Uploaded to YouTube by S!X - Music on 2 July 2017
Tuesday, October 17, 2017
Friday, January 20, 2017
Mortal Purification
"We need the tonic of wildness...At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature."— Henry David Thoreau
Sion Sono swan dives into Shinjuku’s chaos
19 JANUARY 2017 JAPAN TIMES MARK SCHILLING
TOKYO (Japan Times) -- [Shinjuku Swan II (2017) - www.ss-2.jp] Celebrated abroad for films that mash up everything from extreme sex and gore to Christian imagery and classical music, Sion Sono has emerged as one of the most distinctive directors in Japanese cinema this century.His breakthrough came in 2001 with “Suicide Club,” in which 54 teenage girls kill themselves en masse, and he has since directed films such as “Love Exposure” (2008),a four-hour tour de force whose hero is an “upskirt” photographer, and “Himizu” (2011), a near-future dystopian drama themed on that year’s nuclear disaster.
At home, Sono’s biggest hit is “Shinjuku Swan,” a 2015 comic thriller set in the disreputable world of “scouts” — guys who roam the streets of Shinjuku and other entertainment districts recruiting women for the sex trade. Based on a best-selling manga series by Ken Wakui that has generated 38 paperback volumes, “Shinjuku Swan” earned a solid ¥1.33 billion at the box office.
Now Sono and producer Mataichiro Yamamoto, whose credits include the 1985 Paul Schrader drama “Mishima” and the 2009 Takashi Miike actioner “Crows Zero II,” have teamed up again for the sequel, “Shinjuku Swan II,” which opens on Jan. 21.
This time our hero, the good-hearted and two-fisted Tatsuhiko (Go Ayano), is swept up in a turf war between his scout team, Burst, whose boss has decided to expand into Yokohama, and a Yokohama team called Wizard, which is led by the violently explosive Taki (Tadanobu Asano). As the two teams clash — and Wizard mounts a counter-offensive on Burst’s home ground — the action and intrigue escalate, with powerful yakuza bosses upping the life-or-death ante.
Fans of both the manga and the first film will find many of their favorite characters in the sequel (though viewers new to the story may initially feel lost in the on-screen crowd), while the action scenes, supervised by the Hong Kong-trained Kenji Tanigaki, are larger in scale and impact. Sono has an obvious affinity for the material — his 1995 “Bad Film” and 2014 “Tokyo Tribe” also feature big pitched battles between rival gangs — but his signature style and concerns are harder to spot.
Speaking to The Japan Times just before the film’s gala premiere at Roppongi Hills Toho Cinemas, Yamamoto says that he’d always planned to make a sequel.
“With a big manga like that you can’t tell the whole story in just one film,” he says. “But it depended on whether the fans found the first film interesting. If a lot of fans didn’t come to see it, financially we couldn’t justify making the second installment.”
With a sly glance in Yamamoto’s direction, Sono says the first film’s success didn’t surprise him in the slightest. Read More
Tuesday, January 17, 2017
I Know
600-year-old Buddha statue emerges from lake
16 JANUARY 2017 CNN
An ancient Buddha statue has been discovered under the water of a reservoir in China's Jiangxi Province - and there may be more archaeological discoveries. Read More / Watch
These six utopian cities of the future will help you re-imagine life on Earth
17 JANUARY 2017 CNN ALAN MARSHALL
(CNN) -- "Utopia", a book by English statesman, lawyer and clergyman Thomas More (1487-1535), turned 500 years old last month.A fictional rendering of social philosophy, the book describes an exemplary society on an imaginary island in an unknown place faraway across the seas.
Coined by More from the Greek "ou-topos", meaning no place, or nowhere, the word utopia has become adopted in the English language to mean a place where everything is ideal or perfect.
In celebrating the 500th birthday of "Utopia", the Ecotopia 2121 project, of which I am the coordinator, is harnessing More's spirit to predict the futures of 100 real cities around the world -- if they somehow managed to become super eco-friendly.
Of course, modern utopias need to be eco-friendly to overcome the global environmental crisis. Given that cities may be home to 80% of humanity by the end of the century, they can only be sustainable if environmentalism is one of their core features.
The cities of Ecotopia 2121 are presented in the form of "scenario art", which involves a review of both global and local environmental challenges as well as their unique histories and cultures. This allows for a diversity of future scenarios rather than one common vision of the "future city".
What you will see below are a series of artworks, but this is not an art project. We use art as a means of analysis and communication. With that in mind, here are six ecotopian cities of my own creation that emerged from the project, one from each inhabited continent. View / Read More
Friday, January 13, 2017
Wednesday, January 11, 2017
The Negligence Prophecy
“Those who consider the inessential to be essential
And see the essential as inessential,
Don't reach the essential,
Living in the field of wrong intention.”
― Gautama Buddha, Dhammapada
Uploaded to YouTube by Majestic Casual on 9 January 2017
Skip the peace sign – Security researcher cautions against striking Japan’s favorite picture pose
10 JANUARY 2017 ROCKETNEWS24 CASEY BASEEL
(IT Media/Sankei Shimbun) -- ... Isao Echizen, a professor at Japan’s National Institute of Informatics, has no problem with the selfie phenomenon. However, if you’re using one hand to take the picture, he says it’s wise to keep the fingertips of the other out of frame. That’s because consumer camera technology and image quality has now progressed to the level, Echizen says, where your fingerprint data can be derived from a photo of your fingertips.In an experiment, Echizen was able to obtain fingerprint data from photos taken as much as three meters (9.8 feet) away from the subject’s exposed fingertips. That’s a distance far greater than even the tallest person’s arm, and so the results suggest that if you’re taking a selfie while giving a peace sign with your off-hand, you’re putting your fingerprint data at risk. Read More
Democrats slam Trump amid ethics fears
10 JANUARY 2017 THE JAPAN NEWS
WASHINGTON, D.C. (AFP-Jiji) — The top Democrat in the U.S. Congress blasted Donald Trump on Monday for seeking hasty confirmation of cabinet nominees without sufficient ethics and security vetting, as the president-elect expressed confidence that “they’ll all pass.”The confirmation hearings for Trump’s top picks were emerging as flash points between the incoming administration and critics including minority Democrats in Congress who want more time to thoroughly study and vet the nominees.
Trump’s choice for U.S. attorney general, Senator Jeff Sessions, will be in the hot seat beginning Tuesday, as will homeland security secretary designate John Kelly, a retired Marine general.
Four more hearings begin on Wednesday, including that of secretary of state pick Rex Tillerson. The Republican-led Senate coordinated with the Trump team to cram in nine confirmation hearings this week despite Democrats’ calls to slow the process.
“Confirmation is going great,” Trump told reporters in an unexpected appearance Monday in the lobby of his New York building.
But the rush has drawn flak from ethics officials.
“The announced hearing schedule for several nominees who have not completed the ethics review process is of great concern to me,” Walter Shaub Jr, director of the Office of Government Ethics, wrote to Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer.
The schedule has created “undue pressure” to rush the reviews, he said, noting that several nominees had “potentially unknown or unresolved ethics issues” as they headed into their hearings. Read More
Jochen Lempert: The photographic seer
10 JANUARY 2017 JAPAN TIMES JOHN L TRAN
Jochen Lempert’s exhibition “Fieldwork” at the Izu Photo Museum has an ageless feel to it. The intentionally low contrast pictures of wildlife and natural phenomena almost look like they could be archive photos unearthed from the mid-19th century. However, they also have the cool nonchalance of 1970s conceptual art. This ability to straddle and connect the seemingly disparate is a key point in Lempert’s work, and is possible through a careful attention to the details of presentation.... Allusions to evolution abound throughout the exhibition, and these are not limited to biological development, but also to the changing practices of photography. As well as looking back to the 19th century, Lempert references the early 20th-century work of the German new objectivity movement, particularly the plant images of Karl Blossfeldt, as well as the postwar rigorous typological format of Bernd and Hilla Becher. By unambiguously quoting other artists, Lempert takes us up to the self-referentiality of late 20th to early 21st-century postmodernism. As an exercise in the observation of evolution and correspondence, the form of Lempert’s exhibition neatly follows function.
Fluency in the language of photography can add to the enjoyment of “Fieldwork”, but it’s not essential. The exhibition works on an intuitive and sensorial level, too. It’s possible to skim through the exhibition without being drawn in deeply by any single photo but notice, for example, that a starfish has five appendages like Japanese finger socks, that the bi-coloration of a salamander’s feet can be seen on the handgrip of a bicycle or that the pattern of the concrete wall of the 1929 Barcelona Pavilion by Mies Van Der Rohe resembles the structure of a spider’s web. There may or may not be a deep significance to these observations, which vary in their degree of subtlety and to some extent are free-floating associations, but there is pleasure in the discovery.
The esoteric art historian Aby Warburg (1866-1929) pioneered the investigation of images with images in his “Mnemosyne Atlas,” and Lempert’s work, with its purely pictorical discourse, was used to help celebrate Warburg’s 150th birthday anniversary in 2016 when it was included in a commemorative exhibition at the Zentrum fur Kunst und Medientechnologie in Karlsruhe. Warburg compared paintings, sculpture and photographic documentation from across history and cultures in order to gain a greater understanding of the passions and fears of the human animal. Lempert extends this form of research to all animals, and this is a particularly interesting proposition to consider in Japan, where the pantheism of Shinto has trickled down through the centuries to become the often-repeated narrative that “Japanese people love nature.” Read More
Saturday, January 7, 2017
Wednesday, January 4, 2017
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)