Just go and watch it, and DON’T read about it first, the fewer the preconceptions the better the surprises 🙂
For the hard of thinking there’s going to be a Hollywood remake in 2006, which should be sufficiently diluted and easy-teenage-new-york for even the most abjectly dense and unimaginative to claim to appreciate.
Leaving
aside the fact that the movie consists almost entirely of non-stop
non-simulated non-pornographic sex, and all the ‘controversy’ about
that, this is probably one of my favourite romance movies of all time.
Then again so is Oldboy…
Also, as just mentioned, has great surreal chicken dance bit…
Beautifully shot, moderately blood drenched, and a bit weird. Which was good.
Unfortunatly a bit lacking in the character and empathy building needed
to really gel it together, could of been so much better…
Did have a rather out of place and fun dance scene which ranks up there
with the bizzarre old man chicken dancing while Ishida and Abe Sada
orgy it up with assorted geishas in Ai no corrido.
I did wonder briefly if I might be Ennio Morricone reincarnated. Not based on any evidence or for any particular reason, just because that’s the sort of thing I sometimes wonder…
He’s still alive though.
From the page: “Ken MacLeod’s comments. The title comes from two quotes: ‘Work as if you lived in the early days of a better nation.’ – Alasdair Gray. “If these are the early days of a better nation, there must be hope, and a hope of peace is as good as any, and far better than a hollow hoarding greed or the dry lies of an aweless god.” – Graydon Saunders”
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Author of many fine science fiction novels and one of the sanest political bloggers around.
I must not fear. Fear is the mind killer.
Fear is the little death that brings total
obliteration. I will face my fear. I will
permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the
inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.
Rainer Maria Rilke, 1875-….
Have patience with everything that remain unsolved in your
heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like
locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language.
Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given
to you because you could not live them. It is a question
of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question.
Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it,
find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.
++
For one human being to love another: that is perhaps
the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the
last test and proof, the work for which all other work
is but preparation.
++
Ah, poems amount to so little when you write them too early
in your life. You ought to wait and gather sense and
sweetness for a whole lifetime, and a long one if possible,
and then, at the very end, you might perhaps be able to
write ten good lines, For poems are not,as people think,
simply emotions (one has emotions early enough)they are
experiences. For the sake of a single poem, you must see
many cities, many people and Things, you must understand
animals, must feel how birds fly,and know the gesture which
small flowers make when they open in the morning.
You must be able to think back to streets in unknown
neighborhoods, to unexpected encounters, and to partings
you had long seen coming; to days of childhood whose
mystery is still unexplained, to parents whom you had to
hurt when they brought in a joy and you didn’t pick it up
(it was a joy meant for somebody else-);
to childhood illnesses that began so strangely with so many
profound and difficult transformations, to days in quiet
restrained rooms and to mornings by the sea, to the sea
itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushedalong high
overhead and went flying with allthe stars,
– and it is still not enough to be able to think of all that.
You must have memories of many nights of love, each one
different from all the others, memories of women screaming
in labor, and of light, pale, sleeping girls who have just
given birth and are closing again. But you must also have
been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the
room with the open windows and the scattered noises.
And it is not yet enough to have memories. You must be able
to forget them when they are many, and you must have the
immense patience to wait until they return. For the memories
themselves are not important. Only when they have changed
into our very blood, into glance and gesture, and are
nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves-
only then can it happen that in some very rare hour the
first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth
from them.
Currently wearing their t-book 003.
I find it makes me on average about 7.5% cooler than other more common or garden t-shirts.
I also have 007, which was capable of a good 11% increase some days, however the gold leaf text came off the first time I washed it causing that to increase to 23%, or 24% if I attach a cat to the front of it first.
A Buddhist story as recounted by Guru Robbie at the end of this programme. (from memory, may be less than accurate).
—————
A young man sets out to travel the world to see what it has to offer him, on his way along the path between his home town and the next he meets with an old man, walking in the opposite direction. He asks him “Tell me, what are the people the next town like? As I’m travelling to there and would like to know”. The old man answers him “Well, first tell me, what were the people in the town you just left like?”, the young man replies: “The people in that town? Why they are nothing but cheats and liars! They are mean, miserly, and think only of themselves.”.
“Ahhh” says the old man, “then that is exactly how the people in the next town will be to you to also…”
