Volcanos versus airlines

Volcanic ash has returned to Australia after the second round around the world. All flights cancelled at main airports.

Remember the British Airways Boeing 747 that lost all four engines and scratched its windscreens flying through an ash cloud spewing out of the Indonesian Mount Galungung in June 1982.
Miraculously, the pilots were able to restart the engines and land safely at an alternate airport.

This present volcano is located in Chile.

Australian airlines, especially Qantas, who have outsourced some of its maintenance work abroad to its pilots’ and engineers' dismay, may be more concerned about the maintenance costs of their jet fleet than mayhem caused to its passengers. Maybe.

Curators and souls

Great museums portray their stolen, empty artefacts – naturally without people, but, if curated with care, are able to tell intact and interested stories of civilisations from vague beginnings to ends.

Art museums curate their art collection to tell stories of development and context of art in society, or of individual artists from their naive but promising beginnings till the bitter ends of creativity.

One’s own life, too, is recalled as a chain of sketched pictures. The internal narrative, our self-curator, the soul, is kept together by something in one’s inside – will to live, perhaps, or quest for immortality, who knows – a story somehow unbroken from the first vague picture with sketched context, ‘me’, to just now when ‘I’ stopped watching Lucien Freud as seen by Hector Obalk.

Criticism of criticism

D.H. Lawrence in his essay about John Galsworthy (February 1927):

"Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic...The touchstone is emotion, not reason...All the critical twiddle-twaddle about style and form...is mere impertinence and mostly dull jargon..."

Autch!

The pianists

Lang Lang is in Melbourne without actually performing to the public. What a pity.

He, of course, is as famous for his bodily performances while playing as for his inspired playing. Sort of a Chinese version of Olli Mustonen then, the Finnish pianist, in whose performances, too, the audience is totally mesmerised by the interestingly flamboyant gesticulations. Below Olli plays about six minutes of Sergei Rachmaninov's Piano Sonata No. 1, Op. 28.

Suspicious cynics

An online ad promises Apple iPads for $23.71?!

Yeah, right!

How is it, that one always suspects that if an offer on internet ad looks too good to be true, it actually is so?

Over aeons of human history the originally social member of primate pack has turned into a suspicious cynic, a doubter of beautiful opportunities offered by friendly, good-doing internet entrepreneurs.

I wonder why is that?

Incendies

Saw an intense movie called Incendies by Canadian scriptwriter/director Denis Villeneuve based on Lebanese-born Wajdi Mouawad's play Scorched.

This is one of those movies where it is obligatory that whoever writes about it does not reveal too much of the content.

Briefly, the film is about a woman’s fate in a war-torn country called Fuad (Lebanon) where Christians and Muslims kill each other in a tit for tat cycle of violence. The woman, Nawal Marwan (portrayed by Belgian Lubna Azabal), is Christian, persecuted by the Muslims, who goes through an ordeal, moves to Canada and dies. With her last will, she surprises her teenage twins, sister and brother, and sends them on a mission to Fuad in search for their father and brother.

Due to minor problems of some dates of things within the narrative (perhaps those could've been clarified either by dialogue or texts), the movie-goer will have to be extremely vigilant from the very beginning till the end, and perhaps an appearance of some of the characters is a bit confusing at the end, which tries the watcher's 'willing suspense of disbelieve' close to the limit, this is really a great, enjoyable movie that holds its grip throughout. Highly recommended.

Words in Australian

Words: There are two neat new-speak words to portray modern Australian culture: ‘bogan’ and ‘fandom’.

In the past, football clubs were supported largely by bad-behaving working class men, ‘bogans’ in vernacular, as an alternative for national pride and religion. ‘Fandom’ was named by middle class wankers who nicked the clubs for themselves and needed an urbane name for their new kingdom of well-educated bogans.

Social stigmas

People feel bad about having a social stigma; that’s why many of us, and more by passing day, stop smoking so easily.

Shaming big carbon footprints may eventually work for saving the environment, too. Problem is that bad carbon behaviour does not happen in front of other people (except while driving one's car) so it can be kept concealed.

Exhibit 1: Al Gore’s nightly fully-lit mansion shamed lightless by investigative media. Spectacular.

Lumet: Network

Isn’t Sidney Lumet’s Network with William Holden and Faye Dunaway (1976, 4 Oscars) a totally enjoyable piece of cinematic artistry? Remember the line by the main character, Howard Beale (tv anchorman turned prophet in the film, played by Peter Finch)?

“...Right now. I want you to go to the window, open it, and stick your head out and yell. I want you to yell: ‘I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take this any more!’...”

Thirty odd years have not taken anything away from the movie.

Lord of the Rings fans

Lord of the Rings: the Fellowship of Bad Dress-Sense and Cure for Insomniacs

Entirely without proof and purely through the unkindness of heart, I suspect there are two kinds of Lord of the Rings fans: those who only fall asleep while reading the books and those who also do it while watching the movies.

I tend to fall towards the latter with considerable fervour. Although, although...

Something somewhere inside my weather-toughened torso sometimes kindles and glows tenderly and makes me love the sagas nonetheless.

In Australia, asylum seekers sung Matilda, tugged in bed

Aussie Labour government disappoints: previous PM Kevin Rudd was full of pure hot air; present PM Julia Gillard has no obvious convictions and creates distrust among voters.

ALP has now fallen into conservative opposition's trap re asylum seekers: there are only a few thousands each year compared to hundreds of thousands of official immigrants. The government is planning to send those assylum seekers arriving by boats to Malaysia for processing.

Malaysia is no a signatory to the UN convention on asylum seekers and the government cannot guarantee that they would be treated within the international norms applied in Australia. For instance, the asylum seekers in Malaysia are caned for misbehaviour, which obviously is not the Australia way where they are kept in holiday camps, sung Matilda and tugged in bed with a soft toy (perhaps one of the reasons why the boats keep coming).

Anyway, Gillard should think of human values and not send vulnerable people to dreadful future in a foreign landland – not even Tony Abbott, the scaremongering opposition leader, although he is a truly Australian Wally and sees a carrot of an election win flashed in front of him, by an always-unreliable Mrs Fortuna, as an incentive to become the badly behaving politician of this parliament..

American spring

We The People...

In the middle of the expectant ‘Arab Spring’ in most unlikely places for embracing democracy, like Egypt, Syria and Libya, it’s difficult to believe how close in time the American blacks had their ‘American spring’. It was the time when the almost 200-year old Declaration of Independence did not hold self-evident truths, not even the most famous and nerve-touching line:

“...We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men...”

OK, it talks about men but perhaps we should allow the benefit of the doubt and accept that also the womenfolk were to be included.

The problem is that after a considerable time has passed these old texts gather a mythical dust over themselves obscuring the real meaning, which may not be at all as self-evidently universal as one would be willing to understand. Think of Magna Charta, which only guaranteed rights against the King for the landowning class and not much rights at all to the peasants who slaved their toils without as much as a freedom to eat. But, hey, in a couple of years or so that is already 800 years behind us so let’s forget the whole thing.

Equally difficult is to imagine that USA (the government by the people for the people), in the middle of the 20th century and less than 20 years after being part in winning the war against aggression, genocide and racism, still allowed segregation of its coloured and white citizens in public transportation and in education, including Universities.

And not only segregation but beatings, killings without punishment, hounding by law, and public raving about inferiority of the blacks and other coloured folk compared to the giants of intelligence such as the Alabama and Mississippi Governors.

Picture: Stokely Carmichael in his Freedom Riders mug shot

In 1961 the Freedom Riders were taking busses in Alabama and Mississippi and were beaten by police and jailed for their journeys.

The Freedom Riders-movie shows also the Kennedys (John and Bob) in a new, non-flattering light. New Camelot seemed to have windows with shut curtains on the issue of equality. Not even Martin Luther King, according to this film, come out of these few weeks in May of 1961 without dents in his shining armour.

American Experience

Of Printed and Internet Information

Picture from Wikipedia: François Rabelais (c. 1494 – April 9, 1553) a French satirist

I find the New eWorld of ‘enformation’ exiting, promising and half-full of rubbish, but, then, so is the 'old world', too. Think of the old encyclopaedias, as useful as nun’s – well, be that as it may, but one’d rather dig rubbish in seconds from internet than in hours or days from obsolete printed sources.

And what splendid rubbish there is to excavate from internet (or one could even say ‘unearth’ since the New eWorld information certainly is not any more of earthly appearance): rubbish with almost live and equally rubbish commentary – some of it my own – and some nuggets of gold like whispers, vissible but hidden, to be prospected out with the help of prior knowledge or, lacking that, by pure intuition or plain guesswork.

The information on internet is as democratic as it possibly will ever be, with viewpoints of many rather than just some one old fart, what’s-his-face, that sage, who probably died eons ago (or before I was borne, anyway) and was, to some extent, as ignorant as a schoolkid without internet would be today – if such an oddity would still exist – and was buried with his own, real, now unknown, prejudices, preconceptions and one-sidedness, and wisdom, even sageness, too, admittedly, but that we can easily ignore since we and not he are still well and breathing.

'All the world's wisdom’, fully augmented by the 'Wisdom of Crowds', is just there, under your fingertips, available in seconds or even milliseconds, without ever going to library, to one’s bookshelves or without picking up a newspaper with that peculiar whiff of promise, paper and ink. Insta-knowledge. Available without reading for a long, satisfying time fully expecting to concentrate on something satisfyingly demanding, on a flickering surface without feeling of the dry, gentle touch of the bearable weightiness of being, well, civilisation really. All that has become secondary to requirement due to old media's slow and cumbersome nature that flouts the need for instant gratification but still signals an alluring invitation.

The real and savvy media guys probably think that the notion of 'wisdom of crowds' is true. The truest and most telling form of that wisdom is surely the internet and the more focused form still, and, one could say, the actual living proof, is, of course, the Wikipedia, without which nobody with an internet connection can live any more. The (very old) cliché of 'what did we do before' is epitomised in Wikipedia (through the wisdom of crowds).

Abundance of available information may feel like a problem.

But think of all the factual and fictional books, essays, reports, studies, theses, notes, rules, regulations, laws and directives that you have never read, intended or wanted to read or have never known of not-having read, because they are not, never have been and would never be available to you. With internet – assuming all that is available is put on it – you have a manyfold chance to find it (whatever this ‘it’ were), far better than you ever had with just the printed media or, even more transiently, with radio or TV, where the information, once transmitted, was lost forever, doing speed of light towards other Worlds forever undiscovered and firmly lost somewhere among the stars, where it will benefit no one and will forever be not-seen and not-heard again, ever.

Unless it was recorded on another medium, which probably would be obsolete in a few years' time and then forgotten, or perhaps forgotten even before its obsoleteness.

I read somewhere that 90 % of recorded material is never listened to or watched after recording (this information was from somewhere in Internet, so it may or may not be accurate with an acceptable tolerance or at all). Although, being lost in space may be a more glorious and favourable end for a source of information than being burned, pulped, rotted, eaten or soiled otherwise as happens to printed information, and, to large extent or even mostly, before it was ever used by those whom it reached or was destined to.

So, all in all, I think it is a good thing, this new medium of information, or perhaps a mastodon-size thing, or a sperm whale of things, or a colossus of things. Or even, Heaven help us, a Gargantua of things.

And it may be prudent to remember well the kind of appetite Gargantua had and his creation, too, the Abbey of Thélème, and the Abbey's motto : Fay ce que vouldras (‘Do what thou wilt’). And remember also that there was a Gargantua v. 2.0, his son, Pantagruel. And in the Abbey of Thélème life was grand, like this:

"...
By this liberty they entered into a very laudable emulation to do all of them what they saw did please one. If any of the gallants or ladies should say, Let us drink, they would all drink. If any one of them said, Let us play, they all played. If one said, Let us go a-walking into the fields they went all. If it were to go a-hawking or a-hunting, the ladies mounted upon dainty well-paced nags, seated in a stately palfrey saddle, carried on their lovely fists, miniardly begloved every one of them, either a sparrowhawk or a laneret or a marlin, and the young gallants carried the other kinds of hawks. So nobly were they taught, that there was neither he nor she amongst them but could read, write, sing, play upon several musical instruments, speak five or six several languages, and compose in them all very quaintly, both in verse and prose. Never were seen so valiant knights, so noble and worthy, so dexterous and skilful both on foot and a-horse-back, more brisk and lively, more nimble and quick, or better handling all manner of weapons than were there. Never were seen ladies so proper and handsome, so miniard and dainty, less froward, or more ready with their hand and with their needle in every honest and free action belonging to that sex, than were there.
..."

Ah, does that not sound so familiar, like wisdom of crowds or perhaps even the Internet, isn't it. Grand life v.2.0 already in the 16th century! Or at least that's what was addressed to us all, the Humanity, by that old, long-dead and buried fart, a Frenchman of all things, François Rabelais, possibly a sage, whom almost all of us have already forgotten.

Let's, in the end and for the Glory of New eWorld, borrow a verse from the inscription on the gate to the Abbey of Thélème (or from Wikipedia, whatever):

"Grace, honour, praise, delight,
Here sojourn day and night.
Sound bodies lined
With a good mind,
Do here pursue with might
Grace, honour, praise, delight."

Written in this blog by a true Lover of Books

Kari, a late Finnish Cartoonist, about Rock, Youth and Old Farts