Well, life has me back. For a while. The question is whether this is a good or bad thing, considering that life's a bitch and all.
But, disappointingly, there are only a few links to post. The rest will follow (soon, as my former Arindal colleagues would have said).
To begin with, I have a nice video on guerilla gardening.
On the other side of a mirror, there's a shocking article on the consequences workers making antique style jeans face. The cynical part of me thought "How handy. With stuff like that, you can both make fashion and kill people."
Then it came to me that this thought isn't so ironic after all. Fashion and death are actually closely linked together - sweatshops, ridiculous beauty ideals, pesticides in the cotton plantations, etc.
Sad world.
For something more positive:
Very exciting deviation about digital comics. I love the interactive-ness and it feels so much more alive than traditional comics.
And to finish off, two in German.
Ich bin ja nicht so der Fan von Raps, Der hier hat's mir allerdings angetan.
Nachdem im deutschene Raum die Petition zum Grundeinkommen so gut durchgegangen ist, hier ein Film über's Grundeinkommen. Sehr interessant und informativ.
Showing posts with label globalisation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label globalisation. Show all posts
Saturday, March 14, 2009
Friday, May 02, 2008
Once
Some quotes I stumbled over in the last weeks:
From Babylon 5 (I re-watched all seasons recently - fun :D)
"I don't watch TV. It's a cultural wasteland filled with inappropriate metaphors and an unrealistic portrayal of life created by a liberal media elite."
(not quite as good as Ivanova's:
"Who is this? Identify yourself?"
"Who am I? I am Susan Ivanova, Commander, daughter of Andre and Sophie Ivanov. I am the right hand of vengence and the boot that is gonna kick your sorry ass back to earth. I am death incarnate. And the last living thing that you are ever going to see. God sent me."
...but also quite amusing when hearing it in the series.)
And from a book I've just finished reading:
"Linda Stone [...] labeled the disease of the Internet age 'continuous partial attention'-two people doing six things, devoting only partial attention to each one-she remarked to me, 'We're so accessible, we're inaccessible. We can't find the off switch on our devices or on ourselves. We want to wear an iPod as much to listen to our own playlists as to block out the rest of the world and protect ourselves from all that noise. We are everywhere-except where we actually are physically."
and
"Does your society have more memories than dreams or more dreams than memories?
By dreams I mean the positive, life-affirming variety. [...] 'One thing that tells me a company is in trouble is when they tell me how good they were in the past. Same with countries. You don't want to forget your identity. I am glad you were great in the fourteenth century, but that was then and this is now. When memories exceed dreams, the end is near. [...]' In societies that have more memories than dreams, too many people are spending too many days looking backward. They see dignity, affirmation, and self-worth not by mining the present but by chewing on the past. And even that is usually not a real past but an imagined and adorned past. Indeed, such societies focus all their imagination on making that imagined past even more beautiful than it ever was, and then they cling to it like a rosary or a strand of worry beads, rather than imagining a better future and acting on that."
***
Last week I noticed one of the small, private bookshops in downtown had closed down. It had been a family business for 200 years. The small note on the door sounded as if the owner had had a very hard time actually deciding he had to close the shop for good. Seeing it hit me by surprise, too, even though it shouldn't. You grow so familiar with the small businesses that you walk past regularly that you take them for granted.
But, shamefully I have to admit it has been years since the last time I bought a book there. My tries to buy local products haven't really gone much further than the food-sector.
I was similarly surprised when I walked into the Moviemento on Thursday and saw masses of people queuing up for the film I wanted to see. It seems arthouse films aren't so much arthouse anymore when it comes to the audience. That's probably good. Hollywood shouldn't be the only one to make money.
The film I saw was Once. I was a bit unhappy at first, because the film had German subtitles, but ended up being happy about that because the story is set in Dublin and one of the protagonists is Irish - so I got to listen to that lovely Irish accent after not having heard it in a long time. Overall, the language was a big treat in the film. Like many other aspects, it felt very natural and realistic. It isn't the polished, movie-English that you get in most films nowadays. It's colloquial, down-to-earth and how I remember people speak (sometimes painfully so, bringing up old memories).
The music is another treat. It has a big part in the film, and admittedly, I only wento to watch the film because I had listened to the soundtrack over and over again in the last weeks and it stayed with me all the time (you can listen to all of it here).
All in all, it's a very rare and special film. I don't remember the last time I sat in a cinema and forgot where I was, completely emerged in the story that evolved between the screen and my mind. Walking out of the cinema, I was speechless, slightly confused and in a way out of touch with my surroundings, as a part of me was still within the story.
It was quite an experience.
***
Small memory from last month:
From Babylon 5 (I re-watched all seasons recently - fun :D)
"I don't watch TV. It's a cultural wasteland filled with inappropriate metaphors and an unrealistic portrayal of life created by a liberal media elite."
(not quite as good as Ivanova's:
"Who is this? Identify yourself?"
"Who am I? I am Susan Ivanova, Commander, daughter of Andre and Sophie Ivanov. I am the right hand of vengence and the boot that is gonna kick your sorry ass back to earth. I am death incarnate. And the last living thing that you are ever going to see. God sent me."
...but also quite amusing when hearing it in the series.)
And from a book I've just finished reading:
"Linda Stone [...] labeled the disease of the Internet age 'continuous partial attention'-two people doing six things, devoting only partial attention to each one-she remarked to me, 'We're so accessible, we're inaccessible. We can't find the off switch on our devices or on ourselves. We want to wear an iPod as much to listen to our own playlists as to block out the rest of the world and protect ourselves from all that noise. We are everywhere-except where we actually are physically."
and
"Does your society have more memories than dreams or more dreams than memories?
By dreams I mean the positive, life-affirming variety. [...] 'One thing that tells me a company is in trouble is when they tell me how good they were in the past. Same with countries. You don't want to forget your identity. I am glad you were great in the fourteenth century, but that was then and this is now. When memories exceed dreams, the end is near. [...]' In societies that have more memories than dreams, too many people are spending too many days looking backward. They see dignity, affirmation, and self-worth not by mining the present but by chewing on the past. And even that is usually not a real past but an imagined and adorned past. Indeed, such societies focus all their imagination on making that imagined past even more beautiful than it ever was, and then they cling to it like a rosary or a strand of worry beads, rather than imagining a better future and acting on that."
***
Last week I noticed one of the small, private bookshops in downtown had closed down. It had been a family business for 200 years. The small note on the door sounded as if the owner had had a very hard time actually deciding he had to close the shop for good. Seeing it hit me by surprise, too, even though it shouldn't. You grow so familiar with the small businesses that you walk past regularly that you take them for granted.
But, shamefully I have to admit it has been years since the last time I bought a book there. My tries to buy local products haven't really gone much further than the food-sector.
I was similarly surprised when I walked into the Moviemento on Thursday and saw masses of people queuing up for the film I wanted to see. It seems arthouse films aren't so much arthouse anymore when it comes to the audience. That's probably good. Hollywood shouldn't be the only one to make money.
The film I saw was Once. I was a bit unhappy at first, because the film had German subtitles, but ended up being happy about that because the story is set in Dublin and one of the protagonists is Irish - so I got to listen to that lovely Irish accent after not having heard it in a long time. Overall, the language was a big treat in the film. Like many other aspects, it felt very natural and realistic. It isn't the polished, movie-English that you get in most films nowadays. It's colloquial, down-to-earth and how I remember people speak (sometimes painfully so, bringing up old memories).
The music is another treat. It has a big part in the film, and admittedly, I only wento to watch the film because I had listened to the soundtrack over and over again in the last weeks and it stayed with me all the time (you can listen to all of it here).
All in all, it's a very rare and special film. I don't remember the last time I sat in a cinema and forgot where I was, completely emerged in the story that evolved between the screen and my mind. Walking out of the cinema, I was speechless, slightly confused and in a way out of touch with my surroundings, as a part of me was still within the story.
It was quite an experience.
***
Small memory from last month:
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
Globalisation
Some interesting stuff I came across:
- Cranberries are good against infections. That effect seems to only take place with women, though.
- We laugh 3-4 times less than people did 40 years ago. Today, an adult laughs about 15 times a day. Seems like much?
- Potatoes have their origin in the Andes (where they were grown by the Inkas) and only came to us about 500 years ago. Considering that they are pretty essential to Austrian food now, that makes me wonder which food will be "domestic" here in 500 years' time (with the climate change and all). Ginger? Mangoes? Bananas?
Also, looking at where potatoes have been produced in the last years, you notice the typical trend: Production in the Western world has remained constant or been reduced, while it has almost doubled in today's "production countries" China and India.
- New Scientist writes that Probiotic bacteria could keep us slim. My first thought was "Great, more food additives", then "Right, give the population a reason to think even less about what they eat". Then I went and read parts of the original research paper, understood about 17% of it, but at least it explains stuff a bit more thoroughly than the article. And you get some insight into what is necessary to come to such findings, animal testing and all.
***
I watched some of the DVD features of Children of Men. One of the extras, "The Possibility of Hope" really caught me. It shows statements of activists, ecologists, scientists, etc. about the current state of the world and outlooks on the future, reality and utopias and social economy. Naomi Klein is one of them, and so is James Lovelock, who says:
"I look on the earth as an elderly patient. She is a someone, who would be - if she were human - in her 80s. In other words, strong, vigorous full of her 80s, but not as young as she once was. [...] Because she is quite old, any stress she receives, like it's the same with one of us -- I'm at about her age in my 80s, and if I get influenza it will be a lot more serious than if you get it. Well, our patient Earth has the problem of humans. There are, I'm afraid, too many of them and they are doing too much damage to her capacity to regulate her temperature and composition."
Which is an analogy that I really, really like.
And Fabrizio Eva talks about globalisation, culture and identity, reminding me strongly of John Storey's work and what I learned in that context.
"This globalisation process does not extinguish other cultures, because it takes a long time for other cultures to disappear. Yet, it has repercussions between young and old people. Young people are willing to move, so they already have a preexisting conviction that they don't have to accept their culture the way it is. When they realize that life somewhere else might be better, they move to find their own, new identities."
Identity creation is a fascinating topic. We redefine ourselves continually through the different surroundings we put ourselves in - put on different masks, or show different aspects of our personality when we're online, among friends, among strangers, in our jobs, etc. Theoretically, this gives us so many opportunities for different identities that there's no need to move far away. You'd probably only move (based on the reason of identity) if you can't get to grips with any aspect of your living environment at all.
But, what this actually reminded me of: We used to be part of a single living environment decades or centuries ago (one village). Now that it is far easier to travel greater distances, we are part of multiple living environments, multiple cultures.
I wish more DVDs had great extras like that.
***
Continueing on the WIP. Not much progress - still trying to incorporate more brands, which proves a bit tricky.
- Cranberries are good against infections. That effect seems to only take place with women, though.
- We laugh 3-4 times less than people did 40 years ago. Today, an adult laughs about 15 times a day. Seems like much?
- Potatoes have their origin in the Andes (where they were grown by the Inkas) and only came to us about 500 years ago. Considering that they are pretty essential to Austrian food now, that makes me wonder which food will be "domestic" here in 500 years' time (with the climate change and all). Ginger? Mangoes? Bananas?
Also, looking at where potatoes have been produced in the last years, you notice the typical trend: Production in the Western world has remained constant or been reduced, while it has almost doubled in today's "production countries" China and India.
- New Scientist writes that Probiotic bacteria could keep us slim. My first thought was "Great, more food additives", then "Right, give the population a reason to think even less about what they eat". Then I went and read parts of the original research paper, understood about 17% of it, but at least it explains stuff a bit more thoroughly than the article. And you get some insight into what is necessary to come to such findings, animal testing and all.
***
I watched some of the DVD features of Children of Men. One of the extras, "The Possibility of Hope" really caught me. It shows statements of activists, ecologists, scientists, etc. about the current state of the world and outlooks on the future, reality and utopias and social economy. Naomi Klein is one of them, and so is James Lovelock, who says:
"I look on the earth as an elderly patient. She is a someone, who would be - if she were human - in her 80s. In other words, strong, vigorous full of her 80s, but not as young as she once was. [...] Because she is quite old, any stress she receives, like it's the same with one of us -- I'm at about her age in my 80s, and if I get influenza it will be a lot more serious than if you get it. Well, our patient Earth has the problem of humans. There are, I'm afraid, too many of them and they are doing too much damage to her capacity to regulate her temperature and composition."
Which is an analogy that I really, really like.
And Fabrizio Eva talks about globalisation, culture and identity, reminding me strongly of John Storey's work and what I learned in that context.
"This globalisation process does not extinguish other cultures, because it takes a long time for other cultures to disappear. Yet, it has repercussions between young and old people. Young people are willing to move, so they already have a preexisting conviction that they don't have to accept their culture the way it is. When they realize that life somewhere else might be better, they move to find their own, new identities."
Identity creation is a fascinating topic. We redefine ourselves continually through the different surroundings we put ourselves in - put on different masks, or show different aspects of our personality when we're online, among friends, among strangers, in our jobs, etc. Theoretically, this gives us so many opportunities for different identities that there's no need to move far away. You'd probably only move (based on the reason of identity) if you can't get to grips with any aspect of your living environment at all.
But, what this actually reminded me of: We used to be part of a single living environment decades or centuries ago (one village). Now that it is far easier to travel greater distances, we are part of multiple living environments, multiple cultures.
I wish more DVDs had great extras like that.
***
Continueing on the WIP. Not much progress - still trying to incorporate more brands, which proves a bit tricky.
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