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David Mamet Gets All David Mamet On You
2:19PM ON
05/06/2008
BY
Eric Smith
A few weeks back playwright/screenwriter/all-around genius David Mamet wrote an essay in the Village Voice entitled; “Why I Am No Longer A Brain-Dead Liberal”, and true-to-form, the piece is inspired, cynical, hilarious, basically everything you’d expect from one of America’s greatest living writers:
“As a child of the ’60s, I accepted as an article of faith that government is corrupt, that business is exploitative, and that people are generally good at heart.
These cherished precepts had, over the years, become ingrained as increasingly impracticable prejudices. Why do I say impracticable? Because although I still held these beliefs, I no longer applied them in my life. How do I know? My wife informed me. We were riding along and listening to NPR. I felt my facial muscles tightening, and the words beginning to form in my mind: Shut the fuck up. “?” she prompted. And her terse, elegant summation, as always, awakened me to a deeper truth: I had been listening to NPR and reading various organs of national opinion for years, wonder and rage contending for pride of place. Further: I found I had been—rather charmingly, I thought—referring to myself for years as “a brain-dead liberal,” and to NPR as “National Palestinian Radio.”
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One Comment on “ David Mamet Gets All David Mamet On You ”
May 6th, 2008 at 8:02PM
JOE BERNSTEIN Says:
Mamet’s hand is immediately evident in any film he has anything to do with.It’s the cadenced speech with weird emphasis on certain syllables.His stuff is good and intense,and occasionally surrealistic(in the time warped dreamlike sense)as in “Homicide” with Joe Mantegna.Mantegna is definitely a Mamet actor.
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