Take a look at Iceland regarding films per capita. And see how Canada has about the same production per capita as the States but a radically smaller budget per film. And speaking of budgets, take a gander at New Zealand. And overall, why such a dearth of film production in South America?
Vengeance Is Ours: What can tribal societies tell us about our need to get even? by Jared Diamond.
Daniel explained to me that Handas are taught from early childhood to hate their enemies and to prepare themselves for a life of fighting. “If you die in a fight, you will be considered a hero, and people will remember you for a long time,” he said. “But if you die of a disease you will be remembered for only a day or a few weeks, and then you will be forgotten.” Daniel was proud both of the aggressiveness displayed by all the warring clans of his Nipa tribe and of their faultless recall of debts and grievances. He likened Nipa people to “light elephants”: “They remember what happened thirty years ago, and their words continue to float in the air. The way that we come to understand things in life is by telling stories, like the stories I am telling you now, and like all the stories that grandfathers tell their grandchildren about their relatives who must be avenged. We also come to understand things in life by fighting on the battlefield along with our fellow-clansmen and allies.”
I like this article for a number of reasons. It gives me even more ammunition against the idea of tradition for its own sake being a good thing. Tradition means only that someone has done it before. Women were banished to the special hut whilst having their period; men could only rise to the level that their fathers had risen to; and the “reasonable” occurrences of murder and torture were all too many. This article is more than just that though, it also explores the natural tendency toward revenge, the problems when justice does not seem to have taken place and the role of the state in all this.
See the video below of Stephen Pinker’s TED talk on how post violent we really are. Its not only an eye opener but a challenge to the fear based media propaganda that is so easy to buy into.
I would also recommend Dan Gardner’s book Risk: The Science and Politics of Fear.
Gardner not only makes quite clear that we are living in a golden age in our freedom from pain and violence but how much of our skewed and baseless perceptions of everyday dangers are fed by the media. Its both entertaining and enlightening reading. As a member of the media, he has seen first hand how reports of decreasing crime do not make the front page but a single odd and unrepresentative tragedy can blossom into misguided public panic and unneeded legislation at the expense of true dangers.
Shades of Minority Report.
If you dislike this as much as I do, see my semi-rant at Your House is a Garage.
Takashi Murakami. This is not my usual type of stuff but I kind of like it. Slate.com has a decent little slide show of his work here. They title it Japan’s Andy Warhol or is it Walt Disney? Two artists I’ve never much liked but…
I’m happy enough that looking at this stuff reminded me of another Japanese artist, not similar at all, though also described as an Andy Warhol. Tadinori Yokoo.
Tadinori Yokoo initially attracted me simply because the print above featured Mishima Yukio. I went through a phase where I read about ten of his novels (many of them very good like Forbidden Colours where a man’s revenge on womankind takes the form of his paying a beautiful gay man to entrance and then leave women forlorn) and his bodybuilding autobiography Sun and Steel as well as the biography of this right wing militaristic prize winning novelist who eventually committed ritual suicide.
Soon I came to appreciate Tadinori’s works on their merits, the juxtapostion of traditional Japanese elements with contemporary styles.
Go to Why the Great British Breakfast is a Killer at the TimesOnline for a wonderful example of vitriolic writing and response:
From the article:
The fried English breakfast was conceived during the Industrial Revolution (probably) as a form of fast fuel for a working class that actually worked. They ate 3,000 calories in the morning, then they burnt 3,000 calories by lunchtime. Or died when the mine collapsed. But you don’t burn 3,000 calories driving a forklift truck, or answering the phone at Argos, or fiddling your disability benefit. The work dies, but the breakfast lives on. Result: obesity crisis. (Knowing this, and fearing the backlash, Little Chef recently moved to slim down “Fat Charlie”, the obese chef who features in its logo, but nothing came of it - presumably because the porky little scrote just wouldn’t stop eating.)
And from a response to the article:
The Times restaurant critic has a masterful way with words and a witty turn of phrase, but strip away the etymological pyrotechnics and what do you have? Preaching, that’s what - and preaching of the worst sort: as practised by the nanny-state control freaks currently turning this country into a joyless puritan hellhole run by cyclists who knit their own tofu, where a glass of wine is a unit and lighting a fag risks summary execution for killing babies.
After smoking and drinking, it was obviously only a matter of time before the health gestapo turned their jackboots on us innocent lardbuckets. A tax on fat? Yeah, right, that’ll work. Just like it does with alcohol and tobacco. We’ll have ferryloads of white vans coming over from Calais laden with butter, cream, eggs and cheese to be sold by dodgy blokes with plastic carrier bags outside Whitechapel Tube station (“Pssst, squire, want a half pound of Normandy unsalted, only a quid?”).
What I didn’t expect was that a man who eats for a living would recommend porridge, a vile, gelatinous slurry made from a crop that civilised people feed only to their animals, eaten chiefly by 18th-century crofters thrown off their land by the English and unable to afford proper food. As for one’s palate being clean and mellow in the morning, speak for yourself, mate. After a night on the lash my mouth is like the bottom of a baby’s pram, and I can rarely taste anything before noon.
Now why do we have to wander over there to get these kind of spirited and brilliantly evocative spats? Lovely stuff!
Anybody take a look at their Akismet catches lately…the spam is hitching a ride on decent sites but somehow originating and linking elsewhere…still get the gobbledygook list of words to gather my content but from what I think is a legitimate site. Unless the legitimate ones are using dumb strings to gather links.
Seem to be on a movie kick lately…thanks to Cinematical, I discovered the new parody video for Tetris over at Black20.com
And while there I discovered one of their older ones for Pirates of the Caribbean:
