Category: Humor

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The Brave New World and the Odyssey

  • <> <> Pina Bausch 1
    (This image was selected to hold your attention till next post. )

    Many powerful visionary were born between July 22 to July 29.
    Here are random links. Click the links to check who thy are.

    July 22 – go to this old article by Errata . How he influenced film images – priceless.

    July 23 – Poet who wrote about Goddess and mythology +
    “Lawrence and the Arabs.” Written in translucent English, this book studies not only the events of the Arab Revolt; it also evaluates the geopolitical significance of the Middle East at a time when the glance of most observers was turned elsewhere. He understands perfectly the stake of the European powers in the Middle East. He also explores the exact significance of T.E. Lawrence. (from here).

    July 24 – See his polaroid photos and his Drugstore Cowboy friends here.

    July 26 – Brave New World ranked one of top five novels. The philosopher and the satirist with two great wives and friendship with D.H. Lawrence and many others. Read his biography and this (The Case for Constructing Peace) for now.
    Tripped on Acid before taking his last breath. (Planned and carefully executed celebration for departure and not an accident)

    July 26 – A medicine man who talked to pots and pans. Archetypes, Syncronicity, collective unconscious, he got all these ideas from his patients and girlfriends. Juicy scandal – became a play on Broadway.
    Read “Memories, Dreams, Reflections” for a starter.

    Stanley Kubrick by Weegee
    July 26 – What can we say about this man?
    Alex Rose (music critic for the New Yorker)blogged about his friend.
    He and Andy Warhol got stuff in boxes all organized, to make sure we would keep finding things and remember them.

    July 28 Dada or Our Daddy of avant garde – did not think we should own cars.
    He has a reputation of being controversial, and uncompromising but for me he was a great teacher who fused art and life, he represents good sense, sanity and humor. I happen to think many of his paintings beautiful and mysterious for someone who disdained the retinal in favor of concept.
    “When I once asked Beatrice Wood how Marcel was in bed, fearing that I would never forgive myself in the future for not having asked that question (impertinent though it certainly was), she responded with a tribute that would be the envy of any sensitive and caring man: “All I can remember is that he was as gentle in bed,” she said, “as he was out of it.” ( from here).
    See “Jules and Jim” by Francois Truffaut a film vaguely influenced by Henri Pierre Roche’ friendship with Marcel. (The information about Roche came from Pauline Kael. According to Pauline Kael, Roche introduced Picasso to Gertrude Stein). Jim seems like a model for both Henri and Marcel. Who was Jules?
    Eggnudes Descending the Stairs was dedicated to him, anyone care to celebrate his birthday?

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    Nanshu and Nushu – Man’s Language and Mother’s Tongue

    China’s mother tongue is dying.
    * Generations of women passed down a unique form of writing that was kept away from men. Now a 95-year-old may be the last alive who grew up using nushu.

    Old Lady Nushu
    Picture from here.

    “When I learned nushu, it was to meet with friends and sisters to exchange our thoughts and letters. We wrote what was in our hearts, our feelings,” Yang said. “But now,” she added with a sigh, “there’s no use learning it anymore.”

    Nushu on the left
    Nushu and Nanshu
    Chasing Nushu resulted in woven cloth.
    Nushu did not produce its Tale of Genji (first great novel written by Lady Murasaki) and Nushu sounds like Nasu which means eggplant in Japanese.

    The world of Nushu.

    This is China’s new power language – Yuan shu
    Y U A N
    Yuan
    digital image July 22, 2005

    The honorary China man from Australia
    Chris Doyle said this of Wong Kar Wai from the Observer.
    “2046 was a kind of sequel to In the Mood for Love, and, he says: ‘I feel that 2046 is unnecessary, in retrospect. I think probably Wong Kar-Wai realised that somewhere, and that’s why it took so long. You do realise that you have basically said what you needed to say, so why say more? I feel that way. I think you have to move on.’
    Chris is the most honest drunken cinematographer.
    This is an example of Nansu (man’s language in Chinese), old friends showing comradrie and affection – or do you think they are having a serious rift?

    Eat only Big Mac and Kentucky Fried Chickens in China if you want to be safe, a warning from Peking Duck, from here.

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    Sign, Language and Declaration of Incompetence

    Two botched digital images, a sign of incompetence at Vitro Nasu shamelessly displayed.

    <> <> <> <> Slant
    Slant and Missing “OF”

    <> <> <> <> Sign
    So faint you can not see the signs.

    Thank you Google, tonight we celebrate.
    <> <> <> <> July 4 at night
    July $th, 2005. ( oops wrong sign, shift unintended)

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    Tiny Toy from Columbia

    The tiny toy from Columbia
    Toy from Columbia

    My neighbors who changed their minds about selling the toy after
    I showed an interest.
    The lady on the right asked me then
    Femmes
    if I could guess which one of the girls (there were three young girls) was her daughter I could then have the toy for free. Lucky for her I guessed wrong.

    Picture of a biker coming home from Saturday garagesale ride to neighborhood.
    biker
    Looks like she got something to cover her arse.

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    Mao There, Mao Here, – Jung Chang, Hongtu Zhang

    Jung Chang and her husband’s book”Mao:The Unknown Story’ is out and a review is here.
    “the book uses sources they have unearthed that reveal Mao as a psychopathic leader, responsible for the deaths of 70 million, and driven by a hunger for power.”
    “Mao was deeply influenced by Fredrick Paulsen, a minor German philosopher who shunned all constraints of responsibility and duty. He put his theories into practice during the Long March and in Yenan, the Communists’ first headquarters in China.”

    “Contrary to the perceived idea that Stalin disapproved of Mao, Halliday says these documents revealed that the Soviet leader had talent-spotted his Chinese counterpart and nurtured his power-base from the 1920s. “Mao always perpetuated the myth that he’d risen to power without help from the Russians. But he was the one that the Russians were pushing and protecting.” The material Halliday unearthed on four trips to Moscow was so extraordinary, he remembers leaving the archives at 4pm every day, bathed in sweat.”

    Mao's Last Banquet

    The Last Banquet by Zhang Hongtu/Hongtu Zhang
    “Sometimes the hole in my work might remind you of the Nothingness of Taoism or the negative space of traditional Chinese ink painting, but the visual inspiration of my work comes directly from a bagel.”
    (via)

    ancient chinese robe
    PENG WEI (b. 1974)
    Robe / Palace on the Immortal Mountains
    Ink and color on paper, with one seal of the artist, Peng Wei
    (From The Ancient Robe – New Ideas.)

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    Necktie Skirt

    “What I hide by my language, my body utters,” wrote Roland Barthes in “A Lover’s Discourse.” LeDray’s suits of clothes are bodies, really, unable to conceal the meaning of their lives. “Becoming Mr. Man” from 1992 tells the tale of desperate intellectual, pockets stuffed with poems and lapels unfashionably wide, the bulk of its frustrated desires battering the fabric. (from here)

    Charles LeDray
    Necktie Skirt by Charles LeDray

    Laura Bush got harrassed in Jerusalem, and Hollywood Oscar winning stars Hilary Swank and Morgan Freeman were crude and rude as presenters at the Cannes Film Festival. Karina Longworth agreed with me. “They do a really annoying comedy bit about how they just both won Oscars … ugh. Ugly Americans. ” ( from cinematical).

    Something more depressing from Nytimes On this day May 23.

    On May 23, 1934, bank robbers Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were shot to death in a police ambush as they were driving a stolen Ford Deluxe along a road in Bienville Parish, La.
    It continues…

    1430 Joan of Arc was captured by the Burgundians, who sold her to the English.
    1533 The marriage of England’s King Henry VIII to Catherine of Aragon was declared null and void.
    1701 Captain William Kidd was hanged in London after being convicted of piracy and murder.
    1915 Italy declared war on Austria-Hungary in World War I.
    1937 Industrialist John D. Rockefeller died in Ormond Beach, Fla.
    1945 Nazi official Heinrich Himmler committed suicide while imprisoned in Luneburg, Germany.
    1960 Israel announced it had captured former Nazi official Adolf Eichmann in Argentina.
    1992 The United States and four former Soviet republics signed an agreement in Lisbon, Portugal, to implement the START missile reduction treaty that had been agreed to by the Soviet Union prior to its dissolution.
    1997 Iranians elected a moderate president, Mohammad Khatami, over hard-liners in the ruling Muslim clergy.
    2002 Golfer Sam Snead died at age 89.
    2003 Congress sent President George W. Bush a $330 billion package of tax cuts – the third of his presidency.

    We don’t have to worry about May 23 till another year, thank god.

    garagesale
    Photo of dried Saguaro (cacti) flowers framed by found garage sale
    photo frame.

    We bike to Garage sales on Saturday, rarely we find things we like but occasionally we find some treasures. I will share my garage sale collection with the world bit by bit.
    Garage sale or garbage sale? (From artblog)

    Elsewhere, we are celebrating the birth of a new group blog “Long Sunday”. Cannes film festival rediscovered Woody Allen and so did this blog. (The necktie skirt is short and our Sunday long, that is the way we like it).

    Another wonderful tribute to Claire Denis from Darren Hughes.
    “Beau Travail is a perfect film, and one of the many reasons it is perfect is Claire Denis’s uncanny knack for discovering moments of transcendence with music.” (From Long Pauses)

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    Taurus Thinkers – Stripes and Parallels + Daniel Buren

    May 19 was a birthday of Malcom X and Ho Chi Minh and the fact of their birthday did not seem to capture the interest at blogsphere this year. Interesting to know that two of revolutinary father figures shared a birthday. There are a few more examples of birthday twins.

    A)
    Soren Kierkegaard
    5/5 1813
    Karl Marx
    5/5 1818

    B)
    70 Jules Massenet
    5/12/1842 – 8/13/1912
    French composer; best remembered for his operas

    79 Gabriel Faure
    5/12/1845 – 11/4/1924
    French composer

    C)
    69 Albert Finney
    5/9/1936
    69 Glenda Jackson
    5/9/1936

    Or take a look at this list,
    Socrates, Marcus Aurelius, Wittgenstein, Godel, Herbert Spencer, Poincare, Machiavelli, Kant, Thomas Huxley, Kierkegaard, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, David Hume, Ortega Y Gasset, Karl Barth, Bertrand Russell,Rudolph Carnap, Fichte, John Stewart Mill – and if you include the creative minds – Shakespeare and Orson Wells.

    They were all Taurus – no bullshit.
    Thinkers and revolutionaries are stubborn, persistent, retentive, steadfast, sedantary, habitual, earthy and practical. There are non-materialistic Taurus who manage to change the world, not all
    Taurus are greedy as the list above indicate.

    It turns out you don’t have to be Taurus to be a good bullshit artist,
    here is Daniel Buren.
    Read, Daniel Buren: you can run but you can’t hide from the man
    buren2buren

    Daniel Buren from Happy Famous Artist Blog.

    From Daydreamer “one of the Buren’s works’ marvelous points is including nature effect, here.

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    Lost Frog in the Thick of Blog Fog – Basho & Fernando Pessoa

    Basho Basho
    Basho is said to have become enlightened after hearing a frog jump into a garden pond (from googlism).
    Ponder this, the pond may not be the best place to find a competent translation of the Basho’s haiku.
    Check out these great minds struggling with the translation here.

    Alan Watts liked Plop and Ginsberg liked Kerplunk. Or notice how Edward Seidensticker and Donald Keene compete in their free association with the word “old”, as Seidensticker chose “quiet” and Keene chose “ancient”.

    Pessoa 1pessoa

    Or take a look at 16 ways to translate Fernando Pessoa’s poem Autopsychography here.
    At least it is not about a lost frog. (It is about a poet who fakes, lies, invents and pretends).
    <> <> <> Multiple Pessoa here

    Frog abducted Frog abducated by Aliens by Aliens

    Here is a website seriously looking for a frog, him name is Hopkins.

    More fun links are added on the sidebar menu under frog .