bloghome
| contact: drbenway at priest dot com
| blogging since Oct '01
This is Gordon Osse's blog.
NOTE: Though the comment counter is not working, you can leave comments and I check for them. if you want to leave website info or your name, do so within the textbox, not the signature box, which isn't operative. Thanks.
"He who does not at some time, with definite determination consent to the terribleness of life, or even exalt in it, never takes possession of the inexpressible fullness of the power of our existence."
-- Rilke
Love,
the powering,
the Widening,
light
unraveling
all faces followers of
All colors, beams of
woven thread,
the Skin
alight that
warms itself
with life.
-- Akhenaton, "Hymn to the Sun"
Opt your children out of Pentagon harassment
Donations appreciated:
WHO I WORK FOR: Mount Hope Wholesale
Wholesale nuts, grains, fruits and spices (and more) shipped from Cottonwood AZ
(Tell them you heard about them on Gordon's blog!)
WHAT I'VE SEEN LATELY:
MOVIES
(r) = re-viewing
God Told Me To (1976, Cohen)
Whispering City (1947, Otsep)
Times and Winds (2006, Erdem)
Dirty Money (Un flic) (1972, Melville)
10th District Court (2004, Depardon)
RFK Must Die: The Assassination of Bobby Kennedy (2007, O'Sullivan)
The Furies (1950, Mann)
In a Lonely Place (1950, Ray)(r)
The Adjuster (1991, Egoyan)(r)
TV
Mad Men The Buddha of Suburbia Intelligence (2006, Haddock) Family Guy
SUGGESTED VIEWING: The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear (2004, Curtis) [available for streaming/download here]
"Backers of front-running films such as Martin Scorsese's The Aviator and Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby have spent an estimated $15 million (£8m) on lobbying for votes - more than the entire production budget for some of their rivals"
I keep forgetting to post about this -- it goes back to last summer -- then I saw Ricci on The Daily Show last night which reminded me
Pondering why the movie version of Prozac Nation -- with Christina Ricci, Jessica Lange and Anne Heche and directed by promising Norwegian director Erik Skjoldbjaerg (the original Insomnia) -- has yet to be released (except in Norway) after 2 years in limbo
"It's a truthful depiction of depression," says Frank Deasy. "And I think the reason Miramax has struggled is the fact that it doesn't have a traditional dramatic structure, in terms of a clear, unqualified ending. Look at the book: Elizabeth is very clear that Prozac has helped her, but you're left with a dilemma, because perhaps she no longer knows who she is. We didn't want to come down heavily on one side or the other. People who've experienced depression like that aspect of the film, but a lot of people don't like it. Miramax certainly don't seem to like it."
Larry Gross, meanwhile, has a fascinating explanation of the endless hold-ups. The 9/11 comment, he says, is of only trifling importance; far more crucial is a recipe for paralysis based on the book's reputation, Wurtzel's pre-eminence in certain New York circles, and Miramax chief Harvey Weinstein's keen awareness of the possibility of failure.
"Harvey might buy an obscure Japanese film and release it, knowing there's a chance it won't work, because no one will pay it the kind of attention that will rebound against him," says Gross. "Prozac Nation is in the backyard of the people who look at what he does for a living. So any failure to put it over will be looked at very carefully. And that's a reason not to distribute it."
"What you have to realise about New York," he continues, "is that people there think Woody Allen's movies are popular, because they all talk about them. With Wurtzel, it's, 'We talk about her stuff all the time, therefore it must be huge'. So if Harvey didn't deliver a commercially successful film on a nationwide level, they'd be like, 'How did you drop this ball?'"
Gilliard's thoughts on the connection between blogs and Thompson's ethos -- and how writing courses have turned writers away from the world -- are particularly good.
Cannon fodder, "Whoops!", and where were you when the fun stopped?
The Denver Post's collection of articles on Thompson
Douglas Brinkley, a historian and author who edited some of Thompson's work, said the founder of "gonzo" journalism shot himself Sunday night after weeks of pain from a host of physical problems that included a broken leg and a hip replacement.
"I think he made a conscious decision that he had an incredible run of 67 years, lived the way he wanted to, and wasn't going to suffer the indignities of old age," Brinkley said in a telephone interview from Aspen. "He was not going to let anybody dictate how he was going to die."
There can be a world of difference between encouraging amateurs and inspiring brilliant craftsmanship, and perhaps it is Thompson's achievement that, like Hemingway, his example has always done both. "What I learned from Hemingway mainly," Thompson told Charlie Rose in 1997, "was that you can want to be a writer and get away with it. ... And, uh, that was very important at the time." [link]
I remember him talking somewhere about how his legend had taken over and it would be better if he wasn't around to get in the way, something like this.
Writers' Guild winners are the 2 movies I can see giving awards to (I mean any awards), out of the Oscar bunch: Sideways & Eternal Sunshine
OK, now that I check the nominees, I can see Jamie Foxx, Vera Drake, Hotel Rwanda, Finding Neverland and Maria Full of Grace being of merit. And the only ones I've seen are Ray & Eternal Sunshine, as I'm limited to DVDs for a couple reasons.
Guess I'm just disappointed as usual with the emphasis on commerce and accumulated merit trumping creative accomplishment.
This looks like a fine Canadian blog on deep politics/conspiracy theories, and critiquing same: Rigorous Intuition, the latest post on the number of therapists seeing victims of US government Mind Control experiments [bloggerly grandfather robot wisdom]
You might want to switch your browser to "no graphics" though (if you have a dial-up) -- I was up to 15 minutes when I finally stopped the photos from downloading.
On the subject of mind control, you might check out Judith Moore's Song of Freedom, a first hand account that is more a rite of passage than a book. Caveat emptor.
Respected German anthropologist lied about missing link skull, throws accepted scholarship on man's history between 40,000 and 10,000 years ago into twilight zone
"We figure that it's probably the biggest explosion observed by humans within our galaxy since Johannes Kepler saw his supernova in 1604," Dr Rob Fender, of Southampton University, UK, told the BBC News website.
One calculation has the giant flare on SGR 1806-20 unleashing about 10,000 trillion trillion trillion watts.
"This is a once-in-a-lifetime event. We have observed an object only 20km across, on the other side of our galaxy, releasing more energy in a 10th of a second than the Sun emits in 100,000 years," said Dr Fender.
The innovation will also come as a relief to those authors who may have mistakenly felt that people were not buying their books because of something they had written.
Rather than being concerned about such old-fashioned literary gimmicks as plot, character and the careful choice of appropriate language, they must now recognised that the key to successful writing is to change the font size setting on their computer and to invest in some heavyweight paper at the stationers.
ADDENDUM: I can think of several reasons right off:
-- netflix
-- obviously people are spending time online - reading, no doubt, some of the time.
-- books are too bloody expensive.
-- the state of the world is pretty distracting, at least for me these days.
This being said, I've always found that fonts I dislike do have an effect on my reading experience. It would be nice if you could pick the font you'll be reading.
Jeez, I wonder if the popularity of blogs has something to do with how the media only report what they're told to by vested interests and their government handlers, and people are finally catching on?
They can hardly be mourned on aesthetic, historical or ethical grounds, but the demise of Beijing's two most notorious tourist traps is likely to induce at least a twinge of nostalgia in any foreigner who has visited the city in the past 10 years.
In less than two months the Silk Market, one of the world's hotbeds of brand piracy, has been shut down and South Bar Street in Sanlitun, the city's most popular collection of watering holes, has been demolished.
Until the last stallholders were evicted last month, the Silk Market was a vibrant, cramped and gloriously messy reminder of China's conversion to capitalism. Its traders were among the first to exploit the economic revolution launched in 1979.
Nicholas Hytner, director of the National Theatre, who also directed the film of The Crucible, called him "the last of the great titans of the American stage".
He added: "With Eugene O'Neill and Tennessee Williams he brought to the English speaking theatre a poetic urgency and tragic sweep that had been absent since the Elizabethan era. His models were the great classical tragedians and, more recently, Ibsen; and I have no doubt that plays like Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, and A View from the Bridge will always stand with the masterpieces of Ibsen, Shakespeare and Sophocles."
The American playwright Edward Albee said Miller had once flattered him by describing his plays as "necessary"': "I will go one step further and say that Arthur's plays are essential."
Personally, I believe evolution explains some of earth's history, but not all of it. But discounting it completely in favor of daft religious dogma is willful ignorance. The reality may well be more complex, and threatening both to people who are religiously scientific and people who believe scientific reasoning annihilates spirituality.
"This is a very delicate case," says José Luis González, a Mexico-based expert on the Catholic hierarchy. "None of the other scandals has involved someone so close to the Pope."
Maciel, now 84, formed the ultra-conservative Legion of Christ in Mexico in 1941 in the wake of religious wars that pitted Catholics against the anti-clerical revolutionary regime and ended with an uneasy mutual tolerance. The order grew quickly, fed by deeply religious families happy to put their boys under the protection of its charismatic young leader. The recruits, too, were enthused by the prospect of a life fighting for God.
"At the time the idea of missionaries conjured up images of hunters and explorers and it sounded adventurous to us boys," recalled Barba, who was 12 when he joined the Legion in 1949. "We were told we were going to save the world from the communists, and that gave us a sense of importance."
Maciel picked out his favourite pupils and took them to study, first in Franco's Spain and then in Rome. They lived in tightly controlled isolation, instilled with the belief that their leader was the epitome of holiness. But at the same time as preaching the strictest moral code for others, Maciel allegedly indulged an addiction to morphine and a warped sexuality.
"Our evidence gathering and our subsequent legal actions all were initiated weeks and even months ago," said RIAA spokesman Jonathan Lamy. "We will now, of course, obviously dismiss this case."
Perhaps the best explanation I've seen of the post-9/11 American world-view/psychosis promulgated by the Fear Lords: xymphora's post referencing a David Suskind article from last fall and an old article by Robert Anton Wilson called "Creative Agnosticism"
xymphora sums up:
We can perhaps see why so many otherwise sensible middle-aged American men - Christopher Hitchens comes to mind - were driven mad with revenge fantasies in the wake of 9-11. The inability of some to see the possibility that the United States had it coming - an issue raised again in the current imbroglio over Ward Churchill, which is a repeat of similar nonsense concerning Chomsky, Rall, and Sontag - is just another part of shirking responsibility. Americans edit reality to create a 'Real' Universe where the United States has never done anything wrong, and thus whatever terrorists do must be baseless evil which merits the most violent response posssible. The good news is that the constant self-editing of the realities of the world mean that the neocons will eventually fail spectacularly...
If your read nothing else about the state of America now, read this post and these 2 articles.
R.I.P. Ossie Davis ("a giant of the stage, screen and the civil rights movement") and Max Schmeling, who knocked out Joe Louis in '36 and was beaten by him in '38, was kicked out of Germany when he refused to be a Nazi mouthpiece, and later became a friend of Louis's