612 – Davi Kopenawa, Bruce Albert, Alison Dundy – The falling sky – words of a Yanomami shaman

The Falling Sky is a remarkable first-person account of the life story and cosmo-ecological thought of Davi Kopenawa, shaman and spokesman for the Yanomami of the Brazilian Amazon. Representing a people whose very existence is in jeopardy, Davi Kopenawa paints an unforgettable picture of Yanomami culture, past and present, in the heart of the rainforest–a world where ancient indigenous knowledge and shamanic traditions cope with the global geopolitics of an insatiable natural resources extraction industry.

In richly evocative language, Kopenawa recounts his initiation and experience as a shaman, as well as his first encounters with outsiders: government officials, missionaries, road workers, cattle ranchers, and gold prospectors. He vividly describes the ensuing cultural repression, environmental devastation, and deaths resulting from epidemics and violence. To counter these threats, Davi Kopenawa became a global ambassador for his endangered people. The Falling Sky follows him from his native village in the Northern Amazon to Brazilian cities and finally on transatlantic flights bound for European and American capitals. These travels constitute a shamanic critique of Western industrial society, whose endless material greed, mass violence, and ecological blindness contrast sharply with Yanomami cultural values.

Bruce Albert, a close friend since the 1970s, superbly captures Kopenawa’s intense, poetic voice. This collaborative work provides a unique reading experience that is at the same time a coming-of-age story, a historical account, and a shamanic philosophy, but most of all an impassioned plea to respect native rights and preserve the Amazon rainforest. (amazon)

“When I come back from a trip among the white people, the dizziness leaves my eyes after a while and my thought be-comes clear again. I no longer hear cars, machines, or airplanes. I only lend an ear to the tooro toads and krouma frogs that call the rain in the forest. I only hear the rustling of the leaves in the wind and the rumbling of the thunders in the sky. The ignorant words of the city politicians gradually vanish in the quiet of my sleep. I become calm again by going to hunt and making my spirits dance.

The forest is very beautiful to see. It is cool and aromatic. When you move through it to hunt or travel, you feel joyful and your mind is slow-paced. You listen to the chirping of the cicadas in the distance, or the cries of the curassows and the agami herons, and the clamor of the spider monkeys in the trees. Your worries are eased. Your thoughts can then follow one another without getting obscured.”

0588 – The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (2005)

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a 2005 British-American science fiction comedy film directed by Garth Jennings, based upon previous works in the media franchise of the same name, created by Douglas Adams. It stars Martin Freeman, Sam Rockwell, Mos Def, Zooey Deschanel and the voices of Stephen Fry and Alan Rickman. This is the ninth version of the “Hitchhiker’s Guide”. It has previously appeared as a radio series, two record albums, novels, a television series (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1981)), a computer game, a stage show, a comic book, a video game (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1984)) and a towel. (The game version is not, in fact, a video game, but was an Infocom “interactive fiction” {text only} game, plotted/scripted by Douglas Adams, programmed by Steve Meretzky, which has been available to play free on the BBC Radio 4 website since 2005.)

Flyer for the 1979 stage production at the ICA of The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy.

The producers have stated that this film is not a literal translation of the books (just as the books were not a literal translation of the original radio show), but all of the new ideas and characters came from Douglas Adams himself. The hired writer simply came aboard to improve structure and make the screenplay more coherent.

Easter Egg: The DVD includes an “Improbability Drive” item on every menu. Clicking this leads to a random point in one of the bonus features. Used several times leads to a strange cartoon, which is the same one Deep Thought watches.

The Hitchiker’s Guide is a parody of “The Encyclopedia Galactica” from Isaac Asimov‘s Foundation novels.

imdb

558 – Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry by Esther Leslie

“Through coal’s carbon chemistry, and its waste product of coal-tar, a realm of synthetic colours and substances is unlocked from a dense and primitive blackness. The first magic act is coal-tar becoming colour, the first of thousands of substitutions. This magic is a black force. Gravity’s Rainbow lets loose its narrative strands amongst a world of acronyms and neologisms, fictional and actual. spqr, arf, mmpi, soe, spog,
cios, bafo, nta, shaef, pwd, cns, pisces, viam, tsagi, niso, bafo, okw, achtung, Kryptosam, Hexeszüchtigung, ctenophile, Oneirine. These clatter like the evil spells from a necromancer’s manual. These clotted words spell out the coordinates of military, economic and technological power. The most important of these cryptic formulae, the acronyms that generate the rainbow and allow the tracing of its arc,are the colour factory ig Farben and the German Second World War rocket weaponry known as v-1, v-2 or a4. Pynchon brings these two industrial-technological forces into proximity with magic, mysticism and alchemy.”

“Inside the arcades, the ur-architectural phenomenon of the nineteenth century, transitional colours, twinkle, glimmer and reflection danced, and all the more charmingly as night fell. In the early days the gas lighting, whose illumination was an uneven flickering, cast a sparkly sheen over everything. In the arcades, their historian Walter Benjamin claimed, ‘falser colours are possible’, and everything is doused in a special ‘glaucous gleam’, which is reminiscent of aquariums, as Friedrich Gerstäcker imagined in a fictional transposition and, after him, Aragon made so vivid in Paris Peasant. In Gerstäcker’s The Sunken City, the hero sees, to his amazement, that
with the gradual infusion of twilight, these undersea corridors just as gradually lit up by themselves. For everywhere in the bushes of coral and sponge were sitting broad-brimmed, glassy-looking medusas, which already at the outset had given off a weak,greenish phosphorescent light that quickly picked up strength at the approach of darkness and now was shining with great intensity.
The arcades are zones of special effects where optical illusions, tricks of the light and transformations readily occur. This is why the arcades appear so magical, but it also intimates something of their propensity to deception and delusion. The very magic of the space colludes with the commodity promises on sale.”

“Celestis offers space burials, with the ashes compacted in a capsule and sent into orbit (before re-entering) or fired to the moon or into deep space (for ever). That which is legally a ‘final deposition’ can be commodified further in an effort to afford a technologically guaranteed sublime.They also offer a star-naming service.   At the start of the twenty-first century, a Chicago company announced that it had created a new way to memorialize loved ones: by turning their charred remains into a gem. The ‘patent-pending’ LifeGem offers to press the cremated ashes of a lost one into a diamond. You can have your loved one with you whenever you choose, which is something that no other memorial product offers, remarks Greg Herro, LifeGem’s chief executive. ‘Nothing else quite offers that everlasting love.’ (…) ‘The proprietary LifeGem creation process creates diamonds from the true essence of our loved ones, the carbon.”

Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry by Esther Leslie

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Der Bildungstrieb der Stoffe : veranschaulicht in selbstständig gewachsenen Bildern (Fortsetzung der Musterbilder)

by Runge, F. F., 1795-1867 (Includes 23 smaller chromatograms mounted on the title page surrounding the title, and 60 larger chromatograms mounted on 31 leaves. The chromatograms consist of concentric circles of color produced by applying a liquid chemical compound to filter paper.)

547 – Cosmopolis (2012)

spacetime coordinates:  near future Manhattan 

“There’s pain enough for everybody now,”Cosmopolis is a 2012 drama-thriller film written, produced, and directed by David Cronenberg and starring Robert Pattinson in the lead with Paul Giamatti, Samantha Morton, Sarah Gadon, Mathieu Amalric, Juliette Binoche, Jay Baruchel and Kevin Durand.

“A VAMPIRE CAPITALIST haunts New York in David Cronenberg’s film adaptation of Cosmopolis, Don DeLillo’s sci-finance novel that focuses on a Wall Street billionaire named Eric Packer who trades, converses, theorizes, kills and screws his way through New York in a single day.” (read more: https://www.wired.com/2012/08/cosmopolis-cronenberg-delillo/)

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1480656/

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rothko_Chapel

Movie Poster Design

0543 – Lucky (2017)

spacetime coordinates: 2010’s Arizona, USA

The spiritual journey of a ninety-year-old atheist.

Lucky is a 2017 American drama / comedy film directed by John Carroll Lynch from a screenplay by Logan Sparks and Drago Sumonja. It stars Harry Dean Stanton in one of his final on-screen roles before his death on September 15, 2017 (aged 91).

imdb 

517 – “The Posthuman”

online course in the Philosophy of “The Posthuman”  – Dr. Ferrando (NYU)

www.theposthuman.org

501

Excerpt from Examined Life, 2008. (imdb)

Slavoj Zizek investigates the surprising ethical implications of charitable giving.

Slavoj Žižek on CBC radio

Political Correctness Is a More Dangerous Form of Totalitarianism