did a documentary and shot over 55 of my friends. Thinking I could somehow capture them. Like Hi8 video would ever replace conversation, or a hug, or intamacy. It never does. All of it does document it. More so the fiction than the documentary.

My best friend in America was the supporting cast in the favorite. He played kevin and how he has changed since then. Time is just flying by leaving all these bread crumbs of nostalgia in it's wake. I loved shooting that film. I loved the full control and the creative energy of my cast. I liked how it was an awkwardly quirky film with lines that were so outta left field. It was written a summer after one of the big break-ups with my second big real relationship and is riddled with the lingering feelings of that and her. It's got all this defence mechenism in it, before I knew what defence mechanism was. How do I deal with a break-up, i make a movie, or write a screenplay. Anyway point of interest... we screened the favorite at Hofstra University as the initial screening and my x came. There's a musical montage the scene before last, where christian gets up and gets in his car and goes to the bay to ponder his existence to the sounds of change of weather by room 2. At the screening my x gets up and leaves, so i go after her. She tells me she doesn't want to hurt me anymore and i tell her I'm not going to let her. Which has become a classic lie that has haunted me ever since. I think this is so because I do wear my heart on my sleeve. I'm too sensitive and what's worse is I talk about it. If I had a dime for all the times that I caught feelings and voiced them, jeez.

All of these script are suppose to be practice for my lifes work. The main reason why i got into the film thing at all. I had a vision in a diner around 18 years old of a ball of color that smashed into earth and evolved into our lives. Essentially I've interpreted that into the relationship of good and evil. And what I want to do with it is tell a story of how there is a god but we can't talk to him, and all our efforts through the years have been miscommunication. I believe that's a story worth telling, and in all my inspiration, all these scripts have had real life things inspiring them, they weren't visions, there is nothing I can compare to the the original but I don't think I'm talented enough yet to tell it. Tell it right you know, so it has an impact maybe. A lot of people have given up on god or how he/she/it could or does relate to us. Fear of punishment was what put people in line back in the old days.

I'm not that interested in putting people in line, I'm kinda interested in people believing in each other and actually doing things to benefit everyone as a whole. It bothers me that society is the other way, serving only the needs of the individual. Even with everything bad that's happened to me, all the news and bullshit that's out there pushing and selling points self promotion, I still just can't give up on the common good. It's important. I'd like people to leave my life's work feeling A. Good to be alive, B. happy that they are there with all those people, and C. wanting to help others. In this day and age, that's damn near impossible, unless a feling as extreme as love and catharsis is conveyed. Like how about god is in you, maybe the evil however you wanna thinka bout that evil is in you too but it's your responsibility is how you handle or share it. It's there, untapped, awaiting your discovery of it.

As I write My Drama Trilogy these elements are so hard to master. I know they are not the same as what i described above. And strangely enough the philos-aphilos love in hate is the hardest to wrap my brain around. When I was doing research I was left to ponder how it works for days and am in fact still pondering cause I have big ol bunches of experience in this department but I can't really make sense of it. I ritualistically retire some of these thoughts from a girl that I loved who was hell bent on me hating her. She had a mirror theory that I still to this day don't completely comprehend. The love in hate thing in general plays out like pretty existentially in the stories I'm studying. And it's fair to say that if you hate someone that's so close to you that they feel like they're part of you, especially romantically, I mean I've been in situations where I've caught myself thinking about someone and not wanted to be doing that, punching my pillow and such, talking to myself, screaming get out of my head. Essentially not hating them but hating the part of them that is within me, within my thoughts and feelings. It's easily feasible to hate that thing inside you. You know it's bad for you and yet it still returns and your left wondering A. why is it there and B. How do I get rid of it. In these scripts I'm premising if your an immature adult, like a child in adults clothing and you act the way and think that way then your response isn't gonna be to reason it out, it's gonna be to murder that part or you which is embodied by a person that's close to you. Ideally someone you love but can't express it or you see that love as weakness creating hate from it's unbearability.

Another thing is I'm fairly set with making my charachters vulnerable to other characters. Pretty good with that sensitivity factor. All these charachters need to play it off like they are strong and inpenitrable but when they're isolated and on their own is how the first episode needs to play out. Second episode not so much. I'm working on it, it'll be good, patience and thought. I'll get there. It's like one big puzzle. Like life ya know. Give some heart, give some thought, hope for the best, deal with what comes.

These people actually think I have some kind of, uh... fantastic imagination. It gets very, uh, lonesome. So this is permanence; love-shattered pride.

I'm Not There. (2007)
Arthur: I accept chaos. I don't know whether it accepts me.

Billy the Kid: It's like you got yesterday, today and tomorrow, all in the same room. There's no telling what can happen.

Jude: Look at all these medicines! Hey man what are those?
Man At Party: Mandy's, make you sleep.
Jude: Sleep? aint sleepin'... Sleep's for dreamers. I haven't slept in thirty days, man. Takes a lot of medicine to keep up this pace.

Jude: God, I'm glad I'm not me.

Jude: Doesn't really matter, you know, what kind of nasty names people invent for the music. But, uh, folk music is just a word, you know, that I can't use anymore. What I'm talking about is traditional music, right, which is to say it's mathematical music, it's based on hexagons. But all these songs about, you know, roses growing out of people's brains and lovers who are really geese and swans are turning into angels - I mean, you know, they're not going to die. They're not folk music songs. They're political songs. They're already dead. You'd think that these traditional music people would - would gather that mystery, you know, is a traditional fact, you know, seeing as they're all so full of mystery.
Keenan Jones: And contradictions.
Jude: Yeah, contradictions.
Keenan Jones: And chaos.
Jude: Yes, it's chaos, clocks, and watermelons - you know, it's - it's everything. These people actually think I have some kind of, uh... fantastic imagination. It gets very, uh, lonesome. But traditional music is just, uh... it's too unreal to die. It doesn't need to be protected. You know, I mean, in that music is the only true valid death you can feel today, you know, off a record player. But like everything else in great demand, people try to own it. Has to do with, like, uh, the purity thing. I think its meaninglessness is holy. Everybody knows I'm not a folk singer.

Claire: I would like to know what is at the center of your world.
Robbie Clark: Well, I'm 22, I guess I would say me.

Billy the Kid: People are always talking about freedom. Freedom to live a certain way, without being kicked around. Course the more you live a certain way, the less it feel like freedom. Me, uhm, I can change during the course of a day. I wake and I'm one person, when I go to sleep I know for certain I'm somebody else. I don't know who I am most of the time.

Jude: [looking up at a giant Jesus on the cross] Do your early stuff!

Arthur: Seven simple rules of going into hiding: one, never trust a cop in a raincoat. Two, beware of enthusiasm and of love, both are temporary and quick to sway. Three, if asked if you care about the world's problems, look deep into the eyes of he who asks, he will never ask you again. Four, never give your real name. Five, if ever asked to look at yourself, dont. Six, never do anything the person standing in front of you cannot understand. And finlly seven, never create anything, it will be misinterpreted, it will chain you and follow you for the rest of your life.

Narrator: There he lies. God rest his soul, and his rudeness. A devouring public can now share the remains of his sickness, and his phone numbers. There he lay: poet, prophet, outlaw, fake, star of electricity. Nailed by a peeping tom, who would soon discover...
Jude: A poem is like a naked person...
Narrator: - even the ghost was more than one person.
Arthur: ...but a song is something that walks by itself.

Hobo Joe: [Woody shows Hobo Joe and Hobo Moe his guitar case which says 'THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS'] You wouldn't be stashing no weapons in there, son?
Woody Guthrie: No sir, not in any literalized way.

Jude: People actually think I have some kind of a fantastic imagination. It gets very lonesome.

Control (2007)
Ian Curtis: When you look at your life, in a strange new room, maybe drowning soon, is this the start of it all?

Ian Curtis: So this is permanence; love-shattered pride. What once was innocence, has turned on its side.

Under the Tuscan Sun (2003)

Frances: I'll hire the muscular descendants of Roman gods to do the heavy lifting.

German Woman: You greedy Americans. You think you're so entitled. You ruin everything.
Frances: A lot of us feel really badly about that.

Frances: Do you know the most surprising thing about divorce? It doesn't actually kill you. Like a bullet to the heart or a head-on car wreck. It should. When someone you've promised to cherish till death do you part says "I never loved you," it should kill you instantly. You shouldn't have to wake up day after day after that, trying to understand how in the world you didn't know. The light just never went on, you know. I must have known, of course, but I was too scared to see the truth. Then fear just makes you so stupid.
Martini: No, it's not stupid, Signora Mayes. L'amore e cieco.
Frances: Oh, love is blind. Yeah, we have that saying too.
Martini: Everybody has that saying because it's true everywhere.

Martini: Signora. Please stop being so sad. If you continue like this, I will be forced to make love to you. And I've never been unfaithful to my wife.

Frances: What are four walls, anyway? They are what they contain. The house protects the dreamer. Unthinkably good things can happen, even late in the game. It's such a surprise.

Katherine: Regrets are a waste of time. They're the past crippling you in the present.

Martini: Signora, between Austria and Italy, there is a section of the Alps called the Semmering. It is an impossibly steep, very high part of the mountains. They built a train track over these Alps to connect Vienna and Venice. They built these tracks even before there was a train in existence that could make the trip. They built it because they knew some day, the train would come.

Patti: There's something strange about these trees. It's like they know.
Frances: And they know that we know that they know.
Patti: They're creepy. Creepy Italian trees. Of course, the baby's going to like them cause it's going to be a creepy Italian baby who goes around saying things like 'Ciao mama' and doing that weird backward hand wave thing. Life is strange.

Marcello: If you smash into something good, you should hold on until it's time to let go.

Unfortunetly I couldn't find too many quotes from Control, even though it's been hailed as the best movie to come out of England this year. Oh well, see it! See that and I'm Not here. Like all my blogs and blurbs and whatever I exceptionally appreciated these films cause in my rollercoaster-esk life with it's twists and turns I've been trying to come to terms with who I am. What my purpose is in this crazy cracked out world. Creating onseself and accepting things as how they are, how you express yourself and how that will be interpreted. All to often can you the artist recognize something as good but good in the sense that you like it and it expresses things in you. Your message like they say repeatedly in "I'm Not There" is not gonna change anything all it's gonna do if it can is give a take on what's going on in the world in a way that you wish you could. Again being that creative is lonely. It's a lonely path.

As a human theres this constant need for our human condition. Sharing things with each other, reaching out trying to find that comfort in a touch, in a grouping of words and phrases, in an embrace. Like it could ever be shared for more than a moment. When your an artist, and a good one at that. That Sharing becomes a broadcast. Suddenly the artist is a becan for expression and what started as mere self expression is now some kind of movement riddled with admiration without understanding. I don't pretend that I have even a little bit of the fame or talent of Joy Division or Bob Dylan. What I can say though is when you make the decision to push ahead and broadcast your message you leave yourself open for attack.

I watched a making of StarWars last night at 5 am. Couldn't sleep again. George Lucus was saying as soon as he knew that the first episode was a hit, it was time to get out of dodge, so he moved out to a ranch in San Fransico and kept with him only the closest friends he had. He was saying as much as a blessing to have this top grossing film it's like a cut off point for whether or not you get the freedom to meet people that are on the same plain of existence that your on. You could say that that element or idea is elitestness. You could say that. Like you make something that is critically acclaimed and then from that point on your better than everyone else. But I don't think that it is the artist that makes that distinction. I think they are. My family has a friend Olivia in Cyprus and the last time I saw her she said something that I thought was really wise. She said you don't need to have or be keeping people of less around you. Your never gonna become better that way. And it's hard cause you like people for a variety of reasons, but the ones that really humble you as a person are the only ones that matter.

So if you have friends that are funny, that's all fine and good, but if their humor isn't the kind that brings truth in a slam in the face type of way really you gotta move on. I threw Under the Tuscan Sun in as well cause it was just a feel good flick. Reminded me of A Good Year with Russel Crowe. All that off on your own trial by fire madness of wanting a romantic happily ever after stuff. Yes I watch chick flicks without chicks, and like them. Pathetic is the word your thinking of but I think it's a process. I have a little black kitten named tyler to keep me manly. ANyways thats all for now.

Posting My research somewhere accessable

So I've begun writing a trilogy, which is really complicated, but at the same time really theoriputic. I've become quite self-loathing lately, can't say if it's the weather, the season, the loneliness, the nostalgia, I have no clue, seriously! But I can write, I can write for miles and miles and creating fictional problems are much easier to solve then any of my real ones. And this script or scripts is extremely complicated. The goal or mission statement is to create a trilogy with interwoven themes and plotlines form other trilogies of the ancient world, attempting to modernize them with using poetic justice in an attempt to create catharsis. That's a mouthful.

When I look further back then 2 years when I arrived in europe, and just think back why I loved greece and thought of myself with a desire to be greek, it isn't modern greece I admire and aspire to be one with. It was always ancient greece. There was a time where the most brilliant people that lived on planet earth were roaming around these parts. They had virtue, and were humble, and didn't need to put up a smoke screen to present things of value. Things that we are still teaching today. Anyway it's a work in progress. And if bored here's the research and skeleton blue print, really loosely blue print of what's going inside. Technically by the way, it's an action movie.

Many story tellers, film makers, have tried to tell a story in simplest terms. Making there one hero or one villain be the focus point of the story. How that characther changes, what changes him? In this story, all 3 characters change and what's most important is not how they change in the eyes of the world, it's how they change in introspective. How the hardest thing to master is mastering yourself and the habits beliefs and truths are often twisted. I'll tell ya when I hit my 300 page mark and then make that availible if intertested. I'm at 120 now, but it's kinda crazy. Episode 1 is at page 60, Episode 2 is at page 40, and episode 3 is at 20. But with all the flashabcks and what not that could all change. We love 2 things in this project, flashbacks which make all the modernization possible, and THE FURIES (Agent Smith, with the spirit from the ring, type of silent charachters).

Trilogy research

Socrates and Plato
Plato, drawing on the words of his teacher Socrates, considered the soul as the essence of a person, being, that which decides how we behave. He considered this essence as an incorporeal, eternal occupant of our being. As bodies die the soul is continually reborn in subsequent bodies. The Platonic soul comprises three parts:
1 the logos (mind, nous, or reason)
2 the thymos (emotion, or spiritedness)
3 the eros (appetitive, or desire)
Each of these has a function in a balanced and peaceful soul.
The logos equates to the mind. It corresponds to the charioteer, directing the balanced horses of appetite and spirit. It allows for logic to prevail, and for the optimisation of balance.
The thymos comprises our emotional motive, that which drives us to acts of bravery and glory. If left unchecked, it leads to hubris -- the most fatal of all flaws in the Greek view.
The eros equates to the appetite that drives humankind to seek out its basic bodily needs. When the passion controls us, it drives us to hedonism in all forms. In the Ancient Greek view, this is the basal and most feral state.

[edit]Aristotle
Aristotle, following Plato, defined the soul as the core essence of a being, but argued against its having a separate existence. For instance, if a knife had a soul, the act of cutting would be that soul, because 'cutting' is the essence of what it is to be a knife. Unlike Plato and the religious traditions, Aristotle did not consider the soul as some kind of separate, ghostly occupant of the body (just as we cannot separate the activity of cutting from the knife). As the soul, in Aristotle's view, is an actuality of a living body, it cannot be immortal (when a knife is destroyed, the cutting stops). More precisely, the soul is the "first actuality" of a naturally organized body. This is a state, or a potential for actual, or 'second', activity. "The axe has an edge for cutting" was, for Aristotle, analogous to "humans have bodies for rational activity," and the potential for rational activity thus constituted the essence of a human soul. Aristotle used his concept of the soul in many of his works; the De Anima (On the Soul) provides a good place to start to gain more understanding of his views.
There is on-going debate about Aristotle's views regarding the immortality of the human soul; however, Aristotle makes it clear towards the end of his De Anima that he does believe that the intellect, which he considers to be a part of the soul, is eternal and separable from the body.
Aristotle also believed that there were four parts (understood as powers) of the soul. The four sections are the calculative part and the scientific part on the rational side; these are used for making decisions. The desiderative part and the vegetative part on the irrational side, responsible for identifying our needs.

In Greek mythology, Apollo and Dionysus are both sons of Zeus. Apollo is the god of the Sun, lightness, music, and poetry, while Dionysus is the god of wine, ecstasy, and intoxication. In the modern literary usage of the concept, the contrast between Apollo and Dionysus symbolizes principles of individualism versus wholeness, light versus darkness, or civilization versus primal nature. The ancient Greeks did not consider the two gods as opposites or rivals.


Individualism is a term used to describe a moral, political, or social outlook that stresses human independence and the importance of individual self-reliance and liberty. Individualists promote the exercise of individual goals and desires. They oppose most external interference with an individual's choices - whether by society, the state, or any other group or institution. Individualism is therefore opposed to views based on collectivism or statism, which stress that communal, community, group, societal, or national goals should take priority over individual goals. Individualism is also opposed to tradition, religion, or any other form of external moral standard being used to limit an individual's choice of actions.
Individualism has a controversial relationship with egoism (selfishness). While some individualists are egoists, they usually do not argue that selfishness is inherently good. Rather, some argue that individuals are not duty-bound to any socially-imposed morality and that individuals should be free to choose to be selfish (or to choose any other lifestyle) if they so desire. Others, such as Ayn Rand, argue against moral relativism and argue selfishness is a virtue. Others still argue against both moral relativism and egoism.

[edit]The Essence of Individualism
At its core, individualism is nothing more than a dedication to careful thought. Individualist principles cannot be found in moral, political or economic “action” because action can only be valued with respect to the reasons that guide it. For instance, imagine that hard work is objectively valuable; you may feel inclined to judge a hard-worker favorably. But then imagine that her sole reason for working hard is that you will judge her favorably for it; imagine that she will stop when no longer observed. If you know this, you may judge her quite differently. Similarly, after brief observation, you may incorrectly label idle workers as lazy. The point is that snippets of action tell us nothing about the principles that guide action, and in this respect, individualism cannot be ascribed to individuals who have not testified about their thought processes.
But it is natural to infer others’ reasons in order to judge actions immediately. Should you rescue a child from a burning building, others will be quick to praise you under the assumption that you were guided by selfless care for another’s safety. They will not only ignore the proposition that your bravado was feigned for the sole purpose of receiving accolades, but they will also refuse to question whether the motives they’ve inferred are even objectively valuable. This strikes at the essence of individualism; a true individualist reevaluates core assumptions and inferences because, with a firm grasp of logical principles, the individualist knows that all ideas that are not logically provable are subject to change upon the existence of new compelling evidence. The individualist recognizes that another person should not be able to recognize an individualist on the basis of his observable actions. If one chooses to reject prevailing authority, she may be a thoughtless rebel or a thoughtful individualist; the action alone gives no indication as to which.
The essence of individualism is to choose the standards one aspires to. One may choose majority standards, minority standards, original standards, or no standards at all. Again, the actual choice does not prove individualist reasoning – one must look to the reasoning itself. Thus the only defining quality of an individualist is that she uses a personal command of logical principles to give all options a fair and equal evaluation before making a decision or conclusion. This process should certainly include evaluation of existing standards widely held. The individualist relies on her own judgment only to the extent that, after much evaluation, she finds it objectively superior to that of another.
Without delving deep into linguistics and the effects of connotation, it’s fair to point out that the immediate conditioned judgments humans make are mostly rational and mostly beneficial and are not necessarily anti-individualist. Also, they’re easily adjustable upon acquisition of new information. They can be thought of as “pre-reasoned” responses based on our vocabularies and our experiences and observations. Mostly, they serve us well, especially at times when judgments are irrelevant or when it is terribly inefficient to ask and answer questions endlessly. Evolutionary scientists see conditioned judgments as survival tools derivative of the fundamental dilemma: fight or flight. Our conditioned responses make economical use of our minds, so that we may devote our time to other thoughts and concerns. There is but one caveat: conditioned responses are shortcuts; they cannot provide answers to complex questions, and if their owners do not maintain them with frequent adjustment, they may serve to propagate logically misguided information even with respect to simple concepts.[5]
[edit]"Thinking Without Thinking"
In his book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking[6], journalist Malcolm Gladwell posits that conditioned responses are extremely beneficial to the expert mind. He gives an example of a therapist who can predict that a relationship is doomed after hearing mere snippets of a couple’s conversations. What Gladwell interprets as miraculous judgment is as easily interpreted as exceptional internal command of the rules of logic. Concocting meanings and patterns in random abstract data is relatively easy, but it is not easy to prove truth from random data with consistency and accuracy. Imagine every possible observation that one could make with respect to a patient: think of a patient’s seated posture, speech patterns, clothing, habits, interests. Numerous correlations will appear obvious, but many will be coincidental, many will be too ambiguous, and many will be imagined. To prove truth with accuracy is to subject data to such rigorous scrutiny that a conviction as to its meaning can be held beyond reasonable doubt. The words of rigorous logical scrutiny are rightfully the same words of criminal justice. The therapist’s accuracy stems not from magical ability to find telling patterns in data but from her constant testing of all perceived patterns against logic, after which she discards the irrelevant and improvident, retains and organizes a working mental catalogue of the valid and provable, and quickly applies the same to new factual contexts by analogy. To do this instantly may require a remarkable intellect, but any average mind, given enough time, is certainly capable of such a process. Criminal verdicts are not the product of experts; they’re the product of randomly selected humans forced to apply rigorous logical rules as instructed in order to reach a thoroughly justifiable judgment. This begs the question of why average humans do not attend other important judgments with such rigor. Brilliant minds may conceive of logic inherently and use it swiftly, but given time and effort, logic can be learned and applied by all. Use of logic helps illustrate this very point: genius is sufficient to grasp it but not necessary. The essence of individualism is partly found in the determination to observe the world through a lens of logical scrutiny. The implication is that conditioned judgments that are the product of such a process may be extremely beneficial. However, sound judgments and unsound judgments cannot be distinguished facially. The individualist understands this, and thus, she remains skeptical of all judgments until she conducts independent analysis using the tools of logic.[7]
[edit]Individualism & "Common Sense"
At odds with logic is the principle of “common sense.” The two are sometimes used interchangeably, but they most definitely describe adverse methods of reasoning. The term “common sense” refers, quite naturally, to sense that is common. That is, it assumes there is a correlation between the popularity of a proposition and its truthfulness. For example, “common sense” originally suggested to humans that the planet was flat. Modernly, "common sense" is used to describe propositions that are “facially intuitive” per, allegedly, any reasonable individual’s independent judgment. While this idea disowns the groupthink fallacy, it’s still not an improvement because it remains subject to the flat-earth problem and asks the independent mind to accept a judgment on the basis of facial appearance. This causes the propagation of popular albeit erroneous judgments when facial appearance is deceptive as to objective reality. For example, consider the once facially intuitive proposition that, “Man cannot fly,” and then consider the individualist mentality with which the Wright brothers approached it.
Common sense – one of the most popular sources of conditioned automatic judgments – is by its very nature a logical fallacy. Common sense suggests: “This seems like it’s probably true.” Logic asks: “Is it at all possible that this is not true?” If one values truth, one should ask logic’s question instead of repeating common sense’s statement. Observing and experiencing the world through the lens of logic may lead one to develop conditioned automatic judgments that are virtually unassailable. And, conversely, to refuse this lens is an implicit admission that one’s conditioned judgments and conceptions may have no actual basis in functional truth. This creates some interesting questions. For instance, would human interaction be more efficient if all rules of logic were widely appreciated? Beyond geometry, American public schools do not teach logic; if they did, would conditioned judgments improve or cease to exist? Would marketing and media industries lose power and influence in a nation where citizens are better equipped to interpret and scrutinize data and claims of truth? Or do conditioned judgments make interaction more efficient even when untrue or misguided? These concerns precede the quest to define individualism, yet they’re wholly central to it because individualism consistently invokes implicit rejection of collective thought and “conformity.”[8]
[edit]Individualism vs. Conformity
When “individualism” is alleged to be adverse to “conformity,” the proposition renders both words functionally meaningless. Conformity, at base level and regarding human relations, describes action for which the intended outcome is some form of increased homogeneity. The word alone should carry no connotation; it’s merely an objective description and can apply to anything from standardized meal consumption times to hygiene expectations. It is impossible to imagine how an ideology, person or group could oppose such a general and naturally occurring concept; to do so would be to spew fanciful sanctimonious delusions.
Any comparison between conformity and individualism mistakenly elevates form over substance. Since human behavior is choreographed by the mind, actions become a proxy for criticism of a thought process, or lack thereof. Thus, the relevant criticisms miss the point and render themselves an embarrassment to the principles they purport to advocate.
Decisions to conform can be made in three ways: intentionally, after conscious thought (i.e. a desire to imitate); unintentionally, after conscious thought (i.e. a desire to act in a certain way that coincidentally imitates an existing way); or indifferently, after conscious thought (i.e. no desire to act, but inaction still amounts to conformity).
Criticism is most likely to be levied at intentional imitation, but this still amounts to hypocrisy as almost all human behavior is a form of imitation. To be valuable, criticism of “conformity” must delve significantly deeper; the only valid target of criticism is one’s reasoning process (not her actions), and the only acceptable argument is against one whose actions are detrimentally unreasoned despite choice and ability to reason. Observable action labeled as “conformity” tells us nothing about individualism in the same way that correlation tells us nothing about causation. The question should not be: “Are one's actions a conformist imitation?” The question should be: “Who or what is she imitating and why?” That question elicits true reflection on independent reasoning; it asks one to independently justify the standards she chooses to aspire to. Again, while one's observable choice may invite inference or assumption, the choice alone does not prove its reasons.[9]
[edit]Choice & Free Will
The essence of individualism is to choose one’s own standards, or ignore standards entirely, so long as that decision is well-reasoned. The alternative would be to place action before independent thought – to allow the standards of others to supply the reasons for one’s actions. This may suffice for anyone some of the time, but it should be fundamentally obvious that, for it to be a uniformly sound practice, one must be either inherently indifferent to the outcome of her actions or wholly dependent on another’s interpretation and value-judgment of the outcome. In this respect, one lives by the will and whim of another or by no will at all and is thus dangerously subject to persuasion given at least the minimum level of credible impetus that caused her to act in the first place.
One’s independent judgment reflects her will, her desires and her own reasoned valuations. Thus, only one’s independent judgment can or should command one’s actions if she seeks to be an individual rather than an employee of another’s desires.[10]

Philos-aphilos
"Philos-aphilos" (love-in-hate) is a vigorous force throughout the trilogy. All of the bloodshed throughout the play is “murder committed not against an external enemy but against a part of the self.” [4] This can be interpreted literally: Orestes slays his mother, his own flesh and blood; Aegisthus is Clytemnestra’s accomplice in the murder of his cousin Agamemnon.
“A part of the self” can also be interpreted more figuratively as a significant other, such as a spouse; thus, Clytemnestra’s feelings for Agamemnon are characterized as ‘philos-aphilos’ as well. As Richmond Lattimore defined it thus, “the hate gains intensity from the strength of the original love when that love has been stopped or rejected.” Clytemnestra’s love for Agamemnon has been quashed by his sacrifice of Iphigeneia and his return with Cassandra as a mistress. Likewise, Orestes’ sentiments toward his mother are intensified by anger at her murder of his father and resentment at the fact that she chose her lover over her children – essentially, they are “the price for which she bought herself this man.” These conflicting feelings are embodied in Clytemnestra’s dream about nursing the snake. [5]
Lattimore also draws a parallel between the Oresteia and Hamlet, suggesting that the sensation of ‘philos-aphilos’ engendered by Prince Hamlet’s emotional connections to his mother, Queen Gertrude, and to Ophelia, who are both on the side of King Claudius – himself a close blood relative who might have held Hamlet’s affection and regard before usurping the throne – are what make the play a tragedy. [6]


Catharsis (Κάθαρσις) is a Greek word meaning "purification" or "cleansing" derived from the ancient Greek gerund καθαίρειν transliterated as kathairein "to purify, purge," and adjective katharos "pure or clean" (ancient and modern Greek: καθαρός).
The term in drama refers to a sudden emotional climax that evokes overwhelming feelings of great sorrow, pity, laughter or any other extreme change in emotion, resulting in restoration, renewal and revitalization in members of the audience.
Using the term 'catharsis' to refer to a form of emotional cleansing was first done by the Greek philosopher Aristotle in his work Poetics. It refers to the sensation, or literary effect, that would ideally overcome an audience upon finishing watching a tragedy (a release of pent-up emotion or energy). In his previous works, he used the term in its medical sense (usually referring to the evacuation of the 'katamenia', the menstrual fluid or other reproductive material).[1] Because of this, F. L. Lucas maintains that catharsis cannot be properly translated as purification or cleansing, but only as purgation. Since before Poetics catharsis was purely a medical term, Aristotle is employing it as a medical metaphor. "It is the human soul that is purged of its excessive passions."[2] Lessing sidesteps the medical aspect of the issue and translates catharsis as a purification, an experience that brings pity and fear into their proper balance: "In real life, he explained, men are sometimes too much addicted to pity or fear, sometimes too little; tragedy brings them back to a virtuous and happy mean."[3] Tragedy is then a corrective; through watching tragedy the audience learns how to feel these emotions at the proper levels. Some modern interpreters of the work infer that catharsis is pleasurable because audience members felt ekstasis (Greek: ἔκστασις) (literally: astonishment, meaning: trance) from the fact that there existed those who could suffer a worse fate than them was to them a relief.[citation needed] Any translator attempting to interpret Aristotle's meaning of the term should take into account that Poetics is largely a response to Plato's claim that poetry encourages men to be hysterical and uncontrolled. In response to Plato, Aristotle maintains that poetry makes them less, not more, emotional, by giving a periodic and healthy outlet to their feelings.
In literary aesthetics, catharsis is developed by the conjunction of stereotyped characters and unique or surprising actions. Throughout a play we do not expect the nature of a character to change significantly, rather pre-existing elements are revealed in a relatively straight-forward way as the character is confronted with unique actions in time. This can be clearly seen in Oedipus Rex where King Oedipus is confronted with ever more outrageous actions until emptying generated by the death of his mother-wife and his act of self-blinding. As a literary effect, catharsis should be compared with the equivalent effects for epic and poetic forms of kairosis and kenosis.
In contemporary aesthetics catharsis may also refer to any emptying of emotion experienced by an audience in relation to drama. This exstasis can be perceived in comedy, melodrama and most other dramatic forms. Deliberate attempts, on political or aesthetic bases, to subvert the structure of catharsis in theatre have occurred. For example, Bertold Brecht viewed catharsis as a pap for the bourgeois theatre audience, and designed dramas which left significant emotions unresolved, as a way to force social action upon the audience. In Brecht's theory, the absence of a cathartic resolving action would require the audience to take political action in the real world in order to fill the emotional gap they experience. This technique can be seen as early as his agit-prop play The Measures Taken.

["Catharsis" before tragedy
Catharsis before the sixth-century rise of tragedy is, for the Western World, essentially a historical footnote to the Aristotelian conception. The practice of purification did not yet appear in Homer, as later Greek commentators noted:[4] the Aithiopis, an epic in the Trojan War cycle, narrates the purification of Achilles after his murder of Thersites. Catharsis describes the result of means taken to cleanse away blood-guilt—"blood is purified through blood" (Burkert 1992:56) a process in the development of Hellenic culture in which the oracle of Delphi took a prominent role. The classic example, of Orestes, belongs to tragedy, but the procedure given by Aeschylus is ancient: the blood of a sacrificed piglet is allowed to wash over the blood-polluted man, and running water washes away the blood.[5] The identical ritual is represented, Burkert informs us (1992:57) on a krater found at Canicattini, to cure the daughters of Proetus of their madness, caused by some ritual transgression. To the question of whether the ritual procures atonement or just healing, Burkert answers: "To raise the question is to see the irrelevance of this distinction" (1992:57). The Greek nosos embraces both physical sickness and social ills.


Interwoven Greek Plays:
Euripides:
1. Electra
2. Medea
3. The Trojan Women

Euripedes
from The Greek Way by Edith Hamilton

EURIPIDES "with all his faults the most tragic of the poets," said Aristotle, supreme among critics, whose claim to pronounce ever the final verdict has only of late been called into question. His judgment here points the latter-day attitude toward him: the great critic was wrong; he confused sadness and tragedy. Euripides is the saddest of the poets and for that very reason not the most tragic. A very great tragedian, beyond all question, one of the world's four greatest, to all of whom belongs that strangest power, so to present the spectacle of pain that we are lifted to what we truly call the height of tragedy.

Euripides can indeed walk "those heights exalted" but the dark depths of pain are what he knows best. He is "the poet of the world's grief." He feels, as no other writer has felt, the pitifulness of human life, as of children suffering helplessly what they do not know and can never understand. No poet's ear has ever been so sensitively attuned as his to the still, sad music of humanity, a strain little heeded by that world of long ago. And together with that, something then even more unheeded, the sense of the value of each individual human being. He alone of all the classic world so felt. It is an amazing phenomenon. Out of the pages written more than twenty-three hundred years ago sound the two notes which we feel are the dominants in our world to-day, sympathy with suffering and the conviction of the worth of everyone alive. A poet of the antique world speaks to us and we hear what seems peculiarly our own.

There is an order of mind which is perpetually modern. All those possessed of it are akin, no matter how great the lapse of time that separates them. When Professor Murray's translations made Euripides popular in the early years of this century, what impressed people first of all was his astonishing modernity: he seemed to be speaking the very accent of l900. Today another generation who have little care for the brightest stars of those years, George Meredith, Henry James, any or all of the great later Victorians, read Euripides as belonging to them. So the younger generation in 400 B.C. felt, and so will they feel in many a century to come. Always those in the vanguard of their time find in Euripides an expression of their own spirit. He is the great exponent of the forever recurring modern mind.

This spirit, always in the world and always the same, is primarily a destructive spirit, critical not creative. "The life without criticism," Plato says, "is not worthy to be lived." The modern minds in each generation are the critics who preserve us from a petrifying world, who will not leave us to walk undisturbed in the ways of our fathers. The established order is always wrong to them. But there is criticism and criticism. Cynical criticism is totally opposed to the temper of the modern mind. The wise king who looked upon all the works that his hands had wrought and on all the labor that he had labored to do, and beheld that all was vanity and vexation of spirit, was not a modern mind. To read Ecclesiastes is to feel, "This is what men have always thought at times and will always think"; it never carries the conviction, "This, just this is modern. It is the new note of to-day." The same is true of Voltaire, that other wisest man and greatest critic, whose mighty pen shook the old unhappy things of his day until their foundations gave way. He is not a modern mind. His attitude, given in brief by his "Je ne sais pas ce que c'est que la vie Èternelle, mais celle-ci est une mauvaise plaisanterie" [I don't know about the eternal life, but this one here is a bad joke] is of another order. His is the critical intellect, directed upon human affairs but quite separated from "the human heart all ages live by," and that is a separation the modern-minded know nothing of.

Above all, they care for human life and human things and can never stand aloof from them. They suffer for mankind, and what preoccupies them is the problem of pain. They are peculiarly sensitized to "the giant agony of the world." What they see as needless misery around them and what they envisage as needless misery to come is intolerable to them. The world to them is made up of individuals, each with a terrible power to suffer, and the poignant pity of their own hearts precludes them from any philosophy in the face of this awful sum of pain and any capacity to detach themselves from it. They behold, first and foremost, that most sorrowful thing on earth, injustice, and they are driven by it to a passion of revolt. Convention, so often a mask for injustice, they will have none of; in their pursuit of justice at any cost they tear away veils that hide hateful things; they call into question all pleasant and comfortable things. They are not of those who take "all life as their province"; what is good in the age they live in they do not regard; their eyes are fixed upon what is wrong. And yet they never despair. They are rebels, fighters. They will never accept defeat. It is this fact that gives them their profound influence, the fact that they who see so deep into wrong and misery and feel them so intolerable, never conclude the defeat of the mind of man.

................................

He [Euripedes] was, the stories that have come down about him say, an unhappy man. He withdrew from the world and lived the life of a recluse in his library; "gloomy, unsmiling, averse to society," duns an ancient description of him. A misanthrope, they said, who preferred books to men. Never was a judgment less true. He fled from the world of men because he cared for men too much. He could not bear the poignant pity of his own heart. His life had fallen on unhappy times. As final defeat drew ever nearer, Athens grew terrified, fierce, cruel. And Euripides had a double burden to carry, the sensitiveness of a great poet and the aching pity of a modern mind. How could such a one endure to come into contact with what his city had learned to tolerate and to commend? One thing alone to help her he had been fitted to do: he could so write as to show the hideousness of cruelty and men's fierce passions, and the piteousness of suffering, weak, and wicked human beings, and move men thereby to the compassion which they were learning to forget.

On these two scores it is easy to explain what at first sight seems puzzling, his great unpopularity in his lifetime and his unexampled popularity shortly after his death. Only five of his plays were awarded a first prize, whereas Sophocles gained over twenty. Aristophanes has good words for Aeschylus and higher praise for Sophocles but nothing is too bad for him to say about Euripides. The modern mind is never popular in its own day. People hate being made to think, above all upon fundamental problems. Sophocles touched with the radiant glory of sublime poetry the figures of the ancient gods, and the Athenians went home from his plays with the pleasing conviction that old things were right. But Euripides was the arch-heretic, miserably disturbing, never willing to leave a man comfortably ensconced in his favorite convictions and prejudices. Prizes were not for such as he. And yet, very soon after his death, the verdict swung far to the other side and extraordinary tales of the way he was loved by all manner of men have come down to us.

The dogmatisms of each age wear out. Statements of absolute truth grow thin, show gaps, are discarded. The heterodoxy of one generation is the orthodoxy of the next. The ultimate critique of pure reason is that its results do not endure. Euripides' assaults upon the superstructure of religion were forgotten; what men remembered and came to him for was the pitying understanding of their own suffering selves in a strange world of pain, and the courage to tear down old wrongs and never give up seeking for new things that should be good. And generation after generation since have placed him securely with those very few great artists

Who feel the giant agony of the world, And more, like slaves to poor humanity, Labor for mortal good .


Electra
Years before, near the start of the Trojan War, the Greek general Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter Iphigeneia in order to appease the goddess Artemis and allow the Greek army to set sail for Troy. His wife Clytemnestra never forgave him, and when he returned from the war ten years later, she and her lover Aegisthus murdered Agamemnon.
Their daughter Electra was married off to a farmer, amidst fears that if she remained in the royal household and wed a nobleman, their children would be more likely to try to avenge Agamemnon's death. Although the man is kind to her and has taken advantage of neither her family name nor her virginity, Electra resents being cast out of her house and her mother's loyalty to Aegisthus. Agamemnon and Clytemnestra's son, Orestes, was taken out of the country and put under the care of the king of Phocis, where he became friends with the king's son Pylades.

[edit]Plot
Now grown, Orestes and his companion Pylades travel to Argos, hoping for revenge, and end up at the house of Electra and her husband. They have concealed their identities in order to get information, claiming that they are messengers from Orestes, but the aged servant who smuggled Orestes off to Phocis years before recognizes him by a scar, and the siblings are reunited. Electra is eager to help her brother in bringing down Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, and they conspire together.
While the old servant goes to lure Clytemnestra to Electra's house by telling her that her daughter has had a baby, Orestes sets off and kills Aegisthus and returns with the body. His resolve begins to waver at the prospect of matricide but Electra coaxes him into going through with it. When Clytemnestra arrives, he and Electra kill her by pushing a sword down her throat (which is only recounted and not shown), leaving both feeling oppressive guilt. At the end, Clytemnestra's deified brothers Castor and Polydeuces (often called the Dioscuri) appear. They tell Electra and Orestes that their mother received just punishment but that their matricide was still a shameful act, and they instruct the siblings on what they must do to atone and purge their souls of the crime.

[edit]Aeschylean parody and Homeric allusion
The enduring popularity of Aeschylus' Oresteia trilogy (produced in 458) is evident in Euripides' construction of the recognition scene between Orestes and Electra. In The Libation Bearers (whose plot is roughly equivalent to the events in the Electra), Electra recognizes her brother by a series of tokens: a lock of his hair, a footprint he leaves at Agamemnon's grave, and an article of clothing she had made for him years earlier. Euripides' own recognition scene clearly parodies Aeschylus' account. In Euripides' play (510ff.), Electra laughs at the idea of using such tokens to recognize her brother because: there is no reason their hair should match; Orestes' footprint would in no way resemble her smaller footprint; and it would be illogical for a grown Orestes to still have a piece of clothing made for him when he was a small child.
Orestes is instead recognized from a scar he received on the forehead while chasing a doe in the house as a child (571-74). This is a mock-heroic allusion to a scene from Homer's Odyssey. In Odyssey 19.428-54, the nurse Eurycleia recognizes a newly returned Odysseus from a scar on his thigh that he received as a child while on his first boar hunt. In the Odyssey, Orestes' return to Argos and taking revenge for his father's death is held up several times as a model for Telemachus' behavior (see Telemachy). Euripides in turn uses his recognition scene to allude to the one in Odyssey 19. Instead of an epic heroic boar hunt, Euripides instead invents a semi-comic incident involving a fawn.[1]


Medea
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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This article is about the Greek mythological figure. For other meanings, see Medea (disambiguation).

Medea by Evelyn De Morgan.
Medea (Greek: Μήδεια) in Greek mythology was the daughter of King Aeëtes of Colchis, niece of Circe, granddaughter of the sun Helios, and later wife to Jason. In Euripides' play Medea, Jason leaves Medea when Creon, King of Corinth offers him his daughter. The play tells the story of the jealousy and revenge of a woman betrayed by her husband.
The myths involving Jason also invoke Medea. These have been interpreted by specialists, principally in the past, as part of a class of myths that tell how the Hellenes of the distant heroic age, before the Trojan War, faced the challenges of the pre-Greek "Pelasgian" cultures of mainland Greece, and the Aegean and Anatolia. Jason, Perseus, Theseus, and above all Heracles, are all "liminal" figures, poised on the threshold between the old world of shamans, chthonic earth deities, archaic matriarchies, and the Great Goddess and the new Bronze Age Greek ways.
Medea figures in the myth of Jason and the Argonauts, a myth known best from a late literary version worked up by Apollonius of Rhodes in the 3rd century B.C. and called the Argonautica. But for all its self-consciousness and researched archaic vocabulary, the late epic was based on very old, scattered materials. Medea is known in most stories as an enchantress and is often depicted as being a priestess of Hecate or a witch. The myth of Jason and Medea is very old, originally written around the time Hesiod wrote the Theogony. It was discussed briefly in the work Little Illiad from the 6th century B.C.
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Media, 1868 painting by Anthony Frederick Augustus Sandys"
Medea's role began after Jason arrived from Iolcus to Colchis to claim the Golden Fleece as his own. Medea fell in love with him and promised to help him, but only on the condition that if he succeeded, he would take her with him and marry her. Jason agreed. In a familiar mythic motif, Aeëtes promised to give him the fleece, but only if he could perform certain tasks. First, Jason had to plough a field with fire-breathing oxen that he had to yoke himself. Then, Jason had to sow the teeth of a dragon in the ploughed field (compare the myth of Cadmus). The teeth sprouted into an army of warriors. Jason was forewarned by Medea, however, and knew to throw a rock into the crowd. Unable to determine where the rock had come from, the soldiers attacked and defeated each other. Finally, Aeëtes made Jason fight and kill the sleepless dragon that guarded the fleece. Medea put the beast to sleep with her narcotic herbs. Jason then took the fleece and sailed away with Medea, as he had promised. (Some accounts say that Medea only helped Jason in the first place because Hera had convinced Aphrodite or Eros to cause Medea to fall in love with him.) Medea distracted her father as they fled by killing her brother Absyrtus. In some versions, Medea is said to have dismembered his body and scattered his parts on an island, knowing her father would stop to retrieve them for proper burial; in other versions, it is Absyrtus himself who pursued them, and was killed by Jason. During the flight, Atalanta was seriously wounded, but Medea healed her.
According to some versions, Medea and Jason stopped on her aunt Circe's island so that they could be cleansed after the murder of her brother, relieving her of blame for the deed.

Jason et Médée by Gustave Moreau (1865).
On the way back to Thessaly, Medea prophesied that Euphemus, the Argo's helmsman, would one day rule over all Libya. This came true through Battus, a descendant of Euphemus.
The Argo then reached the island of Crete, guarded by the bronze man, Talos (Talus). Talos had one vein which went from his neck to his ankle, bound shut by a single bronze nail. According to Apollodorus, Talos was slain either when Medea drove him mad with drugs, deceived him that she would make him immortal by removing the nail, or was killed by Poeas's arrow (Apollodorus 1.140). In the Argonautica, Medea hypnotized him from the Argo, driving him mad so that he dislodged the nail and died (Argonautica 4.1638). In any case, when the nail was removed, Talos's ichor flowed out, exsanguinating and killing him. After his death, the Argo landed.
While Jason searched for the Golden Fleece, Hera, who was still angry at Pelias, conspired to make him fall in love with Medea, who she hoped would kill Pelias. When Jason and Medea returned to Iolcus, Pelias still refused to give up his throne. Medea conspired to have Pelias' own daughters kill him. She told them she could turn an old ram into a young ram by cutting up the old ram and boiling it (alternatively, she did this with Aeson, Jason's father). During the demonstration, a live, young ram jumped out of the pot. Excited, the girls cut their father into pieces and threw them into a pot. Having killed Pelias, Jason and Medea fled to Corinth.
[edit]Many endings
In Corinth, according to ancient historian Didimos, the Corinthian King Creon convinced Jason to desert Medea for Glauce, Creon's daughter. Medea slew Creon and fled to Thebes, but was forced to leave her children behind in Corinth, where they were later killed by Creon's family in revenge.
Alternatively, Jason is sometimes said to have married Glauce of his own volition, whereupon the evil Medea bewitched a robe with magic herbs and sent it to the princess as a gift. When Glauce put it on, the garment immediately caught fire and burned her to death. Medea then killed her own children by Jason and escaped in a chariot sent by either Helios, god of the sun or Hecate, who is said by some to be Medea's mother.

Medea by Eugène Ferdinand Victor Delacroix (1862).
The tragic situation of Medea, abandoned in Corinth by Jason, was the subject matter transformed by Euripides in his tragedy Medea, first performed in 431 BCE. In this telling, Medea resorted to filicide before her flight to Athens. Euripides was revolutionary in his retelling of Medea's myth because he was the first one to show that she hadn't killed her children because she was mad or a barbarian, but because she was extremely distressed and furious at Jason for leaving her to marry a princess.[citation needed] Fueled by a need for revenge, she sent Glauce a poisoned dress and crown that burned her to death. Creon found her corpse and clutched it in mourning, crying, "Let me die as well." The dress was poisoned so as to kill anyone who touched the girl. It killed him as well. After some hesitation and self-debate, Medea then killed her two sons, Mermeros and Pheres, to hurt Jason. Some contemporary critics of Euripides accused him of accepting a gift of five Attic talents, a huge sum, by wealthy Corinthians who wanted no part of the blame for the children's death.[citation needed]
Fleeing from Jason, Medea made her way to Athens where she healed Heracles (the former Argonaut) for the murder of Iphitus. In return, Heracles gave her a place to stay in Thebes until the Thebans drove her out in anger, despite Heracles' protests.
She then fled to Athens where she met and married Aegeus. They had one son, Medus, although Hesiod makes Medus the son of Jason[1]. Her domestic bliss was once again shattered by the arrival of Aegeus' long-lost son, Theseus. Determined to preserve her own son's inheritance, Medea convinced her husband that Theseus was a threat and that he should be disposed of. As Medea handed Theseus a cup of poison, Aegeus recognized the young man's sword as his own, which he had left behind many years previous for his newborn son, to be given to him when he came of age. Knocking the cup from Medea's hand, Aegeus embraced Theseus as his own.
Medea then returned to Colchis and, finding that Aeëtes had been deposed by his brother, promptly killed her uncle, and restored the kingdom to her father. Herodotus reports another version, in which Medea and her son Medus fled from Athens to the Iranian plateau and lived among the Aryans, who then changed their name to the Medes.[2]
Some say Medea married Achilles in the underworld. In another version of her legend, Zeus tried to court her but failed; for being the only mortal to ever successfully resist him, she was granted immortality by Zeus' wife, Hera.
Confusion sometimes occurs among readers of Greek mythology over whether there were two Medeas and/or what order events in her story occur. Supposedly Medea lived her whole life in Colchis until the Argonauts arrived and she fled to Greece with them. Yet Theseus (who is often listed among the Argonauts) supposedly drove Medea out of Thebes during his first heroic quest. Medea could not have been in Thebes until after the Quest for the Golden Fleece, yet, if Theseus was an Argonaut, the Quest could not have occurred until after Theseus drove Medea out of Thebes. This could be considered a continuity error which might naturally arise from dozens or hundreds of different poets telling different stories using the same characters, or it could be explained away as there being two different witches named Medea. Furthermore, Theseus is not listed as an Argonaut in some versions of the story.


The Trojan Women
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The Trojan Women

An engraving of the death of Astyanax
Written by
Euripides
Chorus
Trojan women
Characters
Hecuba
Cassandra
Andromache
Talthybius
Menelaus
Helen
Poseidon
Athena
Setting
Near the walls of Troy
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The Trojan Women (in Greek: Τρωάδες, Trōades) is a tragedy by the Greek playwright Euripides. Produced during the Peloponnesian War, it is often considered a commentary on the capture of the Aegean island of Melos and the subsequent slaughter and subjugation of its populace by the Athenians earlier in 415 BC (see Milos), the same year the play premiered. 415 BC was also the year of the scandalous desecration of the hermai and the Athenians' second expedition to Sicily, events which may also have influenced the author.
The Trojan Women was the third tragedy of a trilogy of dealing with the Trojan War. The first tragedy, Alexandros, was about the recognition of the Trojan prince Paris who had been abandoned in infancy by his parents and rediscovered in adulthood. The second tragedy, Palamedes, dealt with Greek mistreatment of their fellow Greek Palamedes. This trilogy was presented at the Dionysia along with the comedic satyr play Sisyphos. The plots of this trilogy were not connected in the way that Aeschylus' Oresteia was connected. Such connected trilogies were not favored by Euripides.
Euripides did not win the drama competition at the Dionysia festival with this trilogy in 415 BC, and was beaten by the playwright Xenocles.
The four Trojan women of the play are the same that appear in the final chapter of the Iliad lamenting over the corpse of Hector. Taking place near the same time is Hecuba, another play by Euripides.
Contents
Plot
Hecuba: Alas! Alas! Alas! Ilium is ablaze; the fire consumes the citadel, the roofs of our city, the tops of the walls!
Chorus: Like smoke blown to heaven on the wings of the wind, our country, our conquered country, perishes. Its palaces are overrun by the fierce flames and the murderous spear.
Hecuba: O land that reared my children!
Euripides' play follows the fates of the women of Troy after their city has been sacked, their husbands killed, and as their remaining families are about to be taken away as slaves. However, it begins first with the gods Athena and Poseidon discussing ways to punish the Greek armies because they condoned Ajax the Lesser for dragging Cassandra away from Athena's temple. (From some ancient Greek paintings many people believe Cassandra was raped by Ajax the Lesser, but it does not say that in this story.) What follows shows how much the Trojan women have suffered as their grief is compounded when the Greeks dole out additional deaths and divide their shares of women.
The Greek herald Talthybius arrives to tell the dethroned queen Hecuba what will befall her and her children. Hecuba will be taken away with the Greek general Odysseus, and her daughter Cassandra is slated to become the conquering general Agamemnon's concubine. Cassandra, who has been driven partially mad due to a curse by which she can see the future but will never be believed when she warns others, is morbidly delighted by this news: she sees that when they arrive in Argos, her new master's embittered wife Clytemnestra will kill both her and her new master. However, because of the curse, no one understands this response, and Cassandra is carried off.
The widowed princess Andromache arrives, and Hecuba learns from her that her youngest daughter, Polyxena, has been killed as a sacrifice at the tomb of the Greek warrior Achilles.
Andromache's lot is to be the concubine of Achilles' son Neoptolemus, and more horrible news for the royal family is yet to come: Talthybius reluctantly informs her that her young son, Astyanax, has been condemned to die. The Greek leaders are afraid that the boy will grow up to avenge his father Hector, and rather than take this chance, they plan to throw him off from the battlements of Troy to his death.
Helen, though not one of the Trojan women, is supposed to suffer greatly as well: Menelaus arrives to take her back to Greece with him where a death sentence awaits her. Helen begs her husband to spare her life and he remains resolved to kill her, but the audience watching the play knows that in the Odyssey, Telemachus will learn how Helen's legendary beauty wins her a reprieve.
In the end, Talthybius returns carrying with him the body of little Astyanax on Hector's shield. Andromache's wish had been to bury her child herself, performing the proper rituals according to Trojan ways, but her ship had already departed. Talthybius gives the corpse to Hecuba, who prepares the body for burial before they are finally taken off with Odysseus.
Throughout the play, many of the Trojan women lament the loss of the land that reared them. Hecuba in particular lets it be known that Troy had been her home for her entire life, only to see herself as an old grandmother watching the burning of Troy, the death of her husband, her children, and her grandchildren before she will be taken as a slave to Odysseus.

[edit]Treatment of the play in modern times
Jean-Paul Sartre wrote a version that remains largely faithful to the original text. It adds veiled references to European imperialism in Asia and minor emphasis on common existentialist themes.
Greek director Michael Cacoyannis used Euripides' play (in the famous Edith Hamilton translation) as the basis for his 1971 film The Trojan Women (IMDB profile. The movie starred American actress Katharine Hepburn as Hecuba, British actors Vanessa Redgrave and Brian Blessed as Andromache and Talthybius, French-Canadian actress Geneviève Bujold as Cassandra, Greek actress Irene Papas as Helen, and Patrick Magee, an actor born in Northern Ireland, as Menelaus.
A musical version of The Trojan Women was produced for the youth theatre at the studio of the Thorndike Theatre in Leatherhead in 1983 , directed by Stanley Morris and with original music and lyrics by Maurice Chernick.
Another movie based on the play came out in 2004, directed by Brad Mays.
Trojan Women: The Musical is a modern take on the play, set in the 1920s. It was written by Gareth Hides and Gavin Thatcher, with additional music by Nick Jeavons. The musical was first performed at King Edward VI College, Stourbridge and was revived almost a year later at the Tettenhall Towers Theatre.
Charles Mee adapted The Trojan Women to have a more modern, updated outlook on war. He included original interviews with Holocaust and Hiroshima survivors. His play is called The Trojan Women 2.0.
Trojan Women, directed by Antonis Antypas and with music by Eleni Karaindrou, premiered at the Ancient Theatre of Epidaurus on August 31 and September 1, 2001.
Trojan Women was performed at Guildhall School of Music and Drama in 1999 with then unknown actor Orlando Bloom as Menelaus King of Sparta whom Helen left for Paris of Troy. Bloom later went on to star as Paris in the 2004 movie Troy.
Women of Troy, directed by Katie Mitchell, was performed at the National Theatre in London in 2007-8.


Sophacles
1. Oedipus The King
2. Oedipus at Colonus
3. Antigone


Oedipus the King
A plague has stricken Thebes. The citizens gather outside the palace of their king, Oedipus, asking him to take action. Oedipus replies that he already sent his brother-in-law, Creon, to the Oracle at Delphi to learn how to help the city. Creon returns with a message from the Oracle: the plague will end when the murderer of Laius, former king of Thebes, is caught and expelled; the murderer is within the city. Oedipus questions Creon about the murder of Laius, who was killed by thieves on his way to consult an oracle. Only one of his fellow travelers escaped alive. Oedipus promises to solve the mystery of Laius’s death, vowing to curse and drive out the murderer.
Oedipus sends for Tiresias, the blind prophet, and asks him what he knows about the murder. Tiresias responds cryptically, lamenting his ability to see the truth when the truth brings nothing but pain. At first he refuses to tell Oedipus what he knows. Oedipus curses and insults the old man, going so far as to accuse him of the murder. These taunts provoke Tiresias into revealing that Oedipus himself is the murderer. Oedipus naturally refuses to believe Tiresias’s accusation. He accuses Creon and Tiresias of conspiring against his life, and charges Tiresias with insanity. He asks why Tiresias did nothing when Thebes suffered under a plague once before. At that time, a Sphinx held the city captive and refused to leave until someone answered her riddle. Oedipus brags that he alone was able to solve the puzzle. Tiresias defends his skills as a prophet, noting that Oedipus’s parents found him trustworthy. At this mention of his parents, Oedipus, who grew up in the distant city of Corinth, asks how Tiresias knew his parents. But Tiresias answers enigmatically. Then, before leaving the stage, Tiresias puts forth one last riddle, saying that the murderer of Laius will turn out to be both father and brother to his own children, and the son of his own wife.
After Tiresias leaves, Oedipus threatens Creon with death or exile for conspiring with the prophet. Oedipus’s wife, Jocasta (also the widow of King Laius), enters and asks why the men shout at one another. Oedipus explains to Jocasta that the prophet has charged him with Laius’s murder, and Jocasta replies that all prophecies are false. As proof, she notes that the Delphic oracle once told Laius he would be murdered by his son, when in fact his son was cast out of Thebes as a baby, and Laius was murdered by a band of thieves. Her description of Laius’s murder, however, sounds familiar to Oedipus, and he asks further questions. Jocasta tells him that Laius was killed at a three-way crossroads, just before Oedipus arrived in Thebes. Oedipus, stunned, tells his wife that he may be the one who murdered Laius. He tells Jocasta that, long ago, when he was the prince of Corinth, he overheard someone mention at a banquet that he was not really the son of the king and queen. He therefore traveled to the Oracle of Delphi, who did not answer him but did tell him he would murder his father and sleep with his mother. Hearing this, Oedipus fled his home, never to return. It was then, on the journey that would take him to Thebes, that Oedipus was confronted and harassed by a group of travelers, whom he killed in self-defense. This skirmish occurred at the very crossroads where Laius was killed.

Oedipus sends for the man who survived the attack, a shepherd, in the hope that he will not be identified as the murderer. Outside the palace, a messenger approaches Jocasta and tells her that he has come from Corinth to inform Oedipus that his father, Polybus, is dead, and that Corinth has asked Oedipus to come and rule there in his place. Jocasta rejoices, convinced that Polybus’s death from natural causes has disproved the prophecy that Oedipus would murder his father. At Jocasta’s summons, Oedipus comes outside, hears the news, and rejoices with her. He now feels much more inclined to agree with the queen in deeming prophecies worthless and viewing chance as the principle governing the world. But while Oedipus finds great comfort in the fact that one-half of the prophecy has been disproved, he still fears the other half—the half that claimed he would sleep with his mother.
The messenger remarks that Oedipus need not worry, because Polybus and his wife, Merope, are not Oedipus’s biological parents. The messenger, a shepherd by profession, knows firsthand that Oedipus came to Corinth as an orphan. One day long ago, he was tending his sheep when another shepherd approached him carrying a baby, its ankles pinned together. The messenger took the baby to the royal family of Corinth, and they raised him as their own. That baby was Oedipus. Oedipus asks who the other shepherd was, and the messenger answers that he was a servant of Laius.
Oedipus asks that this shepherd be brought forth to testify, but Jocasta, beginning to suspect the truth, begs her husband not to seek more information. She runs back into the palace. The shepherd then enters. Oedipus interrogates him, asking who gave him the baby. The shepherd refuses to disclose anything, and Oedipus threatens him with torture. Finally, he answers that the child came from the house of Laius. Questioned further, he answers that the baby was in fact the child of Laius himself, and that it was Jocasta who gave him the infant, ordering him to kill it, as it had been prophesied that the child would kill his parents. But the shepherd pitied the child, and decided that the prophecy could be avoided just as well if the child were to grow up in a foreign city, far from his true parents. The shepherd therefore passed the boy on to the shepherd in Corinth.
Realizing who he is and who his parents are, Oedipus screams that he sees the truth and flees back into the palace. The shepherd and the messenger slowly exit the stage. A second messenger enters and describes scenes of suffering. Jocasta has hanged herself, and Oedipus, finding her dead, has pulled the pins from her robe and stabbed out his own eyes. Oedipus now emerges from the palace, bleeding and begging to be exiled. He asks Creon to send him away from Thebes and to look after his daughters, Antigone and Ismene. Creon, covetous of royal power, is all too happy to oblige.
Aeschylus


Oedipus at Colonus
After years of wandering in exile from Thebes, Oedipus arrives in a grove outside Athens. Blind and frail, he walks with the help of his daughter, Antigone. Oedipus and Antigone learn from a citizen that they are standing on holy ground, reserved for the Eumenides, goddesses of fate. Oedipus sends the citizen to fetch Theseus, the king of Athens and its surroundings. Oedipus tells Antigone that, earlier in his life, when Apollo prophesied his doom, the god promised Oedipus that he would come to rest on this ground.
After an interlude in which Oedipus tells the Chorus who he is, Oedipus’s second daughter, Ismene, enters, having gone to learn news from Apollo’s oracle at Delphi. She tells him that, back in Thebes, Oedipus’s younger son, Eteocles, has overthrown Polynices, the elder, and that Polynices is now amassing troops in Argos for an attack on his brother and on Creon, who rules along with Eteocles. The oracle has predicted that the burial place of Oedipus will bring good fortune to the city in which it is located, and both sons, as well as Creon, know of this prophecy. Both Polynices and Creon are currently en route to try to take Oedipus into custody and thus claim the right to bury him in their kingdoms. Oedipus swears he will never give his support to either of his sons, for they did nothing to prevent his exile years ago.
King Theseus arrives and says that he pities Oedipus for the fate that has befallen him, and he asks how he can help Oedipus. Oedipus asks Theseus to harbor him in Athens until his death, but warns that by doing him this favor, Theseus will incur the wrath of Thebes. Despite the warning, Theseus agrees to help Oedipus.
Creon appears in order to abduct Oedipus, but, proving unsuccessful, he kidnaps Antigone and Ismene instead. Theseus promises Oedipus that he will get his daughters back. Theseus does in fact return with Oedipus’s daughters shortly.
Soon after, Polynices arrives, seeking his father’s favor in order to gain custody of his eventual burial site. Oedipus asks Theseus to drive Polynices away, but Antigone convinces her father to listen to his son. Polynices tells Oedipus that he never condoned his exile, and that Eteocles is the bad son, having bribed the men of Thebes to turn against Polynices. Oedipus responds with a terrible curse, upbraiding his son for letting him be sent into exile, and predicting that Eteocles and Polynices will die at one another’s hands. Polynices, realizing he will never win his father’s support, turns to his sisters. He asks that they provide him with a proper burial should he die in battle. Antigone embraces Polynices, saying that he is condemning himself to death, but he resolutely says that his life remains in the hands of the gods. He prays for the safety of his sisters and then leaves for Thebes.
Terrible thunder sounds, and the Chorus cries out in horror. Oedipus says that his time of death has come. Sending for Theseus, he tells the king he must carry out certain rites on his body, and that by doing so he may assure divine protection to his city. Theseus says that he believes Oedipus and asks what to do. Oedipus answers that he will lead the king to the place where he will die, and that Theseus must never reveal that spot, but pass it on to his son at his own death, who in turn must pass it on to his own son. In this way Theseus and his heirs may always rule over a safe city. Oedipus then strides off with a sudden strength, taking his daughters and Theseus to his grave.
A messenger enters to narrate the mysterious death of Oedipus: his death seemed a disappearance of sorts, “the lightless depths of Earth bursting open in kindness to receive him” (1886–1887). Just as the messenger finishes his story, Antigone and Ismene come onstage, chanting a dirge. Antigone wails that they will cry for Oedipus for as long as they live. Not knowing where to go now, Antigone says they will have to wander forever alone. Theseus returns to the stage, asking the daughters to stop their weeping. They plead to see their father’s tomb, but Theseus insists that Oedipus has forbidden it. They give up their pleas but ask for safe passage back to Thebes, so that they may prevent a war between their brothers. Theseus grants them this, and the Chorus tells the girls to stop their weeping, for all rests in the hands of the gods. Theseus and the Chorus exit toward Athens; Antigone and Ismene head for Thebes.


Antigone
Antigone and Ismene, the daughters of Oedipus, discuss the disaster that has just befallen them. Their brothers Polynices and Eteocles have killed one another in a battle for control over Thebes. Creon now rules the city, and he has ordered that Polynices, who brought a foreign army against Thebes, not be allowed proper burial rites. Creon threatens to kill anyone who tries to bury Polynices and stations sentries over his body. Antigone, in spite of Creon’s edict and without the help of her sister Ismene, resolves to give their brother a proper burial. Soon, a nervous sentry arrives at the palace to tell Creon that, while the sentries slept, someone gave Polynices burial rites. Creon says that he thinks some of the dissidents of the city bribed the sentry to perform the rites, and he vows to execute the sentry if no other suspect is found.

The sentry soon exonerates himself by catching Antigone in the act of attempting to rebury her brother, the sentries having disinterred him. Antigone freely confesses her act to Creon and says that he himself defies the will of the gods by refusing Polynices burial. Creon condemns both Antigone and Ismene to death. Haemon, Creon’s son and Antigone’s betrothed, enters the stage. Creon asks him his opinion on the issue. Haemon seems at first to side with his father, but gradually admits his opposition to Creon’s stubbornness and petty vindictiveness. Creon curses him and threatens to slay Antigone before his very eyes. Haemon storms out. Creon decides to pardon Ismene, but vows to kill Antigone by walling her up alive in a tomb.
The blind prophet Tiresias arrives, and Creon promises to take whatever advice he gives. Tiresias advises that Creon allow Polynices to be buried, but Creon refuses. Tiresias predicts that the gods will bring down curses upon the city. The words of Tiresias strike fear into the hearts of Creon and the people of Thebes, and Creon reluctantly goes to free Antigone from the tomb where she has been imprisoned. But his change of heart comes too late. A messenger enters and recounts the tragic events: Creon and his entourage first gave proper burial to Polynices, then heard what sounded like Haemon’s voice wailing from Antigone’s tomb. They went in and saw Antigone hanging from a noose, and Haemon raving. Creon’s son then took a sword and thrust it at his father. Missing, he turned the sword against himself and died embracing Antigone’s body. Creon’s wife, Eurydice, hears this terrible news and rushes away into the palace. Creon enters, carrying Haemon’s body and wailing against his own tyranny, which he knows has caused his son’s death. The messenger tells Creon that he has another reason to grieve: Eurydice has stabbed herself, and, as she died, she called down curses on her husband for the misery his pride had caused. Creon kneels and prays that he, too, might die. His guards lead him back into the palace.

Aeschylus
1. Agamemnon
2. The Libation Bearers
3. The Eumenides

Agamemnon

"The Murder of Agamemnon" by Pierre-Narcisse Guérin
Written by
Aeschylus
Chorus
Elders of Argos
Characters
watchman
Clytemnestra
herald
Agamemnon
messenger
Cassandra
Aegisthus
soldiers
servants
Setting
Argos, before the royal palace
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[edit]Introduction
Agamemnon details the homecoming of Agamemnon, King of Argos, from the Trojan War. Waiting at home for him is his wife, Clytemnestra, who has been planning his murder as revenge for the sacrifice of their daughter, Iphigenia. Furthermore, in the ten years of Agamemnon's absence, Clytemnestra has entered into an adulterous relationship with Aegisthus, Agamemnon's cousin and the scion of a dispossessed branch of the family, who is determined to regain the throne he believes should rightfully belong to him
[edit]Storyline
The play opens to Clytemnestra awaiting the return of her husband, having been told that the mountaintop beacons have given the sign that Troy has fallen. Though she pretends to love her husband, she is furious that he sacrificed their daughter, Iphigenia. This is not made clear here, but it would have been familiar to the audience. A servant stands on top of the roof, reporting that he has been crouching there "like a dog" (kunos diken) for years, "under the instruction of a man-hearted woman". He laments the fortunes of the house, but promises to keep silent: "A huge ox has stepped onto my tongue." However, when Agamemnon returns, he brings with him Cassandra, an enslaved Trojan princess, as his concubine. This serves to anger Clytemnestra further.
The main action of the play is the agon between Clytemnestra and Agamemnon. She attempts to persuade Agamemnon to step on a purple (sometimes red) tapestry or carpet to walk into their home. The problem is that this would indicate hubris on Agamemnon's part, and he does not wish to do this. Eventually, for reasons that are still heavily debated, Clytemnestra does convince Agamemnon to cross the purple tapestry to enter the oikos, where she kills him in the bath: she ensnares him in a robe and as he struggles to free himself she hacks him with three strokes of a pelekus. Agamemnon is murdered in much the same way an animal is killed for sacrifice with three blows, the last strike accompanied by a prayer to a god.
Whilst Clytemnestra and Agamemnon are offstage, Cassandra starts discussing with the chorus whether or not she ought to enter the palace, knowing that she too will be murdered. Cassandra has been cursed by Apollo for rejecting his advances. She has the gift of clairvoyance, but the curse means that no one who hears her prophesies believes them. In Cassandra's speech, she runs through many gruesome images of the history of the House of Atreus as if she had been a witness of them, and eventually chooses to enter the house knowing that she cannot do anything to avoid her fate. The chorus, in this play a group of the elders of Argos, hear the death screams of Agamemnon, and frantically debate on a course of action.
A platform is soon rolled out displaying the gruesome dead bodies of Agamemnon and Cassandra, along with Clytemnestra, who attempts to explain her action. Later, Aegisthus struts out and delivers an arrogant speech to the chorus, who nearly enter into a brawl with Aegisthus and his henchmen. However, Clytemnestra halts the dispute, saying that "There is pain enough already. Let us not be bloody now." The play closes with the chorus reminding the usurpers that Orestes, the son of Agamemnon, will surely return to exact vengeance.

[edit]The Libation Bearers
The Libation Bearers

"Electra" by Sir William Blake Richmond
Written by
Aeschylus
Chorus
Trojan slave women
Characters
Orestes
Electra
servant
Clytaemnestra
Pylades
Cilissa
Aegisthus
attendants
Setting
Argos, at the tomb of Agamemnon
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[edit]Introduction
The Libation Bearers (also known as Choephoroe) is the second play of the Oresteia. It deals with the reunion of Agamemnon's children, Electra and Orestes, and their revenge.
[edit]Storyline
In the palace of Argos, Clytemnestra, who now shares her bed and the throne with her lover Aegisthus, is roused from slumber by a nightmare: she dreamt that she gave birth to a snake, and the snake now feeds from her breast and draws blood along with milk. Alarmed by this, a possible sign of the gods' wrath, she orders her daughter, the princess Electra, whom in the meantime Clytemnestra has reduced to the virtual status of a slave-girl, to pour libations on Agamemnon's grave. A group of women (the libation bearers of the title) are to assist her.
Electra arrives at the grave of her father and comes upon a man by the tombstone, who has just placed a lock of his hair on the stone. As they start to speak, it gradually and rather agonizingly becomes apparent that the man is her brother Orestes (who had been sent away to the royal court of Phocis since infancy for safety reasons), and who has, in her thoughts, been her only hope of revenge. Orestes believes that he is the snake in his mother's dream, so together with Electra they plan to avenge their father by killing their mother Clytemnestra and her new husband, Aegisthus.
Orestes wavers about killing his own mother, but is guided by Apollo and his close friend Pylades, the son of the king of Phocis, that it is the correct course of action. Orestes and Pylades pretend to be ordinary travelers from Phocis, and ask for hospitality at the palace. They even tell the Queen that Orestes is dead. Delighted by the news, Clytemnestra sends a servant to summon Aegisthus. Orestes kills the usurper first, and then his mother. As soon as he exits the palace, the Furies, being only visible to him, begin to haunt and torture him as he flees in agony. This delineates the crimes of Clytemnestra and Orestes.[citation needed] The Furies do not hunt down Clytemnestra for killing her husband, but they do hunt down Orestes for his crime of matricide as is their function: to them, crimes against blood bonds are far more significant than crimes against marriage bonds[1].
[edit]References in other Greek Dramas
Pietro Pucci of Cornell University argues that in referencing The Libation Bearers in his own Electra, Euripides made a social commentary on the relationship between truth and evidence. Euripides criticized the scene of recognition when Electra realizes that lock of hair on Agamemnon's tomb is Orestes'. In his own play Electra, Euripides has Electra make a scathing remark about the ridiculous notion that one could recognize a brother solely by a lock of hair, a footprint and an article of clothing. [2] What Euripides (presumably purposefully) ignores in Aeschylus' play was the religious significance of the act of placing a lock of hair on a tomb, which was a much more powerful clue as to who left the lock than the actual nature of the hair. Only a friend of Agamemnon's would dare approach his grave and leave a lock of hair, and even more importantly, this ritual had a specific father/ male heir significance. Aeschylus' Electra, therefore, recognized her brother based on her faith in a religious act. Euripides' Electra, on the other hand, judges the situation solely on evidence, and comes to the wrong conclusion that Orestes cannot be present, when in fact the audience knows that he is there and the two characters have in fact just spoken to each other. This commentary suggests that Euripides is referring to the then pertinent argument over evidence and truth, an issue which had no weight when Aeschylus was writing. [3]

[edit]The Eumenides
The Eumenides

"Orestes wird von den Furien verfolgt" (Orestes pursued by the Furies) by William-Adolphe Bouguereau
Written by
Aeschylus
Chorus
The Furies
Characters
Priestess
Apollo
Orestes
Ghost of Clytaemnestra
Athena
Athenian citizens
Setting
before the temple of Apollo at Delphi and in Athens
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[edit]Introduction
The Eumenides (also known as The Furies) is the final play of the Oresteia, in which Orestes, Apollo, and the Furies go before Athena and a jury consisting of the Athenians at the Areopagus (Rock of Ares, a flat rocky hill by the Athenian agora where the homicide court of Athens held its sessions), to decide whether Orestes' murder of his mother, Clytemnestra, makes him worthy of the torment they have inflicted upon him.
[edit]Storyline
Orestes is tormented by the Furies, chthonic deities that avenge patricide and matricide. He, at the instigation of his sister Electra and the god Apollo, has killed their mother Clytemnestra, who had killed their father, King Agamemnon, who had killed his daughter and their sister, Iphigenia. Orestes finds a refuge and a solace at the new temple of Apollo in Delphi, and the god, unable to deliver him from the Furies' unappeasable wrath, sends him along to Athens under the protection of Hermes, while he casts a drowsy spell upon the pursuing Furies in order to delay them.
Clytemnestra's ghost appears from the woods and rouses the sleeping Furies, urging them to continue hunting Orestes. The Furies' first appearance on stage is haunting: they hum a tune in unison as they wake up, and seek to find the scent of blood that will lead them to Orestes' tracks. Ancient tradition says that on the play's premiere this struck so much fear and anguish in the audience, that a pregnant woman named Neaira suffered a miscarriage and died on the spot.
The Furies' tracking down of Orestes in Athens is equally haunting: Orestes has clasped Athena's small statue in supplication, and the Furies close in on him by smelling the blood of his slain mother in the air. Once they do see him, they can also see rivulets of blood soaking the earth beneath his footsteps.
As they surround him, Athena intervenes and brings in a jury of twelve Athenians to judge her supplicant. Apollo acts as attorney for Orestes, while the Furies act as advocates for the dead Clytemnestra. During the trial, Apollo convinces Athena that, in a marriage, the man is more important than the woman, by pointing out that Athena was born only of Zeus and without a mother (Zeus swallows Metis). Before the trial votes are counted, Athena votes in favour of Orestes. After being counted, the votes on each side are equal. Athena then persuades the Furies to accept her decision. They eventually submit. (However, in Euripides' Iphigeneia in Tauris, the Furies continue to haunt Orestes even after the trial.) Athena then renames them Eumenides (The Kindly Ones). The Furies will now be honored by the citizens of Athens and ensure their prosperity. Athena also declares that henceforth hung juries should result in the defendant being acquitted, as mercy should always take precedence over harshness.

[edit]Proteus
Although Proteus, the satyr play which originally followed the first three plays of The Oresteia, is lost, it is widely believed to have been based on the story told in Book IV of Homer's Odyssey. In 2002, Theatre Kingston mounted a production of The Oresteia in the translation by Ted Hughes and included a free reconstruction of Proteus based on the episode in The Odyssey and loosely arranged according to the structure of extant satyr plays.

[edit]Analysis and themes
That the play ends on a happy note may surprise modern readers, to whom the word tragedy denotes a drama ending in misfortune. The word did not carry this meaning in ancient Athens, and many of the extant Greek tragedies end happily.
[edit]Social progress and justice
Worth noting here is the metaphorical aspect of this entire drama. Initially, in their role as avengers of bloodshed, the Furies are classical equivalents to the Code of Hammurabi and the Torah, which demand “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”. Thus, they initially embody the concept of lex talionis, or “law of retribution”.
The change from an archaic self-help justice by personal revenge to administration of justice by trial symbolises the passage from a primitive society governed by instincts, to a modern society governed by reason: justice is decided by a jury of peers, representing the citizen body and its values, and the gods themselves sanction this transition by taking part in the judicial procedure, arguing and voting on an equal footing with the mortals. This theme of the polis self-governed by consent through lawful institutions, as opposed to tribalism and superstition, recurs in Greek art and thought.
The dramatization of societal transformation in this myth (the transition to governance by laws) is both a boast and justification of the then relatively new judicial system. The concept of objective intervention by an impartial entity against which no vengeance could be taken (the state) marked the end of continuous cycles of bloodshed, a transition in Greek society reflected by the transition in their mythology--the Furies are a much greater part of older Greek myths than comparatively more recent ones. The reflection of societal struggles and social norms in mythology makes plays like these of special interest today, offering poignant cultural and historical insights.