大地上的秋天，成熟的秋天
丝毫也不残暴，更多的是温暖
鸟儿坠落，天空还在飞行
沉甸甸的果实在把最后的时间计算
大地上每天失踪一个人
而星星暗地里成倍地增加
出于幻觉的太阳、出于幻觉的灯
成了活着的人们行路的指南
甚至悲伤也是美丽的，当泪水
流下面庞，当风把一片
孤独的树叶热情地吹响
然而在风中这些低矮的房屋
多么寂静：屋顶连成一片
预感到什么，就把什么承当
ponderings of a pococurante read more »
Archives for the month of: June, 2006
第一次听说西川这个人是因为看了贾樟柯的电影《站台》里他饰演的徐团长，当时我觉得那个角色很诙谐的，因此西川也给我留下了比较深刻的影像。近来我一直想读他的诗，今天终于看了几首并发现他的风格比较朴素，但我还是挺喜欢的，大概是因为本来就是偏爱诗歌而并非是他写的有多好。
他的博客在这里.
I don’t even know how I came across Natalia Zuckerman’s site but i downloaded some of her music; this girl is all kinds of dope, very jazzy, very sensual, but jaunty in that percussive, acoustic guitar dave matthews kinda way. Good stuff, take a listen when you get the chance.
[tags]Natalia Zuckerman, music, jazz, woman, singer, guitar, songwriter, pop, rock[/tags]
So i’m sure that this was the missile strike heard around the world, but even in all the nearly identical reports that i’ve read thus far, there are a couple of other details mentioned in some that are not in mentioned in others–such as this:
Seven other people were also killed in the blast, including two women..
MOst of the time the reports just say this:
“Coalition forces killed al Qaeda terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and one of his key lieutenants, spiritual adviser [Sheikh Abdul Rahman al-Iraqi], yesterday, June 7, at about 6:15 in the evening.”
I don’t suppose its right of me to think about the other peopel that died–were thy innocent, were they guilty, or does anyone even give a shit? If you killed 7 people to get to Z. then perhaps, from a utilitarian standpoint that’s OK–since you prevented the deaths and suffering of even more people that would have happened had Zarqawi continued to live and do what he does best. And yet this form of justice–what can i say? this is the world we are living in now.
[tags]iraq, zarqawi, US, war, politics [/tags]
From Blogcritics i found out that Christopher O’Riley, who has done these albums of piano interpretations of rock bands like Radiohead, has recently released an album of Elliott Smith covers (or interpretations, it’s hard to call the song a cover when there’s no voice and no instrumentation other than the piano). The album is entitled Home to Oblivion which is a very Elliott type of title (though perhaps it’s a more specific reference or song name that i’m not aware of?) On Amazon there’s also this album called “To Elliott from Portland” which is more your standard indie rock covers from local Portland bands of E.S.’s songs.
… Too band i can’t pick up any of that stuff at the local DVD shop in Shanghai.
This is not surprising to me, since nothing that scumbag does is: banning gay marriage, banning inheritance taxes, and banning flag-burning. An attempt by a ever unpopular usurper to circle the wagons as his ratings plummet. From the Guardian:
George Bush declared his backing for a ban on gay marriage yesterday in what sceptics said was part of a broad campaign by the US president to win back disillusioned conservatives and divert attention from the Iraq war.
The point is that none of these issue are at the heart of the concerns of ordinary Americans–or at least they should not be. Who knows what “ordinary Americans” are thinking these days, I was never much in touch with that, and whatever inklings i might have had of that are now completely gone, since most of the time, what i found digusted me. But in any case, it doesn’t seem that i’m alone here:
“Most people are more concerned about performance issues, over Iraq and the economy,” said Andrew Kohut, of the Pew Research Centre polling organisation. “In terms of issues these are pretty far down the line of concerns [of the public]. The question is … whether this can re-energise the conservative base and make it more likely to vote in the mid-terms.”
5 months until November, the one rule in American politics is that you can never start too early. Trying to canvas support is no big deal, but how can you ask the citizenry not to become totally disillusioned with politics when you use ploys like this, where issues like gay marriage and flag burning and inheritance taxes are just used as chips in the eternal game of politics? How can anyone look at this kind of world and have any faith left in american politics?
[tags]politics, US, America, Bush, right, conservative, gay marriage, flag burning, inheritance taxes, polls, midterm elections, Congress[/tags]
From an interview with Richard A. Lanham:
Second, how to “make sense of the enormous flow of free information” is another question altogether, at least if I understand you. If you mean, “how do we explain the explosion of free information provided by the internet?,” then there are a lot of answers to that, some beyond the traditional purview of economics. People put up information on the web often for the pure pleasure of sharing what they know-the pleasure of teaching. They don’t expect money to follow. They are being paid in a different coin, the pleasure of teaching, which includes of course the attention your readers/viewers/students pay to you. One of the great surprises, at least to me, about the internet-based information explosion is the extraordinary human generosity which it has revealed. People want to share their information, their enthusiasms, their way of looking at the world and now they have a new and infinitely more effective way to do it. It may be what they know about Barbie dolls, or about digital cameras, or the specifications of sewer pipe for your house-the range is infinite. It is far more surprising, at least to me, how often people want to give this information away than how they want to be paid for it. So, how to explain the “enormous flow of free information”? Emphatically, not just in the expectation of future profit. Quite the opposite. This generosity of spirit has not been so remarked as it ought to have been.
I like this idea, and i think for the large part that it’s true; the internet and the sharing of information is made possible by the fact that the while we might never become film critics for the new york times (see 2 posts before this) that there is a whole bunch of things that we can share, and that we can, through our blogs and through this generosity of spirit, overcome a bit of the smallness, the anonymity, the feeling of being nobody and nothing.
I don’t know if i;m just gushing but isn’t there a fundamental loneliness to our society and civilization (or just this era?) that goes beyond just the regular run of the mill existential loneliness of all human beings? Nevermind that’s gotta be wrong. But there is something to it, there is something at work in all that sharing–the revival of an older ethic, the revival and revitalization of a certain set of values. It’s strangely democratic, but because we are all selective about both what we consume (and therefore, as the same logic applies to othes) who are we are read or “consumed” by, it doesn’t devolve into the sterile massified thing.
THis is from chapter 2 of the economics of attention by Richard A. Lanham:
Let’s summarize the rules of attention-economy art as Andy practiced them: * Build attention traps. Create value by manipulating the ruling attention structures. Judo, not brute force, gets the best results. Duchamp did this for a joke. Do it for a business. * Understand the logic of the centripetal gaze and how to profit from it. * Draw your inspiration from your audience not your muse. And keep in touch with that audience. The customer is always right. No Olympian artistic ego need apply. * Turn the “masterpiece psychology” of conventional art upside down: o Mass production not skilled handwork o Mass audience not connoisseurship o Trendiness not timelessness o Repetition not rarity * Objects do matter. Don’t leave the world of stuff behind while you float off in cyberspace. Conceptual art gets you nowhere. Create stuff you can sell. * Live in the present. That’s where the value is added. Don’t build your house in eternity. “My work has no future at all. I know that. A few years. Of course my things will mean nothing.”
This is from Perth Australia. She’s always taking pictures at a slant, sometimes gimmicky, but oftentimes quite effective, but that ‘s part of her talent.
There’s an interesting post here from the 2 blowhards blogs about why one of them, Michael, decided to not pursue a career as a professional film critic. Food for thought esp. for me: somehow i know that things aren’t all they’re cracked up to be; but like being a photographer or filmmakers or musician, the fact that i have not entered the real world of those professions, the fact that i have not “made it” means that i jones after it that much more badly. I’ve never treated the whole blog thing that seriously, unless of course people took me seriously and read this blog seriously. Being the movie critic for the NY times–a paid position and guaranteed readership, and the status that confers on you has always been tempting. The thing about reading all these posts from other intelligent blogs–if you think that they know something you don’t, if you learned something new from them, then how exactly do you process this new information in light of what you knew previously? When someone who seems to know much mor about you than you about the film reviewing world tells you all this, how would you react? Would you get disillusioned? Or would you say that they were full of shit and keep doing and keep dreaming? Or would you just largely regard this as a partially true but ultimately subjective (but nonetheless intelligent) opinion of one individual and one individual only?
[tags]movies, film, film criticism, blog, bloggers, writing, critics[/tags]