Now that we are vegetarian, Sophia invents some interesting dishes just for fun.
This alien platter is a weird masterpiece! A bizzare bitter melon, with a texture like an alien lizard, is hollowed out and stuffed with mashed purple sweet potatoes & bamboo shoots, then baked crispy with red Korean chilis that we dried from our garden. Tastes good, too!
Sophia and her new pals, Amy Goodman and Jeremy Scahill
Great book launch at the Harvard Science Center yesterday, featuring Jeremy Scahill on his new book, Dirty Wars. After his excellent work on exposing Erik Prince’s fiendish company Blackwater, Scahill pursued the covert wars, targeted killings, and drone wars that the U.S. engages in around the world. In his speech, Scahill said that he started out in journalism by pestering Amy Goodman constantly, offering to feed her cat, wash her car, etc, if only she’d take him on as an intern at Democracy Now. It got to point where Amy had to choose between taking out a restraining order on him, or letting him join the team.
Good thing she brought him on board, because Scahill’s journalism (for the Nation, Democracy Now, and other agencies) has been courageous, hard-hitting, and shining with moral clarity. Scahill’s field work in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia shows the sort of backbone we wish other journalists would emulate, so we can finally kick the host of ass-kissing slime-bags who have been posing as journalists (shall cite as an example, Judith Miller or Tucker Carlson?) out on the curb.
If anything will save us from the lying obfuscations of the so-called “main stream media” it will be a new generation of real journalists, who aren’t afraid to reveal the truth and who are persistent enough to be heard. Right on, Jeremy! You deserved a standing ovation! Now if only the power-mongers and their cringing sycophants can be pried away from those kill lists and drone buttons, we can move on to a better, more humane future.
Харийс Брантс (Harris Brants) illustration for Picnic on Paradise in Издательский дом Дейч --- Коллекция «Фантастика» Аркадий и Борис Стругацкие 2008
Reading “The Second Marxian Invasion” about the Strugatski Brothers by Stephen W. Potts. Apparently this was Potts’ thesis at UC Berkeley and it is fascinating reading indeed. Tracing the utopian, socialist, and totalitarian themes in Russian fantastika literature from it’s earliest origins in the late 18th Century, the author describes how various Russian writers reacted to events such as the failed revolution in 1905, and the victory of the communists in 1917. For every utopian vision of the early Russian SF, there were dystopias, horrors, and complexities. Zamaytin’s We, published in 1921, is considered the classic tale of dystopia under totalitarianism, but according to Potts, it was not a counter-revolutionary work so much as a complaint that the Bolshevik utopia had not gone far enough towards the total liberation and union of personal and political interests.
The modernist craze of the Leninist years eventually was constricted by Stalin’s paranoia, resulting in a number of science fiction authors vanishing to the gulags. Only writers like Belyaev, who could “reduce their technological miracles to the level of fairy tales, and inject their work with starkly ideological plots” were able to survive. When the “thaw” finally took place in 1956, the subsequent launch of Sputnik propelled Soviet SF into a new hard science phase that eventually was characterized as “cold stream” SF. This cold stream was one in which SF was narrowly conceived of as optimistic, science-oriented, and upbeat; similar to our sense-of-wonder space opera days, but one emerging from the constraints of Stalinist censorship and therefore self-consciously regulating itself and focused on a sort of vanguard of hard science futurism. The Strugatsky brothers, whose themes were more diffuse, more challenging, and informed by anthropology, psychology and the “soft” sciences, as well as the nascent New Wave, were seen as “warm stream” writers.
In the 60s there was an ideological battle between the cold stream and warm stream, which was conceptually decided when the warm stream became more popular and when important critics advocated for science fiction with a purpose that transcended mere prediction and imagining of future technological advances. Here Potts quotes some criticism from 1968 about SF, but which raises some interesting thoughts about the purpose of writing in general:
…we take as a criterion in assessing the value of a work everything that promotes the development of the human personality, extends its horizon, inspires it with lofty ideals, ennobles it morally and intellectually, improves its aesthetic preception [sic] of the environment, helps to gain an insight into the good and evil of this world, and to respond to them more keenly — in short, it is everything that promotes the truly human in man.
(E. Brandis, V. Dmitrevsky, “In the Land of SF,” Soviet Literature (no. 5, 1968): 148)
This strikes me as just a brilliant way to write anything!
I’ve always been fascinated by the relationship between Jung and Freud, especially from the perspective of Jung, as related in Memories, Dreams, Reflections. There are certainly plenty of outsider opinions: ranging from the breezy website where I found this odd photo of the two men on safari in sub-Saharan Africa, to the mystical musings of Miguel Serrano in The Hermetic Circle.
Just how did Jung reflect on Freud’s obsession with sexuality? What was the meaning of Jung’s dream, as a result of which he discovered the collective unconscious? And above all, what about the bog mummies and the two skulls?
All of these are answered in Jung’s own words. Though you will hear them in my voice, as I read most of Chapter 5 from Jung’s classic memoir, and which I dedicate to my lovely wife, BwukGwei, (who asked me to make more recordings!).
Hope you will enjoy it too!
| Jung on Freud (47:21), Diamond Bay Radio, Jan 2013 download mp3 (45MB) |
In the light of recent tragedies and difficult times, let us get on with healing ourselves.
Go ahead and let that nasty world of vampires and lunatics disappear!
Time to patch together a new reality and keep on trucking!
Happy New Year, everybody!
The streets of Toronto in 1965 provide the backdrop for this punk / delinquent short film (28min), featuring a 25 year old Michael Sarrazin as a bored, alienated youth. Filmed as a straight social commentary, the director uses some heavy-handed “symbolism,” which is so crude it works as a sort of cartoonish surrealist overlay to an otherwise lackluster film. In addition, the mid sixties artifacts — solid steel cars, dreary vistas of cement and glass, hairstyles, dance routines, and diners — evoke an era, captured with crisp, clean cinematography.
Those bygone days of formica counter tops, round stools, and heavy white coffee cups…so angst-provoking back then, and now so cozy and nostalgic! At least you could find a stool and a 35 cent cup of joe. Nowadays you have to pay $2 for a cup of over-roasted tar at Starbucks, and you might as well forget about finding a stool among the laptop-plucking sages and their $6 brews of triple-whatever-the-hell lattes. Oh, for those halycon days when a little kick around the neighborhood on a bike could wreck your entire grooving scene…
Vostok 1 - (12 Apr 1961) Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space.
Vostok 2 - (6 Aug 1961) Gherman Titov, the first man to spend one day in space.
Vostok 3 - (11 Aug 1962) Andriyan Nikolaev, first simultaneous flight of two manned spacecraft.
Vostok 4 - (11 Aug 1962) Pavel Popavich, first simultaneous flight of two manned spacecraft.
Vostok 5 - (14 Jun 1963) Velery Bykovsky, longest solo orbital flight, 4 days in space.
Vostok 6 - (16 Jun 1963) Valentina Tereshkova, first woman in space!
After the blasting winds and rain of Sandy, the streets are wet and plastered with green, orange and brown leaves. On all hallow’s eve, the kids came tromping along — one was dressed as a slice of pizza, which was the only costume her parents could handle after her other choices, a flying pony or a finger — and our neighbors Sherlock Holmes and a leather clad cowgirl were bailing out buckets of candy from their never-ending supply. Fun times!
Meanwhile, much inspired by Rudy the Elder’s recent foray into self-publishing, I decided to take a crack on putting together my own ebook. Just for test purposes I grabbed the first out-of-copyright PDF on my laptop, which happened to be Black Amazon of Mars, by Leigh Bracket, and began to crank it through Calibre. The actual components and .xml massaging turned out to be rather finicky, but I finally got the general hang of it.
So, enjoy the first ebook from TIMEBRANE Books, and let me know what you think!
Free EPUB edition: Black Amazon of Mars, by Leigh Bracket.
Happy Walpargus-nacht, Samhain, All Souls night, Halloween, Witches Sabbath, or whatever it is you want to celebrate on this velvet black autumn night!
Watching the Republicans flail around in psychotic convulsions at the CPAC finally seemed to have convinced some Americans of what I have observed for most of my life, namely that the GOP is the party of the criminally insane. The recent bile-spewings of Rush Limbaugh and Alan Keyes, are nothing new. It is rather sick to watch, though, as if we are viewing the inside workings of a really lunatic fringe cult, played out live on national t.v.
There are more than a few sociological parallels to the cult that figures in the book I just finished, Imaginary Friends (1967), by Alison Lurie.
Honk 2011 (c) Benjamin Greenberg
Not everyone enjoys the brassy-assed freak-out of Honkfest, but if you ask me, a pack of nutty anarchists marching around the streets jamming on trumpets, drums, flutes, french horns, and tubas, is always good.
It may take a village to raise a child, but all it takes in Somerville is a couple of radical marching bands, and before you can say jimmy-crack-corn you will be surrounded by stilt-walkers in illuminated gowns, and chicks wielding flaming trombones walking around in skeleton-toed boots. Works for me!
Here’s a video we captured on Elm Street, up until a kid smacked the camera with his lantern…but all in good fun!
Link to video: HONK 2012, the opening number
