Will The Little People Stop Fiddling With Perspective???

Wow Look At This!

the ENLIGHTENMENT

On the transmission of ideas:

What is an idea might also be expressed as who is an idea? Marx is an idea as well as a person. Or rather we speak of Marxism for his ideas and for his person we say Marx. This classification may not be unique to English but it may also have its opposite in certain lebenswelts, even if they are imaginary. We can conjure a Borgesian world whereby a person is their idea and in fact in some computer remain as both idea and person.

But the realisation we encounter here is that people do not have one idea, they have many. So, where, therefore do we delineate an idea like: It would be nice to have bacon for breakfast from Bacon is central to the Enlightenment or even bacon was more central to the Enlightenment than Bacon.On the transmission of ideas:

Halloo, The Departed and The Dark Knight Returns

Dear People

hello post Halloween where I was not able to perform in any horror film whatsoever. I do have some film review news: As you know I look and trace possible genealogies between films, and here is one: Batman, The Dark Knight Returns by Christopher Nolan and The Departed by Martin Scorcese.

Watch these two films back to back and you will see that they share:

• The Civic theme; City as one of the main characters; city in peril, under threat, menaced by corruption but the good are at work
  
• The same look of Police as a kind of Pageant
• The gang scenes of money for drugs swaps
• Joker Jack Nicholson needs no mention but the slaying of Police Commissioner Gordon played by Gary Oldman and Head of Police Queenan played by Martin Sheen

So there you have it.


Sad Squorch at the beginning of November 2009

Hyping up The Golem, The Football Agent and The Night The Bad Haircut Came Home

WOW! This is K1's effort at a musical. It's pretty good. He's trying to get it on TV. He wants it to be part of a series of seven called The Gnuthausen Chronicles. I wish him luck. He hasn't included me. All he's done is put me in a few grainy YouTube efforts. K1 when are you going to write a musical for me? I've got a title already: The Puppet, The PuppetMaster and The Night The Bad Strings Were Repaired At Last. Good title. And I'd be the STAAAH!

Hurt Locker Review

The Hurt Locker


This was a good film by the director of Point Break, Kathry Bigelow, also a good film. But these are not great films. I won't go into Point Break which I enjoyed immensely.

Hurt Locker has some wonderfully suspenseful moments but you never tear off the nail you're chewing. Why? I put it down partly to plot. You need the plot to vice-grip the characters and you need to the tension of your heroes' predicaments. This happens but the web does not ultimately stick. There are great scenes of Sergeant First Class William James the team leader of an Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) in a bombsuit; great suspense but perhaps as a result of Sgt James' total not giving a shinola, we too don't "mind" if he's blown to "Jesus" as he himself says. I won't get technical. It is a worthwhile film if you're into war movies. It is not in the league or psychological depth of Full Metal Jacket, itself which is not in the league of an earlier true masterpiece of Kubrick's: Paths of Glory. Some cultural observations:

• The bombsuit reminds us of Kubrick's 2001 with the breathing sounds and while the ordinance in the film has been praised I can say that the way it carries off does not always make us jump. The sound-design of the film should have been better even if it meant imitating the breathing in the spacesuits in 2001, which adds a suspense drawn from a kind of hypnoticness.
  
• The bomb disposal robot is similar to Wallee. To what degree was the film of Wallee a lament for the mistakes made after the invasion of Iraq?
  

Breughel The Wedding Feast

Hello. I've been away. I'm back briefly. What do you think of this painting? I don't care if no one reads this blog. One day I shall be great and afford some new strings and maybe I can find myself a new master: exciting and dynamickey mouse. I am poor. I dress badly. The boss of my boss is a scrooge. Nothing comes down to me. No trickle down, even though my youtube.com performance has had 61 hits. I'll get there. I will. I will.

The Japanese 20 Greatest Films Season - BFI

There were some great films in this season: Kurosawa; Oshima; Ichikawa; Imamura; Shindo, and others.

Me and K1 saw a pitiful few but of what we saw we were only truly impressed by Onibaba (pictured right). This is one of the greatest films of all time. Only the chamber piece nature of it takes away from its masterfulness. Plotwise, allwise - barring perhaps the above - it is masterful. It is BW and the eroticism is perfect: that is morally the nudity and sex is just enough but the main point is the brilliance of the plot. Read it simply as one of the greatest What Goes Around Comes Around stories. Karma. Read it as one of the great Hell and Brimstone stories worthy of any cinematical Dante-inspireds out there. It is a beautiful film of great emotional power. It is a tragedy almost as dramaturgically well timed as Oedipus Rex. See this film.

Onto the other films: Tokyo Drifter (Suzuki), Intentions of Murder(Imamura), A Full Up Train (Ichikawa). Full Up Train failed to deliver for me. But what it is greatest at is to show the shiteness of life in Post-War Japan: the Company as YOUR life. Over.Made in 1957.

By the 60's things are a little better. Intentions of Murder(1964) and Tokyo Drifter(1966) are worth comparing back to back. The former is BW the latter colour. The former is realistic, the latter fantastic. IoM is about a marginal female in an upper-class family ultimately having the cunning to have the cake and eat it - partly because she (unwittingly?) understands the structural strictures of the society. She does go through a harrowing ordeal to get there and through this Imamura is able to do what he did best: give us really compelling flavours of the Japan of that time.

Tokyo Drifter also gives us a gangster flavour and locations and feel that is worthy of the viewers and the Japonophiles attention. The plot is good but abandons our engagement because the central axis of patron and protege is let down. There is a level where we cannot suspend our disbelief in the characters any longer. To do so perhaps more hyperbole not less is needed. The hero is basically unkillable. However, the use of song - the female love interest is a singer - lifts the film while one views.

Finally to 1971. Oshima, director of the incredibly erotic (pornographic, dirty?) Realm of The Senses, delivers a startlingly beautiful diachronic story of a wealthy Japanese family linking it with the Manchurian disaster of Japan's occupation of that (Chinese?)region. (Manchuria hovers at the borders of the plot of Dr Zhivago and lends its name to the brilliant, original version of The Manchurian Candidate-ominous? Another post might address Mongolia, which borders that region). But the film fails partly because some of the character's names begin with the same letter. Beware screenwriter (and novelist, playwright, storyteller): unless it is something special you are doing do not confuse the viewer, reader with similar names! Basically one gets a bit lost. There are masterpiece moments in the film worthy of plunder but ultimately the film fails. Why? Really because the central character is a loser whose losses as humans we cannot believe in. But he's a truly realistic loser: his bride does not even show up for the wedding and the only two real loves of his life have been screwed by the same guy: his older, handsomer nemesis/friend. Happens all the time loser. You know where I'm coming from. That kind of winner has his own sadness to deal with; his own kinds of losses BUT that type of character is different and is found in other types of film. In fact the other films in this article include HIM in some degree or another.

But echoing the ending of one of Shakespeare's sonnets - can't remember which- begins with Like as the sea makes towards the pebbled shore - I end with Onibaba where justice is served and where the meaning of Mercy or the need, desire, wish, hope for mercy cannot be avoided and its meaning cannot but fail to be explored...deeply. We bow to Shindo. Truly, truly, cliche though it may have become, may have been, may be, may have always been: MIND THE GAP.

A Li'l Definition for those Computer File Names

www.what-is-exe.com

This is a link to a great site defining all those annoying file names you sometimes see on Windows. You can look up the definition of .dll or .exe and many others.

COCKPIT VIEWS GALORE!

CHECK IT OUT: SPECTACULAR SHOTS FROM AEROPLANE COCKPITS. DO LOOK!

It just goes to show how beautiful the world can be given or taking the chance to see the world from a different perspective. I'll try and look at things from a new perspective, a new angle today!

http://www.canadabizmart.com/bootstrapper/collection/spectacular-cockpit-photos/

Oh yeah Veeerwhoop!

Oh Yeah!!! I started this here blog with the question: where are the mirrors in the Universe? And here it is: http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap080625.htm. Wow. I had a feeling this idea was correct because even in ponds we see "mirrors". Your eyes are mirrors. In a sense the mind is a kind of mirror.

K1 and me have always been fascinated by mirrors. I am in a sense a mirror of him and he unwittingly is mirrored by me or is it he mirrors me. I think the latter is better. Go to the above link. It's fascinating.

Where have I been? Oh well, don't ask. It's big thinks. Keep thinking.

Big Thinks

Hi All

Big thinks denotes profound thoughts as opposed to little thinks which are commonplace, mundane, quotidian. These two stock opinion phrases are spoken by a hybrid half-Ape half-Human character in HG WELLS' great novel THE ISLAND OF DOCTOR MOREAU. Currently there is a Jeanne Moreau season at the bfi. Please check it out if you are a fan of hers.

Back to the prophetic Wells. He shows us in this short and astonishing work hybrid creatures: sub-humans who nauseate the central character Pendrick by their almost human-likeness and yet their animalness. Being neither, they have no beauty. They are grotesque and this is my fear for science. We are learning of the beautiful symmetries that underpin the building blocks of reality at the same time as fiddling with the biological foundations and structures of what makes us, I mean you, human. A great addition to this debate in fictional form is Michael Crichton's NEXT. Here we have a humanzee called Davey who doesn't quite reach human intelligence but who has great physical prowess. Next is a compelling read; it alerts the reader to much ugly rapaciousness in the area of genetic research. Ultimately, however, it fails to fully deliver, perhaps imagination-wise, on the severe consequences we could all face as a result of such unbridled and money fueled experimentation.

Anyway I want to leave you with a great picture - you can click on it to go to its original resting site - and apologies if any copyright is being infringed. The illustrator's imagination here must be praised.

Reading into it the Bush Administration has been funding terrorism, alarmingly

George W. Bush's war on terror has indadvertently allowed terror groups to get their hands on billions of dollars while weakening Iraqi security resources. Go to this link and do some sums. LINK

PHYSICS IN CRISIS

rEMEBER WHEN i SPOKE of natural mirrors like still lakes in the Universe? Physics is now in crisis because of dark matter. Why is everything going wrong? :}http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/03/science/03dark.html?_r=2&ref=science&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

I have an aeroplane theme

Hi Everynobody, I've added this because it's in the spirit of my origins. I am Squorch747 and I have an aeroplane theme. 

KOW-LOON AEROPLANES

This is an excellent graffiti because it uses many common symbols. However, it does not use the 'M' of McDonalds though that may be intentional.

On a hypothetical level I want to link this graffiti, which I spotted opposite the entrance of Westminster Cathedral, to the coming recession and the rise in rice prices.

Let's just admit that Blair and Bush are GUILTY. GUILTY, guilty, guilty. The war in Iraq may come to be seen as the catalyst that began the West's decline into a darker poorer age. China and Russia were the beneficiaries.

I have been reading The Prince by Machiavelli. In the first few pages he says: Do not occupy a state. It is a disaster. Durhh!!! Did the strategists in the US read that book. Probably. Did it sink in? You tell me. I had George W. Bush down as a nice man. And he was. See him now. He has a corrupt air about him now. He's going down in history as a twit. And what about Condeleeza Rice? Well at least she tried to oppose the biggest greediest idiot in modern history: Dick Cheyney. Unless he repents he will probably burn in the fires of hell.  Is that too harsh. Sorry if it is. 

What On Earth

What's This? Why is it sideways? Is it the BatCave?

No. It's Montserrat, the location of the discovery in 880ad of the image of the Virgin of Montserrat. I couldn't rotate it. And anyway if you're into images you'll know how useful seeing things from alternative perspectives is.Nerh.

HarliquinComeToMyAid

I believe this painting by Miro is one of K1's favourites. It has inspired him often. For me I relate to the mustachioed character to whom our eyes are first drawn. I do feel "he" inspired Zebedee of The Magic Roundabout.

In this painting he seems ill at ease and like the Laughing Cavalier his emotional expression is determined by his mustache. The Laughing Cavalier, as is well known, does not laugh or even smile but his mustache does and so the viewer is "tricked" into perceiving a smile of jollity; the cavalier's twinkling eyes abet this effect. Here our hero, sorry my hero, is ill at ease, in a quandry, discombobulated, and this is as a result of the down turned left (red) eye firstly and then the mustache. So I'm wrong to place such emphasis on the mustache. Sorry. But it's not insignificant.

It is amazing what a/the mustache can do. I might grow one soon. I'll keep you posted. Further analysis of this painting will be made and to all of the two readers of this blob out there, your comments are most welcome sans the cobbler of Barnes.Grrrr!

These two films share a similar sensibility in their approach to childhood. Narratives about childhood, whether by Marcel Proust or by the two directors of The Approach of Autumn and The White Balloon, test us as adults.Memories of childhood are rich and we relate to the world of children with, if you will, a suspension of adultness. Or rather we shift perspectives more readily than when our protagonists are adults only.

Both films deal with the vulnerability that is possibly childhood's core; the need for children to find care and love. Both films end on a similar note, a sad note, a sense that the children have been betrayed by the selfish and apathetic world created by adults.

Wh-movement

time to move with the questions
they flow from the heart to the mouth you know
and out into the cobwebs of communicating
dust they get dusted knuckle-dusted too

questions are reality in action
our habitations alter without cease
the chief of this region is the sun
and its puppets the planets it whips around

i'm hungry
where can i get food?
the organ is not spirit
and the spirit too
may need questions
to clarify the position its in
when
it loses its body
oh shit
where's my body
oh shit it's down there
oh shit i must be dead

did i ask enough questions
i'm still asking them
oh shit
how's that?

By Jove 'Tis Been A While

Back with a videoengeance

A gr8 site to the power of 10

If you go to this site be a bit patient then click on the plus (+) or minus (-) signs and see that the Universe from its microness to its macroness is shown in Tenths. So we start with the smallest particles Higgs Boson and end with a picture of the visible Universe.

What lies beyond the visible Universe: the Puppet Masters of the Universe?

http://www.wordwizz.com/pages/10exp-18.htm

Economic Woe?

Is this what will happen if the economy goes belly shnup?

Commentators out there have been woaning but you know I warned you all earlier in the year that all the computer maths business doings was going to have reverb. It happened with the sub-prhyme mortgage problem in the US which might be facing its greatest challenge since the 1930's. Bush fans or no your President or was it Cheyney took their eye of f the ball and rushed into a war that has cost us all too much.

The Guests-Bah!!!!

Please all you fans out there check something K1 did. He didn't put me in this film http://www.youtube.com/robohope

The Guests is the film he didn't put me in. I can't believe it.

Introducing

Introducing Jerry Soundhedhi I'm Jerry Soundhed and I 'm going to have my new show podcasted someday. But given how slow Mr Squorch is (think Elvistein) I'll probably never get off the graphite.

NOT ICONIC

The Fall of the Rebel Angels by Breughel is not an iconic picture in our current Western visuo-geist compared to, for example, Breughel's own Triumph of Death.

Perhaps the picture is too busy or the colours and layout do not convey the full sense of this astonishing moment where the cosmos, from a Christian perspective, is altered completely and chaos in the form of evil is unleashed.

However, this painting repays those who might draw inspiration from it, since the imagery of some of the fallen creatures, once disentangled
from the clutter, can startle and perhaps warn us of the future where trans-genetic creatures escape from laboratories and populate the planet with disastrous results.

On a lighter note, I have always loved the bloated fishlike cartooney being at the top right with its expression of surprise. It looks a little like the expression Paul McCartney sometimes has on his face: the rounded O shape of his lips. Sir Paul, please write a song about the Fall of the Rebel Angels. On second thoughts, please ignore my request.

Office At Night by Edward Hopper

Two figures male and female in the stillness of night alone. A ghoulish quality pervades this painting. The faces are bleached out and as with much of Hopper's work, eye contact is evasive.

Poem for Mila

Below and Above 1

That day the clouds haltly like motor-traffic

And into the stretching light of summer night june,

Their seedlet rain sowing

Did what they do in an England London way-

That is in their own interplay

The day, they spoiled, for some, for some I’m sure,

But for others, most likely, can I assure you?

They secured:

Strolling together enbelled beneath skyscraper umbrellas

In certain quarters of Hampstead

Pimlico and Bayswater and less famous places too

They matriculated some romance

And the blades of sunlight that cut through

Symbolised something to them and for them

Of what so rarely staples, fuses, fissions, pins the here to now

Detatches the gowhere? Nowhere

From the somewhere righthere to the right now non-

Finite

And sometimes when it’s true that’s called like wow,

A kiss.

As for me I’m in the aforementioned Pimlico

In a café Nero

Waiting for the 10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1, zero moment

When ashtrays can never sit atop menus

In the interior venues…

Restaurants and bars

In winter you will exhale beneath the stars

But now here

I inhale the moment

The 7:50 segment of

The Pinball machine day

Everyone in London, dodge, dodge. Dodge

An object – they’re humans I know like me –

I’m an object to them too – dodge, sometimes collide

Here each is a pinball to a ride

The rain and the wind drove us inside.

Happy at the inertia

Of reveries about my ancient Persia

And because associations work mysteriously

Mila the Muscovite’s accent

And wildly beautiful eyes in my mind like the colour of the rising moon in summer

And ruminations about the ancientness of the domestic cat

And the situation of the Pre-Raphaelite,

Aesthetically preferred by Mila

Who yet is found here in a 21^st century poem

Gowhere righthere now where, as a symbol

Not a soul, floating more graciously than the clouds of the 29^th of June 2007

Into the stratas

That have been recorded

And will sometimes be reopened

To let meanings

Enact all synonyms and similes of motion

In their attempt to collide or cooperate with each other

Yet above the clouds are stars

And above them more metaphors

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