Fobsie'll like this.

The New York Times' Critics' Choice DVD pick for the week: The 36th Chamber of Shaolin!

Plastic Waste

If you ignore the wastes in the foreground, and the 'Your future has meaning' hoarding, you could catch parts of newly built beautifull St Martins Church at Palarivattom Junction, Kochi City, Kerala, India.

And if you want to shock yourself with the things that we do to our nature, click here.

Lunacy : Jan Svankmajer

Film Info
2006
118 mins
Color
Czech Republic / Slovakia
In Czech with English subtitles
35mm
Aspect ratio: 1.66:1
Sound: Dolby Digital

“ONE OF THE YEAR'S BEST FILMS! A SATIRICAL MASTERPIECE!”
- Andrew O'Hehir, Salon

“Horrific but also funny! Line up outside New York’s Film Forum--and then other theatres nationwide!”
- Stuart Klawans, The Nation

“Raucously inventive and completely out of its mind!”
- Aaron Hillis, Premiere

“A bracing blast of old school surrealism!”
- Dennis Lim, Village Voice

“The last true surrealist...provides the full Svankmajer flavor--as well as a comic metaphor for human existence itself!”
- J. Hoberman, Village Voice

“Marvelous stop-motion animated sequences.”
- Manohla Dargis, The New York Times

“Awesome! Plentiful animation sequences!”
- V.A. Musetto, New York Post

“B plus. Darkly comedic...encourages simultaneous laughter, horror and thought. If that isn’t art, what is?”
- Tasha Robinson, The Onion

“An excellent jolt of blasphemy!”
- Nathan Lee, New York Sun

“The Marquis de Sade, Edgar Allan Poe, Delacroix, orgies and questionable therapeutic practices! Mixes high and low with deranged glee!”
- Time Out, New York

“100% Svankmajer....a potent cocktail....a double-barreled blast of Euro-cult outrageousness!”
- Grady Hendrix, New York Sun

“Svankmajer’s filmic imagination is genius....continues to enthrall, mystify and utterly creep us out!”
- Parisa Vaziri, Film-Forward

“His finest live-action feature to date!”
- Ken Fox, tvguide.com

“Combining horror, comedy, drama and absurdity has rarely been so much fun!”
- NYCMovieGuru.com

“Four stars! (highest rating)”
- Ed Gonzalez, Slant Magazine

“Intriguing!...Shot through with the Czech director’s customary black humor, and punctuated by some cheerfully gruesome animation...A fully formed film which transcends polemic by an intelligent use of the imagination.”
- Richard James Havis, Hollywood Reporter

Loretta Lux Photography

www.jonathanyuen.com

Zak Smith's illustrations of Gravity's rainbow

On hyphens

“If you take hyphens seriously, you will surely go mad.” ~(Oxford University Press style manual).

'Work' in literature

The workday proves dull not only to the Computer Programmer, but to the novelist. When there's war to attend to, and heartbreak, and class struggle and familial strife and rage against the dying light, why would one preoccupy oneself, when endeavouring to write fiction, with the nine-to-five? Work does play an important role in literature. It just doesn't mirror the importance or merit the attention it gets in real life.
...
Contemporary readers like the Marketing Consultant should shudder to the core at [Bartleby's] display of existential freedom.

Christopher Hitchens' new book

From God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything:

There are four irreducible objections to religious faith: that it wholly misrepresents the origins of man and the cosmos, that because of this original error it manages to combine the maximum of servility with the maximum of solipsism, that it is both the result and the cause of dangerous sexual repression, and that it is ultimately grounded on wish-thinking.

Book lists

Yet another, this time from a whole book of lists.

The slacker as rebel

Tennis again, wondering if Allen Ginsberg is not more important than Alan Greenspan:

Perhaps that makes you the true misfit -- one who does not even recognize it and would disavow it if asked. When asked to consider the useful social role he plays, the philosophical rebel prefers not to. Or has something happened to the currency of the idea itself of the rebel of conscience, the revolutionary of the soul, the transcendence seeker? ... [The philosophical rebel] alone has the courage to say, "I have no clue what this shit is." ... he does not jump when the Man says jump -- he scarcely moves; he hardly hears the Man; he can hardly even see him; he has to squint. It's his constitution to be cautious and to ask the relevant question Why? ... Could it be that the voice of what you want is God's voice? Could it be that what you want is what God wants? Could it be that you are eating and sleeping and fucking for God? And if that is God's voice then what is this other voice that would hobble the hipster and tie him down, would frighten him into a frightful day job he half believes in and half detests? That must be the voice of the devil!

On porn

Cary Tennis at Salon.com:

In the lizard mind where all things are writ backward on the mirror in God's pink lipstick, I am you and you are me. We become what we behold, as Blake said. What we see is what we are. If you are naked I am naked. We are porous in the sensorium of sex. We are not impervious; we cannot look at it without tingling. It hijacks our sex. So if we do not like porn it may be because porn is too powerful. We don't care to lose our freedom to this thing, to have our sex run off one way while we who were children once gape in astonishment and wonder and frightful surprise at the size, the perfection, the wetness, the hairlessness, the lips, the machines.

Contemporary Indian Cinema...

...at MoMA.

The Wired 40

Annual list of the most innovative companies in the world. Infosys at no 14.

Fixing the world

Know these attempts:
The Whole Earth Catalog

We are as gods and might as well get good at it. So far, remotely done power and glory - as via government, big business, formal education, church — has succeeded to the point where gross defects obscure actual gains. In response to this dilemma and to these gains a realm of intimate, personal power is developing — power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested. Tools that aid this process are sought and promoted by the WHOLE EARTH CATALOG.

Worldchanging
‘[Worldchanging: A User’s Guide for the 21st Century] might well be the most complete, compelling articulation of the possible look and feel and actual operation of a sustainable society ever written.’

Cho / Oldboy

The doings of Cho Seung-Hui have brought the 2005 Korean film Oldboy into public discourse.

And so it goes...

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (11 Nov 1922 - 11 Apr 2007)

Listen to the title character in his 1965 novel God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, or Pearls Before Swine:

“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’”

Helvetica

It’s 50 years since the introduction of Helvetica, which has been called the official typeface of the 20th century.

Easter

midnight
pigs, ducks, chicken and cattle shrieked and tore the sky into two.
blood flood the kitchen floor
women smelled of grease and garlic
bottles are emptied
bowels are cleared

morning air, stayed like a drunkard's breath
christ is up in the air
sermons are given and doors closed
churchyard quite and strewn with color rags

at home, food, laughter and howls started
family feuds are renewed for the coming year
then people strayed out
ducked the police on the streets.

Happy Easter was a Drunken Roar.

Work

‘All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind.’ ~ Aristotle

‘We must cultivate our garden.’ ~ Voltaire

‘Like the bee, we should make our industry our amusement.’ ~ Oliver Goldsmith

‘There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living.’ ~Thoreau

‘I do not like work even when someone else does it.’ ~ Mark Twain

‘Nothing is really work unless you would rather be doing something else.’ ~ James Matthew Barrie

‘To find out what one is fitted to do, and to secure an opportunity to do it, is the key to happiness.’ ~ John Dewey

‘I like work; it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.’ ~ Jerome K. Jerome

‘The labor of a human being is not a commodity or article of commerce. You can’t weigh the soul of a man with a bar of pig-iron.’ ~ Samuel Gompers

‘One of the saddest things is that the only thing that a man can do for eight hours a day, day after day, is work. You can’t eat eight hours a day nor drink for eight hours a day nor make love for eight hours -- all you can do for eight hours is work. Which is the reason why man makes himself and everybody else so miserable and unhappy.’ ~ William Faulkner

‘To find joy in work is to discover the fountain of youth.’ ~ Pearl S Buck

‘Get happiness out of your work or you may never know what happiness is.’ ~ Elbert Hubbard

‘What is the good of being a genius if you cannot use it as an excuse for being unemployed?’ ~ Gerald Barzan

‘If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you’re a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind.’ ~ Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

‘Men for the sake of getting a living forget to live.’ ~ Margaret Fuller

‘Life is just a dirty four-letter word: W-O-R-K.’ ~ J. P. Mcevoy

‘No man ever said on his deathbed, “I wish I had spent more time at the office.”’ ~ Senator Paul Tsongas

‘The intellectual equipment needed for the job of the future is an ability to define problems, quickly assimilate relevant data, conceptualize and reorganize the information, make deductive and inductive leaps with it, ask hard questions about it, discuss findings with colleagues, work collaboratively to find solutions and then convince others.’ ~ Robert B. Reich

‘Find a job you love and you’ll never have to work a day in your life.’