December 27, 2007 at 9:35 am · tag/s : reading, universities
is it possible that the university where i work is run by ex-members of the secret service of the former east germany? i came across the following instructions for crippling ‘oppositional’ people in the directive ‘perceptions’ (richtlinien stichpunkt wahrnehmung) quoted in anna funder’s excellent stasiland :
to develop apathy in the subject … to achieve a situation in which his conflicts, whether of a social personal career health or political kind, are irresolvable … to give rise to fears in him … to develop/create disappointments … to restrict his talents or capabilities … to reduce his capacity to act … to harness dissentions and contradictions around him for that purpose …
(p.286)
December 19, 2007 at 9:44 am · tag/s : film
as a certified lazy slut, i am always supremely happy to find someone else has done some work which i would have had to do, but for a while there i really thought that it would be up to me to write a lengthy polemic about the most over-hyped movie of 2007, the ridiculous into the wild by sean penn which everyone seems to love, including the increasingly unreliable david (4 1/2 stars) and margaret (5 stars) on the movie show at the movies. maybe it is me but was it their move to the abc, or their advancing age which is turning these two into sentimental old bores? i used to make a point of going to see movies david gave zero or half a star to since they were bound to be worth seeing, but the old bore loves just about everything he sees these days and as for margaret, is it possible that matron is adding zoloft to her drip? thankfully after wading through thousands of gushy words on the subject of this most tedious of films i discovered an erudite review on a blog called Antagony & Ecstasy where tim brayton opines that
I have hardly ever seen a film so little thought-out as Into the Wild, which jams incoherent styles together like Play-Doh molded into some monstrous chimera of cinematic technique.
aah : relief … ok that’s two and half hours of my life i will never get back, i am off the hook, and judging by the comments on tim’s post, not the only one who is completely non plussed by people who should know better calling this self indulgent folly a masterpiece.
December 5, 2007 at 8:09 am · tag/s : amerika, image, life, people
cue : a random post about two sets of photographs of people : one - the life’s work of the german photographer august sander (1876-1964) currently the subject of a major exhibition at the art gallery of new south wales which contains a sizeable portion of the 1200 of his photographs owned by the j.paul getty museum - for obvious reasons these were interesting times for a german photographer to be plying his trade although the allies made a significant dent in his legacy when 30,000 of his negatives were destroyed during the bombing of cologne - call me old fashioned but this is a refreshingly sober hang too, the curator having chosen not to be creative and to simply exhibit the photographs at eye height, equidistantly spaced in plain black frames. here are a few nice examples of sander’s work i found on the net.
two - portraits by the anonymous officials of us law enforcement agencies of arrested people wearing t-shirts with slogans. i think they are meant to be funny, but mostly they just made me sad.
