Black Swans: Stories

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Wright, James (December 17, 2009). "Clint Mansell interview". Independent Film Channel. Archived from the original on November 30, 2010 . Retrieved December 12, 2010. Eve Babitz began her independent career as an artist, working in the music industry for Ahmet Ertegun at Atlantic Records, making album covers. In the late 1960s, she designed album covers for Linda Ronstadt, The Byrds, and Buffalo Springfield. Her most famous cover was a collage for the 1967 album Buffalo Springfield Again. The men on the other side of the plain, having lit their fire, were smoking themselves in it. The women saw the smoke curling up towards their plain and ran toward it, armed with spears, crying "Wi-bulloo! Wi-bulloo!" Thomas says that even though she is precise in her actions, she is also very frigid. She has always tried to perfect every move but never allowed to let her body run wild. As discussed above, it is fair to say that this fretting and fussing is the result of her upbringing. Her mother comments on everything she has to do or say or even eat, and she has inherited this trait. Moreover, she has first-hand seen the career of a failed ballerina in her mother and doesn’t want to end up like her, which makes her work even harder. Safe to say, this obsession with perfection is nothing new for her. Perhaps then Nina could move out and live on her own terms. She does love her mother, but she also wants to leave her. Despite what Erica thinks, Nina knows that she never really was good enough to be something like a Swan Queen. She might have refrained from saying all these things before, the time when she was unsure of her own talent, but now that she has the dream part, now that she is finally breaking out of her mother’s hold, she doesn’t hesitate in voicing this opinion. And she gets this voice because of Thomas.

While perfection can mean different things to different people, Nina's arc — and the film as a whole — shows that the pursuit of perfection doesn't come without consequences. After all, achieving excellence can be gratifying, but chasing it can be deadly. Having caught one of the animals, the women remembered the men, whom they saw leaving their camps laden with weapons. Screeching with anger, they started after them, but too late. The men passed into the darkness, where they smoked all evil of the plain from them in Wurrunna's fire.

Once they were white

One of them gave a cry of surprise, the others looked round, and there on the lake they saw swimming two huge white birds. The smoke was forgotten; they ran toward the new wonders, while the men rushed to the deserted camp for weapons. It is the story, really, of one's 20s . . . wherein the clashes of reality and desire can lead to spectacular and terrifying confrontations with the chasm that divides them." -- The Millions She’s a natural. Or gives every appearance of being one, her writing elevated yet slangy, bright, bouncy, cheerfully hedonistic—L.A. in it purest, most idealized form." — Vanity Fair You can definitely make the argument that Nina’s already started to hallucinate and that Lily was never on the train and that the 14:22 mark is her first true appearance. But it would be a bit strange for Nina to be seeing Lily before having met Lily. I’d argue, rather, that Aronofsky just wanted to create that sense of duality by having her arrive late twice and have that slight moment of doubt and deja vu.

This shows that Erica has never been able to work through her own inadequacies and finds comfort in the fact that Nina is good because of her. Her daughter is the materialisation of the perfection that Erica had hoped to be in her own career, which is why she doesn’t want anything to distract her from this vision. She doesn’t want Nina to go astray and keeps her on a tight leash. While this does work, to some extent, it also sows the seed of absolute perfection in Nina. Soon they cried "Biboh! Biboh!" changing as they did so into large, pure white birds, which the Daens call baiamul, the swans. You know, there were some moments in here that just felt like navel-gazing, pimping-myself-out (which I love), rich-bitch nonsense. And then there were moments of extreme clarity and hyper-focused lucidity delivered with a cutting twist. T]his novel is studded with sharp observations... Babitz's talent for the brilliant line, honed to a point, never interferes with her feel for languid pleasures."-- New York Times Book ReviewBut who is Eve Babitz? Born in Hollywood, in 1943, Babitz is an American author and artist. Los Angeles plays a main role in her fictive memoirs, but so do the men, the artists, and the drugs. And, if we’re talking men, we should just mention that Jim Morrison was one of her many lovers. Babitz was born in Hollywood, California, the daughter of Mae, an artist, and Sol, a classical violinist on contract with 20th Century Fox.Her father was of Russian Jewish descent and her mother had Cajun (French) ancestry.Babitz's parents were friends with the composer Igor Stravinsky, who was her godfather. The women saw them, and returning from the swans, came angrily toward them. Then each man let go the animal he had. Far and wide on the plain went possums, bandicoots, bkandis, and others. Shrieking after them went the women. The men dropped the possum rugs and loaded themselves with weapons, then started toward Wurrunna's smoke signal, now curling up in a spiral column.

Suddenly, softly fell on them a shower of feathers, which covered their shivering bodies. Gaining warmth, they looked about them. High on the trees overhead they saw hundreds of mountain crows, such as they had sometimes seen on the plains country, and had believed to be a warning of evil. When Nina arrives at the ballet studio, she finds Lily in her costume, practicing her routine with the rest of the troupe. When Lily walks up to Nina, she says she was only filling in because Thomas had asked her to. Nina then questions Lily about why she left her house the night before, and Lily claims she went home to her place with Tom where they spent the night, and that last time she saw Nina was at the club. When Nina brings up what happened in her bedroom, Lily is flattered that Nina had a lesbian wet dream about her. She playfully asks Nina if she was any good but Nina gets embarrassed and leaves, looking uncomfortable and frustrated, wondering if her lovemaking with Lily had really happened or not.

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Thomas kisses her. During the kiss there’s a strange feminine soundscape that ends with what sounds like playful laughter. Nina then bites Thomas’s lip. Ending the kiss. The dance moves involved her male companion to hold her and touch her on what should have been the wounded area. All this time, he doesn’t feel the glass shard in her belly? Also, if it had been a fatal injury, how could she dance with such ferocity on stage? Perhaps, she had imagined the stabbing part as well. This means that she is not hurt and will be fine, though she might need to get help for her hallucinations. In 1963, her first brush with notoriety came through Julian Wasser's iconic photograph of a nude, twenty-year-old Babitz playing chess with the artist Marcel Duchamp, on the occasion of his landmark retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum. The show was curated by Walter Hopps, with whom Babitz was having an affair at the time. The photograph is described by the Smithsonian Archives of American Art as being “among the key documentary images of American modern art”. Each man found an animal, and then started. Among them they had possums, native cats, flying squirrels, various kinds of rats, and such. When they reached where the darkness was rolled up on the edge of the plain they camped. Wurrunna and his two brothers sped through the scrub, skirting the plain until they reached the far side. Then Wurrunna lit a fire, produced a large gubbera, or crystal stone, from inside himself, and, turning to his two brothers, crooned a sort of sing-song over them.

Before we discuss the extent of Nina’s mental ruin, we should think about the reasons that might have led to it. It doesn’t take much to figure out that she is an isolated person. The only consistent individual in her life is her mother, Erica. She, too, had been a ballerina, though not as successful, or as good, as her daughter. She says that she had to let go of her career because of her pregnancy. We might have believed her tale of “sacrifice” had her own daughter held her in high regard. Instead, we find Nina suffocated by her constant overbearing, yearning to break free. Burlingame, Jon (December 21, 2010). "Academy nixes four score contenders". Variety . Retrieved December 24, 2010. It felt very Melrose Place, except with more drugs and.. as I can remember it.. and I can’t remember it too clearly because I was a youngin when that show was on but from what I remember this was giving me heavy Melrose Place vibes. At first, we rule out this behaviour as the compulsive nature of Erica to be in control of her daughter’s life and to treat her like a child. But moving forward, a context begins to appear. If this rash symbolises Nina’s diseased state of mind and if it has happened before, then it means that Erica is aware of Nina’s hallucinations. Her daughter’s drive for perfection has broken her before; never like this time, but there are wounds and dents on her psyche. A little later, Nina is being fitted for her Swan costume. When she's done, Lily walks in and says Thomas made Lily Nina's alternate. Enraged and afraid, Nina finds Thomas and begs him not to make Lily her alternate, convinced that Lily is trying to steal the role from her. As Nina begins to cry, Thomas soothes her before telling her she is being paranoid. He tells her that the only person trying to sabotage Nina is "Nina".Everything was about L.A. I'm not from L.A. or even the USA so the L.A. parts really were boring for me, which means 80% of the parts were boring in the end. She talks so much about L.A. about how amazing it is, at least she is aware that the USA is not better than Europe like most think. She really thought she can make her boyfriend move to L.A. because she wouldn't leave it of course! The love for L.A. left me speechless and I'm happy I'm not an American. This read like if Kit from Pretty Woman, or ummm Vivian, played by Julia Robert’s character in the film, wrote stories of their lives and their friends before she meets Richard Gere and goes nowhere. Taleb's problem is about epistemic limitations in some parts of the areas covered in decision making. These limitations are twofold: philosophical (mathematical) and empirical (human-known) epistemic biases. The philosophical problem is about the decrease in knowledge when it comes to rare events because these are not visible in past samples and therefore require a strong a priori (extrapolating) theory; accordingly, predictions of events depend more and more on theories when their probability is small. In the "fourth quadrant", knowledge is uncertain and consequences are large, requiring more robustness. [ citation needed]