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Comment by haywirez | Hacker News Reader

Just want to say that Michael Benson's Space Odyssey[0], the oral history of making the movie, was the best book I've read this year. Kubrick somehow, through a lot of luck, determination, and frankly a hefty dose of delusional thinking, managed to gather the best minds of a generation to work on what basically amounted to a crazy art project. The book does a good job of impressing that for a lot of people involved it became the apex of their professional and personal lives. In the end, they made something that truly mattered and changed culture. I left the book wishing I got to experience something as intense as that. Most of what we do doesn't matter.

[0] https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Space-Odyssey/Michael...

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"Most of what we do doesn't matter"

One of the pernicious aspects of our culture of celebrity worship is that it leads to the feeling that if something won't be recorded in a book, or on TV, or in a movie, that it doesn't matter.

This is wrong, the instance to instance living of our lives matters, it all matters.

I've seen Space Odyssey a few times, its a cool movie.

How I treat the people I come in contact with today, will matter as much to their lives as how they spent 3 hours several years ago.

It all matters.

How I was treated by most of the people I have come in contact with over the past three months of my life will be forgotten over the course of the next three months.

I will never forget 2001: A Space Odyssey. And this is true for millions of people.

It doesn't have to have anything to do with celebrities or entertainment, but it's very hard and very remarkable to have a profound impact on large numbers of people. And it's exceedingly rare to do this unintentionally.

But it will have changed the quality of how you lived these 3 months,

The remembering isn’t the important part, the living itself is the important part

If I die at age 72, the quality of any three particular months of my life represent less than a percent of my overall quality of life. An experience that I remember or that changes my life, or an invention that I use on a regular basis, changes my life continuously from that moment forward.

Agree that Benson's book _Space Odyssey_ is great.

I just finished _Space Odyssey_ and was appalled by the way Kubrick treated Arthur C. Clarke, excluding him from receiving a percentage of the proceeds and delaying the publication of his book until after the much-delayed film was released and lying to him about his reasons.

Kubrick also abused Dan Richter, who did the choreography for the "Dawn of Man" sequence and played "Moonwalker", the leader of the hominids. Kubrick insisted he could only give Richter one credit. "I'm the only one with more than one credit," Kubrick said, according to Richter. Kubrick gave Richter the choice of a starring credit or the choreography credit. Richter chose the starring credit.

Kubrick also messed with Doug Trumbull (effects), Stuart Freeborn (makeup), Gyorgy Ligetti (music), and many others.

I understand many of the people who worked with Kubrick looked back on all they learned and how they grew professionally while working for him. But I don't understand why he seemed to be such a jerk.

He's the Steve Jobs of cinema.

A home cooked meal, a kind word, a smile matters.

> Most of what we do doesn't matter.

Speak for yourself.

It's a mater of philosophy and scale I guess.

Your home cooked meal, kind word or smile won't have any affect on a star going super nova across the galaxy.

On the other hand that time you were a bit grumpy and short tempered with someone or eat a McDonald's probably won't mater either.

In 1000 years I suspect that no one will know a single thing about my life. The work of Stanley Kubrik, however, is as likely to be around as the works of Cicero or Shakespeare. I take more comfort in that.

On the contrary, I think Kubrick was great on spite of his shortcomings. Most of great artists in history were kind people. I could bet that his movies would be better (or even there would be more of them), having him been a more people's person. Alas, we can only speculate.

I'm not sure there's any way to judge whether most great artists in history were "kind people" or not. We all have our short comings though and "feet of clay".

For all we know he may have wanted to be a better person, for whatever that means, but not been able to be any other way.

He is not his artwork.

I agree that it's a matter of scale. Some people move the dial so much that they effect change in the present and in the foreseeable future. You could say these people matter more than most others.

However, to say that most of what we do doesn't matter is a denial of one's own life.

A home cooked meal, a kind word or smile won't change anything about a star across the galaxy, but what does anything at all about a star across the galaxy matter if it doesn't in some way help to make home cooked meals, dispense kind words, or cause smiles?

Matter doesn't matter, consciousness does.

Interesting take. I've always felt his work was "art: the useless kind." Ambiguous to a T as stipulated by art guidelines. His praise is the unimaginative patting themselves on the back for sitting through an editing mess.

>> Most of what we do doesn't matter.

"Most of what we do doesn't impact culture as immensely as Kubrick's work."

>Most of what we do doesn't matter.

Most of what we do does matter, just not at the same scale.

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