Category: uncategorized

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2

~ Mark

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2. You know it’s serious when the skies are overcast for two hours straight. Setting aside the expected clichés of dim lighting, muted palettes, stormclouds, speeches, etc., I went in expecting to be highly entertained and I was not disappointed. Until the end. I see the last five minutes as a pretty serious failure given the ~15 hours of good work that came before. Seriously, just throw an Ewok party and call it a day. Don’t try to make 20-year-olds-who-look-like-teenagers look like 40-years-olds. Yep, I’m old and grumpy. One day I’ll be glad to watch these again with my kids.

~ Mark

The value of physical pain is that it is finite. It ends when the ailment ends. We can use this as an opportunity to push on through, with the safety net of knowing it will eventually be over. It is practice.

Ryan Holiday. Just this weekend I was talking about the value of exercise qua mild self-harm. This is more articulate than I was.

Son Of Strelka, Son Of God (Narrated by Obama) – A Free Audio Story

~ Mark

Bit by bit I’ve dissected Obama’s self-read autobiography into thousands of very short phrases, usually one to ten words or so, and have used these snippets to tell a completely different story from the original. I’ve then set the story to music. The story is called Son Of Strelka, Son Of God. Broadly speaking, it tells the story of an ugly dog-faced demigod who recreates the world after it is destroyed. It’s about thirty minutes long, and lies in some weird grey area between audiobook and electronic music.

Wow. More in Slate.

Son Of Strelka, Son Of God (Narrated by Obama) – A Free Audio Story

~ Mark

Trekking in the Indian Trans-Himalaya. Chris Willett’s journals from a July-August trip to Ladakh and Zanskar, India. I still agree with my claim that he has pretty much the best hiking journal on the internet when you consider the double-whammy of writing and photography. Usually pretty unvarnished. Sometimes travel is damn hard.

It was here that Tibetans fled when the Chinese liberated their country, and it was here that I was told Tibetan culture was still intact. Desert peaks leading to handing glaciers soared above irrigated valleys, with monasteries carved into the sides of mountains and an outdoor paradise, this was the objective for the summer. But as always seems to happen, my time was more an experience within myself, an experience that helped to bring clarity to my own life at a time of transition. I will not be back.

~ Mark

This continuous modification of man by his own technology stimulates him to find continuous means of modifying it; man thus becomes the sex organs of the machine world just as the bee is of the plant world, permitting it to reproduce and constantly evolve to higher forms. The machine world reciprocates man’s devotion by rewarding him with goods and services and bounty.

Marshall McLuhan.

Days of Heaven

~ Mark

Days of Heaven. My first Malick film, and luckily an interesting, beautiful one. The story has scattershot narration by a young kid. Sometimes she has wise observations and sometimes she has immaterial asides. With this distance in age, we sort of see the characters in the central love triangle at a remove, a little more inscrutable. We see the drama and the tragedy but Malick’s not looking for your tears, I don’t think. The story’s too thin to bear it. The magic’s in the editing. The shots are elliptical, working by collage and juxtaposition and suggestion. Check out some lovely stills. Nice soundtrack from Mr. Morricone, to boot.