great speeches

[Lady E]

can anyone recommend a great speech?

my boyf has to do a graphic / typographic interpretation of a speech and removing the obvious, its a hard brief to find one.

oration isnt something we think about too much anymore is it?

it can be classical, historical, political, real or fictional, from film or tv or literary.

but really it should be a speech from a person to a group of other people, in the classic 'i have a dream' format.

[Lady E]

i wonder if stand up comedy counts?

[mr franks]

ian duncan smiths speech at the conservative party conference. your boyf could type it in really small letters.....

[Lady E]

aaahh

or kenny everrett at the young conservatives conference in the 80s with those big hands saying 'lets bomb russia!'

[mlexicon]

there was a letter written by martin luther king jr to the local churches in Birmingham Alabama.......its not a speech, but reads like one....
He wrote it to the local church leaders while he was in jail...
Its one of the most fascinating peaces of literature Ive ever read...
Martin Luther had some skills...
He made everyone look like fools with a pen
you could find it in a search i think

[Lady E]

was hoping to avoid the MLK buzz - its guaranteed that everyone else will do him

obviously because he was amazing. but he';s the first person you think of when you think of speeches

[mr franks]

this book has some moving letters and speeches by native americans. sad book, made my eyes moist.


Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West -- by Dee Alexander Brown

[decadnids]

yes, I have heard of that book.
do you have it mr franks?

shakespeare wrote plenty good speeches....obviously

www.ubu.com

is an amazing source of spoken word things

[Lady E]

true nuff.

[mr franks]

Originally posted by decadnids
yes, I have heard of that book.
do you have it mr franks?

its up my arse dec, come fish it out..

actually iv lent it to Lamont - you wanna borrow it?

[decadnids]

yes - would like to borrow it, but i am not fishing it from your arse.
i gave that up last summer.

[mr franks]

fair play

[alex cortex]

emma, check out the very classic speeches. of the roman senat for example. catull, cesar, etc. not to forget the greek rhetoric, platon, sokrates, etc. i´m sure there are many good translations around. and just recently i saw orson welles´ macbeth and was impressed. there are also a few speeches in. anyway shakespeare - lots of speeches: richard III, henry V, ...

[mr franks]

how about Scargills anti thacherite speeches durin the miners strike? you could probably track them down, tho how you would do a typographical representation of scargills accent fuerqe knows.

[doc]

time to evolve - bill hicks.

also relevant in the drug'mama topic.

[Lady E]

maybe look at beckett...

[komakid]

What about William Burroughs or maybe the Pope ?

[May Kasahara]

Less upstandingly, you could go for one of my personal favourites: David Warner's speech in Time Bandits about how God fucked up making the world. Short but to the point.

"Look how he spends his time - 42 species of parrot. Nipples for men. Slugs! He created slugs! They can't hear, can't speak, can't operate machinery - I mean, are we not in the hands of a lunatic? If I was making a world I wouldn't mess about with butterflies and daffodils. I would have started with lasers, 8 o'clock day one."

[Brownthing]

If you want to be topical, then Robin Cooks resignation speech to the House of Commons was a good 'un.

[pille'ocheoni]

William Burroughs has some great stuff, so does hunter s thompson, and

im sure micheal moore "bowling from columbine" has some great stuff.

[alex cortex]

twelve angry men by sidney lumet has this long speech by henry fonda in front of the jurors.

and if a long speech is needed, try any by fidel castro...

[wheezer]

on a slightly funnier note:

http://www.february-7.com/features/conan.htm

conan o'brians commencement speech 2000 at harvard. a lot of one-liners could make for intersting typography.

[V Knid esq]

"I did not have sexual relations with that woman" was a quite funny speech.

Or there are the Nuremburg rallies...

MC5 doing their White Panther 'Kick Out The Jams Motherfuckers' thing "It takes five seconds, five seconds to decide whether you are going to be the problem or whether you are going to be the solution - you must choose, brothers, you must choose." etc etc

Ken Campbell spoke like a proper old-school orator at Wack, using repetition and dynamics to get the crowd (those who were listening anyway) into a frenzy as he delivered his killer punchline about personal responsibility for the universe.

I'll have a think, see if there's any others. Did any birds ever make good speeches?

[Loz]

I still like

Music is the deepest of the arts and deep beneath all arts. So E.M. Forster wrote somewhere. If swimming suggested to me the idea of physical flight, then music suggested something much more. Music was a kind of penetration. Perhaps absorption is a less freighted word. The penetration and absorption of everything into itself. I don't know if you have ever taken LSD, but when you do so the doors of perception, as Aldous Huxley, Jim Morrison and their adherents ceaselessly remind us, swing open wide. That is actually the sort of phrase, unless you are William Blake, that only makes sense when there is some LSD actually swimming about inside you. In the cold light of the cup of coffee and banana sandwich that are beside me now it appears to be nonsense, but I expect you know what it is taken to mean. LSD reveals the whatness of things, their quiddity, their essence. The wateriness of water is suddenly revealed to you, the carpetness of carpets, the woodness of wood, the yellowness of yellow, the nothingness of all, the allness of nothing. For me music gives access to every one of these essences of existence, but at a fraction of the social or financial cost of a drug and without the need to cry "Wow!" all the time, which is one of LSD's most distressing and least endearing side-effects.

Other arts do this too, but other arts are forever confined and anchored by reference. Sculptures are either figuratively representative or physically limited by their material, which is actual and palpable. The words in poems are referential, they breathe with denotation and connotation, suggestion and semantics, coding and signing. Paint is real stuff and the matter of painting contains itself in a frame. Music in the precision of its form and the mathematical tyranny of its laws, escapes into an eternity of abstraction and an absurd sublime that is everywhere and nowhere at once . The grunt of rosin-rubbed catgut, the saliva-bubble blast of a brass tube, the sweaty-fingered squeak on a guitar fret, all that physicality, all that clumsy 'music making', all that grain of human performance, so much messier than the artfully patinated pentimenti or self-consciously painterly mannerism of the sister arts, transcends itself at the moment of its happening, that moment when music actually becomes, as it makes the journey from the vibrating instrument, the vibrating hi-fi speaker, as it sends those vibrations across to the human tympanum and through to the inner ear and into the brain, where the mind is set to vibrate to frequencies of its own making.

The nothingness of music can be moulded by the mood of the listener into the most precise shapes or allowed to flow as free as thought; music can follow the academic and theoretical pattern of its own modality or adhere to some narrative or dialectical programme imposed by a friend, a scholar or the composer himself. Music is everything and nothing. It is useless and no limit can be set on its use. Music takes me to places of illimitable sensual and insensate joy, accessing points of ecstasy that no angelic lover could ever locate, or plunging me into gibbering weeping hells of pain that no torturer could devise. Music makes me write this sort of maundering adolescent nonsense without embarrassment. Music is in fact the dog's bollocks. Nothing else comes close.

by Stephen Fry.

[DsD]

i know that this don`t counts but michael mittermeier (one of the greates stand up comedian in germany) said in a american pub or something like that: "i love america. i realy love it. since 50 years everybody hated germany cause of hitler but now after america stated the war against irak everybody hates u."