Particle Portraits

Quote: “Take a deep breath! You have just inhaled oxygen atoms that have already been breathed by every person who ever lived. At some time or other your body has contained atoms that were once part of Moses or Isaac Newton. The oxygen mixes with carbon atoms in your lungs and you exhale carbon dioxide molecules. Chemistry is at work. Plants will rearrange these atoms, converting carbon dioxide back to oxygen, and at some future date our descendants will breathe some in.”

11.07. filed under: play. science. 6

Robot Folktales

Have you ever found yourself, sitting there at the office or behind a neighbors shrub, wondering, “What would a robot tell me if I weren’t so self involved and just gave it the chance to talk about itself?” I think we all have. It’s one of the great burning questions. Yet even in this magical age of information and technology, in which we enjoy the benefits of rocket ships and self-raking litter boxes, the answer has not been forthcoming. Or at least that’s what I thought before meeting Bluebell and Hector, a couple of genteel robots with tales to tell.

Tips for greater efficiency for example:
 
#2. Don’t waste time on decisions. Always choose the third from the left.

#3. Think about the bees. If they can succeed so can you.

#4 Get a nickname, preferably “The Colonel.” This will save you years of effort.

Hearty kudos go to Emma Payne for dragging our sorry asses into the red-wallpapered, naturalist illustrated, future. Because truly… any future in which I can’t listen to a robot recount its dreams or read me its latest poem is not one I want to spend a hell of a lot of time in. Brilliant.

 

 

10.28. filed under: bits&bytes. play. 5

Butoh, Dance of the Dark Soul

“But by an altogether Oriental means of expression, this objective and concrete language of the theater can fascinate and ensnare the organs. It flows into the sensibility. Abandoning Occidental usages of speech, it turns words into incantations. It extends the voice. It utilizes the vibrations and qualities of the voice. It wildly tramples rhythms underfoot. It pile-drives sounds. It seeks to exalt, to benumb, to charm, to arrest the sensibility. It liberates a new lyricism of gesture which, by its precipitation or its amplitude in the air, ends by surpassing the lyricism of words. It ultimately breaks away from the intellectual subjugation of the language, by conveying the sense of a new and deeper intellectuality which hides itself beneath the gestures and signs, raised to the dignity of particular exorcisms.”

–Antonin Artaud, from The Theater of Cruelty (First Manifesto): The Theater and Its Double, 1938.

10.21. filed under: art. history. people. play. 4

Mr. Men: The Movie

Way back in 1971 Roger Hargreaves, a London Ad man, wrote and illustrated a little book called Mr.Tickle. It was the birth of the immensely popular Mr. Men franchise which would make Hargreaves the third most selling British author in history, published in over 22 languages. Some of the older among you surely remember these.

If you do, or if you have kids of your own, you might be interested to know that there is actually a big screen adaptation in the works, slated for a 2008 release.(Here’s the IMDb entry.) Why am I telling you all this? Why would a person like myself, with an admittedly acerbic sort of outlook, put myself in a position to have to post an image which contained not just rainbows and butterflies and picnic blankets but kites and hot-air balloons to boot?! Read on…

10.17. filed under: film. lies. play. 6



Peanuts, by Charles Bukowski. Funny, and strangely simpatico. Via Monkeyfilter.

10.09. filed under: books. comedy. play. 1

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