Nothing

The thing about nothing is that it truly is something. When Freddie Mercury sang "nothing really matters...to me" in Bohemian Rhapsody, he may well have been stating one of the most profound declarations of caring ever. Next time you ask someone "are you ok" and they reply "its nothing", maybe reply with, "nothing really matters", because if nothing is something, then they are actually trying to tell you something about what they claim to be nothing. But if nothing really is nothing then it still is something, its nothing, so nothing is sort of something.

This has troubled philosophers for a while.

It follows that if nothing the indefinite pronoun is some sort of something then maybe everything is part of nothing.



some nothing links:

http://www.nothing.net/deult.html
http://www.nothingamsterdam.com/
http://nothing.org/

format vs content

Is format important? There are many opposing views in film/making regarding the primacy of form over content or vis versa. Some argue that the way a film looks should always be of the best quality and consistently so, giving the viewer the chance to focus solely on the content. This view assumes that viewer will automatically be distracted by low technical standards. Others argue that if the content is good enough, the form should not matter, as the story/plot/image will carry the viewer beyond a preoccupation with artifice. It's an interesting debate. A badly acted/scripted piece is just that no matter how it's captured. A well written/acted piece can be let down if the viewer is distracted by poor technical considerations. There's definitely a balance that needs to be struck somewhere... Watching old movies can inspire you to look beyond the artifice of technical polish. There's usually a hiss in the audio, and the film cuts are visibly faulty on some classics. Maybe people in the 50s were more concerned with performance and story to notice a few consistent technical production flaws . Or maybe they noticed but just let it go, as they did with many things back then, like wars, social injustice and really archaic political views... similarly today we have let wars and archaic political views pass under the radar. We are shooting news footage on iphones i guess. I don't think there is an actual primacy of one over the other. Sometimes content is something that could only ever have happened whilst being captured on a phone camera. Maybe as more and more cameras become HD capable, including phones, less camera worthy things will happen, as people become actors in a HD world. Not that state repression and responses to it and war crimes are HD worthy, what is HD worthy? Not many things I've seen lately.