A Scott Weiland moment and mood behind the desk

Locus Solus

Neuroses for the dead
avowed to be
null and a void
allowed to be divided
into ten thousand days

won't last too long

Like the first whisper of a rising wind

Yoshitoshi, Eimei nijûhasshûku (Twenty-eight famous murders with verse), 1867

Thatched Cottages at Cordeville

Vincent Van Gogh: Thatched Cottages at Cordeville, 1890.

Man / Machine

Georges Rohner: L'homme et la machine, 1980

Soga Shohaku: "Brahman and Indra"

Pacman and consumerism

“Jesus: Pacman was about consumerism. It was all about seeing how much you could consume before you died. Your whole life is spent eating yellow dots – consuming products – while trying to avoid the reality of of your own death.

Elvis: Do what?

Jesus: That was what the ghosts represented. Mortality. They were always coming to get you, and the Pacman's whole existence was based on avoiding them while devouring as much crap as he could fit his mouth around. But there was death, always around the corner, and no matter how much you consumed, they always got you in the end. You never noticed that?”

Captain Smack, This Is Your Captain Speaking
Full post

Cultural revolution or mass hysteria?

“But beyond the very legitimate concerns about the quality of American beef, I think there is also something more going on here, at least for the university students.
I get the sense that young people are bored, bored with pop culture, bored with plastic surgery, bored with consumerism and the fetishization of luxury goods.
They are also angry that they have spent their entire lives studying, only to leave university and enter a jobless future. Korea was convulsed by political revolution in the 1980s, but never really went through an equivalent cultural revolution.The protests are about mad cow disease today, but social movements have a way of accumulating new meanings and directions over time. Who could have predicted that opening the Korean market to U.S. beef would have sparked such massive protests. And who knows where this thing will end up. That’s the exciting thing about history.”

John Eperjesi (Kyung Hee University), “Candlelight Vigils, Food Sovereignty for Healthier Future”
Full article

“This situation would not be so confusing if the diplomats, journalists and other foreign residents who know Korea did their jobs properly. But either they don’t understand the dynamic themselves or out of love for Koreans they moderate their language. Thus the foreign press, for example, refers to “anger against resumed beef imports,” rather than public hysteria, which is what it really is. Believe me. As a European, I know hysteria when I see it. We murdered 200,000 people as witches in the 15th century and 6 million Jews, and large numbers of Gypsies and homosexuals, in the 20th, for reasons that we don’t know.”

Mike Breen, “Mad Cow Hysteria”
Full article

Office stuff

- What are you working on?
- [thick Korean accent] What work?

[staring at a blank spreadsheet] I didn't really think this through...

Almost rational

“The real trouble with the world of ours is not that it is an unreasonable world, nor even that it is a reasonable one. The commonest kind of trouble is that it is nearly reasonable, but not quite. Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians. It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is; its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden; its wildness lies in wait.”

G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

From 'Anatomy of Melancholy'

“To say truth, 'tis the common fortune of most scholars to be servile and poor, to complain pitifully, and lay open their wants to their respective patrons... and... for hope of gain to lie, flatter, and with hyperbolical elogiums and commendations to magnify and extol an illiterate unworthy idiot for his excellent virtues, whom they should rather, as Machiavel observes, vilify and rail at downright for his most notorious villainies and vices.”

“I have read many books, but to little purpose, for want of good method. I have confusedly tumbled over divers authors in our libraries with small profit for want of art, order, memory, judgment.”

Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy

Averroes in his analogical plenitude

Non-dreams

And there you go, dreaming about new women. It took you a while to figure out what you wanted from life in general: a little bit of solitude, silence, drinking... doing drugs, and every now and then, a very pretty girl that you'll never see again.

Nietzsche

His war against God was madness of course. Direct war was completely out of the question. Christianity had the genius (the wisdom?) of positioning go-betweens, intercessors and mediators, like Jesus Christ himself. It is better to have to do with the saints than with God sometimes. How wise polytheism was in this respect.

Appointment

Everything is temporary: love, art, earth, you and me. Death is inevitable that it takes everyone by surprise.
How would you know if today might not be your last day? this time the last time?
You think you have enough time but you really have no idea at all.
And then, that's it, you drown, you die: game over.
Death is the only appointment that cannot be written down in your calendar.

One-way street

Deafening... defining. The shore might not be there any more
among seasons of seasickness and reeling waves.

Asian Markets Fall Like Cherry Blossoms In Gentle Spring Rain

Asian Markets Fall Like Cherry Blossoms In Gentle Spring Rain

TOKYO, HONG KONG, SEOUL—"Our worst monthly drop; rate cuts make investors flee—to commodities," Nikkei index vice commissioner Fukako Mishima said in haiku last week.

And yet another masterpiece from The Onion. A genuine poem in prose.

All plots tend to move deathward

“The discussion moved to plots in general. I found myself saying to the assembled heads, “All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots. Political plots, terrorist plots, lovers’ plots, narrative plots, plots that are part of children's games. We edge nearer death every time we plot. It is like a contract that all must sign, the plotters as well as those who are the targets of the plot.” ”

Don DeLillo, White Noise

Grendizer/Goldorak. Giant robot knight shell

After more than twenty years, what I find surprising is the bizarre Americanization of the main character, an aristocrat from a remote (and dead) planet, who passes himself off as a humble horse wrangler (of all things).

The New York Philharmonic in Pyongyang

The New York Philharmonic’ concert in Pyongyang on February 26, conducted by Lorin Maazel, will be broadcast live, worldwide, on satellite television, a statement from the orchestra said on Friday, January 25.

The announcement of this historical concert was made on December 11 in New York during a press conference to which participated Pak Gil Yon, alongside the orchestra’s president Paul Guenther and Zarin Mehta, who has been music director since 2002.

The orchestra will perform the American and North-Korean national anthems, then will proceed to play the Prelude to Act III of Richard Wagner's opera Lohengrin, Anton Dvorak’s ninth symphony, “From the New World” and George Gershwin’s “An American in Paris”.

The concert will take place in the East Pyongyang Grand Theater, at the end of a tour that will take the New York Philharmonic to Taiwan, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Beijing. The musicians, who will be staying in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea from February 25 to 27, will then go to Seoul, where they are scheduled for a concert on February 28.

The live broadcast of the concert will be co-produced by the Philharmonic and EuroArts Music International (a Medici Arts company), the South-Korean television channel “Munhwa Broadcasting Company” (MBC), ARTE France and the EBU (European Broadcasting Union). The broadcast will be directed by Michael Beyer, with Paul Smaczny and Thomas Baer as executive producers. The performance can be watched on Thursday, February 26 at 8 p.m. (ET) on Thirteen/WNET New York GREAT PERFORMANCES on PBS (check local listings). The DVD of the event will be released in spring 2008 by EuroArts.

Below the Surface

Saw the “Contemporary Dance Showcase, Phase 2: Japan + East Asia” at Japan Society on Friday. A good variety of performances, i.e., tones and colors. In a nutshell, a very strong show, funny, angst-filled at times, beautiful in the most traditional sense of the word.

I found Lee Yong-In’s solo performance to be the strongest, if not necessarily the most original. The sharp precision, the austerity of the movements, and the beauty of the dancer: a very nice piece.

Discreet apocalypse: bits of avoidance/abstention

He thought about the time when he had slept with them. Both were pretty. One was the daughter of a preacher, and a philosopher at that. The other was a doctor, a cellist with a slow, husky voice. He thought about how he pulled off that one; not how he ended up in bed with them, but more how he actually avoided sex with them.
One of them was a stronger temptation. The other, of course. It always had to be. At some point, he thought he was not going to do it.

Once again, he was falling short of doing the deed, and was blurring the lines between the failure to go all the way and his sempiternal penchant for incompletion. He kissed her goodnight, got off the cab and simply walked home, drunk and dissatisfied.

Becoming Slash

I’ve been somewhat consumed by both Guitar Hero AND Rock Band lately. A bit of a distraction, but it feels great playing/being Slash for a few hours, I have to say.

Celebrity Skin

“Have you ever felt so used up as this?
It’s all so sugarless
Hooker/waitress
Model/actress
Oh, just go nameless
Honeysuckle, she's full of poison
She obliterated everything she kissed
Now she’s fading somewhere in Hollywood
I’m glad I came here with your pound of flesh”

Hole, “Celebrity Skin”

Facebook, pokety poke

A portrait of the world in 2008

Happy new year!

What will 2008 be like? As is customary at the beginning of a year, most newspapers and magazines are trying to predict the events and personalities that will have an impact on the world in the next twelve months. Daniel Franklin, the editor of The Economist’s special annual publication, The World in..., (since 1986) reflects upon the traditional journalistic exercise of trend-forecasting in an editorial he wrote for The Guardian. There are usually three forms of prediction, or rather, of event, according to the journalist.

The surefire events

First of all, there are events that will definitely take place, one way or the other. Thus, Daniel Franklin can safely affirm that the US presidential election will hit the headlines this year. “China will also be a headline-maker, and not just because [of[ the summer Olympics in Beijing”, but also because “with America’s economy slowing, possibly even contracting, China will be the country that contributes most to global growth next year”.

Similarly, the Financial Times, which boasts “great success in predicting the events of 2007”, assures us that the reality of the power in Russia will remain in the hands of Vladimir Putin, who will step down as president and take the post of prime minister, “given his personal popularity”. Chances are that a constitutional change will transfer more power to the executive branch. As for the Middle East, the paper predicts that “Iran could produce enough material for a nuclear weapon in 2009 at the earliest”, and Iraq will still be a “broken country – broken by dictatorship, war, invasion and occupation. For most practical purposes it already has disintegrated”. The situation will worsen unless there is “a broader rapprochement in the region between Shia Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia”. When it comes to global warming,"there will be real progress on climate change (...), but it will often feel as if the world is taking a few steps back for every stride forward”.

More trivially perhaps, 08 will be a lucrative year for 007, since it will be the 100th anniversary of James Bond’s creator, Ian Fleming: a book and a film will come out on this occasion. Also, the Chinese will celebrate the Year of the Rat, while the United Nations has declared that 2008 will be the International Year of the Potato.

Speculations and surprises

In the second category of predictions, Daniel Franklin classifies the events about which one can only speculate, at the risk of getting it completely wrong: for instance, China may be the country that will earn the largest number of gold medals at the Games, or a woman will gain access to the presidency of the United States for the first time in history (or maybe not).

This is nevertheless an event that the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times bet on: “the Democratic nominee [Hillary Clinton] will win the election, so great is the unpopularity of this administration” (Financial Times). Mr. Franklin prophecies another trend for the year 2008 : “America (quelle horreur !) will overtake France to become the world’s biggest consumer of wine.”

Last, there are the imponderables, the unpredictable: terrorist attacks, natural disasters, pandemics, financial crash(es)... “some of these will occur in 2008, making nonsense of the best-prepared scenarios.” concludes Daniel Franklin. We just don’t know what they are. If we did, the predictions game would be far less fun.”

Against the experts in predictions

The forecasting game does not make all journalists happy. In a provocatively entitled article – “If you want to know what’s going to happen in 2008, there are lots of experts who can’t tell you .” – published in The Independent, Dominic Lawson lashes at the motley crew of improvised forecasters solicited by the press at this time of the year. “A couple of days ago, the British writer reports, BBC Radio 4 got its three top men in North America to predict (...) who would be the next President of the United States of America. ‘Hillary Clinton’ said expert No. 1, confidently. ‘Barack Obama’ shot back expert No. 2, with equal conviction. ‘John McCain’ insisted expert No. 3, in a similarly self-assured manner. Anyone for Huckabee? Well, it’s just a game, isn’t it?”

Some papers go even farther and do not hesitate to try their hand at an exercise that reads a lot like experimental or science-fiction. The New York Times fondly remembers an editorial from January 1st 1908, which tried to envision New York and the world as the would be... in 2008. In the same perspective, various people from radically different walks of life were invited to imagine the world in 2108.

Ken Perlin, professor at New York University, believes that “everyone’s eyes will be implanted with tiny displays. All the information we need about the city will be accessible to us without conscious effort”. Less optimistic, choreographer Bill T. Jones thinkts that 2008 will be remembered “as a glorious last hurrah”. By 2108, “we will lose the battle with global warming” and “a nuclear device will be exploded somewhere on the planet”. “The less fortunate will go hungry and some may be crippled, but there will be enclaves of great opulence”.

Admittedly, few (if any) of these predictions are not to be taken literally, they are useful insofar as they help us contemplate a variety of possible scenarios for the future. Whethere or not they should call for further action or contradiction is anyone’s call.