I just watched this fantastic short by Paul Doucet, which is currently right up my post-apocalyptic alley. The use of ephemera, music and a constant geiger counter in the background reminds me aesthetically of the video game Fallout 3, which I absolutely love. If you want to know a bit more about how it was shot, read the original posting on io9. I especially love the opening establishing shot of the record player and poster, as well as the concluding shot. It's not exactly cheerful stuff, of course, but enjoy!
Wednesday, October 07, 2009
Wednesday, July 01, 2009
Rousseau, Botany and Armchair Academia
Ruminations from Jean-Jacques Rousseau's The Reveries of the Solitary Walker (Seventh Walk):
Botany is a study for an idle and lazy solitary person: a point and a magnifying glass are all the apparatus he needs to observe plants. He walks about, wanders freely from one object to another, examines each flower with interest and curiosity, and as soon as he begins to grasp the laws of their structure, he enjoys, in observing them, a painless pleasure as intense as if it had cost him much pain. In this idle occupation there is a charm we feel only in the complete calm of the passions, but which then alone suffices to make life happy and sweet. But as soon as we mingle a motive of interest or vanity with it, either in order to obtain distinction or to write books, as soon as we want to learn only in order to instruct, as soon as we look for flowers only in order to become an author or professor, all this sweet charm vanishes. We no longer see in plants anything but the instruments of our passions. We no longer find any true pleasure in their study. We no longer want to know, but to show that we know. And in the woods, we are only on the world's stage, preoccupied with making ourselves admired. Or else, restricting ourselves to armchair and garden botany at the most, instead of observing vegetation in nature, we concern ourselves only with systems and methods--an eternal matter of dispute which does not lead to an additional plant being known and throws no true light on natural history and the vegetable realm. That is the source of the hatreds and the jealousies that rivalry for fame excites among other learned men. Altering the nature of this love study, they transplant it to the middle of cities and academies where it withers no less than exotic plants in the gardens of connoisseurs.
Sunday, June 28, 2009
Drawing Doomsday
My temporary roommate pointed out this Max Fleischer short from 1928. Magnificent!
What if our cartoons do turn against us in the end? Nooo! Not the doomsday lever!
What if our cartoons do turn against us in the end? Nooo! Not the doomsday lever!
Friday, June 26, 2009
Tales from the Gorge, Part 1
It's a lovely day in Ithaca, New York - or as much as I can hear of it from inside my room in one of the large, well-aged houses that perch steadfastly on the hill up to Collegetown. I have to make sure I don't lean back in the computer chair, as the cushioned black back is currently a makeshift drying rack for the damp clothes I wore yesterday, no longer dripping out traces of the sudden afternoon downpour.
The theory-heads pouring out of the lecture hall after yesterday's lecture were, as I was, completely shocked at the very wet turn to a day that had until then been an oven-baked, sun-saturized steambath. In retrospect, though, I should have known that the thick waves of humidity were bubbles in the hot air waiting to erupt into the torrents of rain that threatened us as we looked dismally out at the gray gusts blowing sheets of water across the previously steaming pavement. In the morning the sun beating down gave no indication (I thought) of what was to come, so I foolish decided this was the best day to leave the raincoat in the apartment. In my defense, climbing the hills to the Cornell campus is an ordeal that makes it significantly easier to choose to leave behind anything that could add weight to the trek. The consequences of the morning's choice were staved off by a compassionate colleague who offered to share his umbrella with me down to the library. It turned into an impromptu adventure, as the sudden surges of wind threatened to blow the small umbrella into useless bits of metal. We skirted, unsuccessfully, the ever-growing puddles and streams while holding our bags close, trying to find a way out of the maze of buildings to the quad. We left our dripping footsteps on the plastic-covered wallways of a physics building in construction, finally finding an exit through which we could see the tower that promised the shelter of the library. After making that far, I parted ways with my umbrella-buddy and made the slightly loony decision to walk the rest of the 30-minute way back to the apartment without rain protection. By then my feet were threatening to slip out of the front of my sandals with every step - which is more of a problem when you are heading down a series of semi-steep slopes, as I was. Another serendipitous umbrella-ride took me to the bottom of the first hill, and I continued to the bridge over the gorge. As I expected, the water was rushing madly under the series of grates one
must traverse on the pedestrian edges of the bridge. I gleefully took in the series of shivers induced by the combination of sounds provided by the storm - the sustained rush and whoosh of the gorge under my feet, the rolling, shivering rumble of thunder and the splash of the cars on the pavement. It has been years since I have heard thunder and seen flashes of lightning. I have missed the eerie magnificence of Texas storms! I walked past a local pub, hair dripping, and heard the astute observation from a smoker outside: "You're wet!" Yes, I said, and made the turn to the familiar row of houses before trudging up the stairs and hurriedly slinging the less-dripping clothes on the chair, where I now sit.
Turns out it isn't such a nice day in Ithaca, by the standards of sun-lovers. I am pleased, though, to hear small rumbles of thunder and the slight patter and slush that lets me know that the rain is lingering still.
The theory-heads pouring out of the lecture hall after yesterday's lecture were, as I was, completely shocked at the very wet turn to a day that had until then been an oven-baked, sun-saturized steambath. In retrospect, though, I should have known that the thick waves of humidity were bubbles in the hot air waiting to erupt into the torrents of rain that threatened us as we looked dismally out at the gray gusts blowing sheets of water across the previously steaming pavement. In the morning the sun beating down gave no indication (I thought) of what was to come, so I foolish decided this was the best day to leave the raincoat in the apartment. In my defense, climbing the hills to the Cornell campus is an ordeal that makes it significantly easier to choose to leave behind anything that could add weight to the trek. The consequences of the morning's choice were staved off by a compassionate colleague who offered to share his umbrella with me down to the library. It turned into an impromptu adventure, as the sudden surges of wind threatened to blow the small umbrella into useless bits of metal. We skirted, unsuccessfully, the ever-growing puddles and streams while holding our bags close, trying to find a way out of the maze of buildings to the quad. We left our dripping footsteps on the plastic-covered wallways of a physics building in construction, finally finding an exit through which we could see the tower that promised the shelter of the library. After making that far, I parted ways with my umbrella-buddy and made the slightly loony decision to walk the rest of the 30-minute way back to the apartment without rain protection. By then my feet were threatening to slip out of the front of my sandals with every step - which is more of a problem when you are heading down a series of semi-steep slopes, as I was. Another serendipitous umbrella-ride took me to the bottom of the first hill, and I continued to the bridge over the gorge. As I expected, the water was rushing madly under the series of grates one
must traverse on the pedestrian edges of the bridge. I gleefully took in the series of shivers induced by the combination of sounds provided by the storm - the sustained rush and whoosh of the gorge under my feet, the rolling, shivering rumble of thunder and the splash of the cars on the pavement. It has been years since I have heard thunder and seen flashes of lightning. I have missed the eerie magnificence of Texas storms! I walked past a local pub, hair dripping, and heard the astute observation from a smoker outside: "You're wet!" Yes, I said, and made the turn to the familiar row of houses before trudging up the stairs and hurriedly slinging the less-dripping clothes on the chair, where I now sit.Turns out it isn't such a nice day in Ithaca, by the standards of sun-lovers. I am pleased, though, to hear small rumbles of thunder and the slight patter and slush that lets me know that the rain is lingering still.
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Freedom and the Act of Will
Interesting thoughts on freedom from Phenomenology of Perception by Maurice Merleau-Ponty:
"We often see the weakness of the will brought forward as an argument against freedom. And indeed, although I can will myself to adopt a course of conduct and act the part of a warrior or a seducer, it is not within my power to be a warrior or a seducer with ease and in a way that 'comes naturally'; really to be one, that is. But neither should we seek freedom in the act of will, which is, in its very meaning, something short of an act. We have recourse to an act of will only in order to go against our true decision, and as it were, for the purpose of proving our powerlessness. If we had really and truly made the conduct of the warrior or the seducer our own, then we should be one or the other. Even what are called obstacles to freedom are in reality deployed by it. An unclimbable rock face, a large or small, vertical or slanting rock, are things which have no meaning for anyone who is not intending to surmount them, for a subject whose projects do not carve out such determinate forms from the uniform mass of the in itself and cause an orientated world to arise--a significance in things. There is, then, ultimately nothing that can set limits to freedom, except those limits that freedom itself has set in the form of its various initiatives, so that the subject has simply the external world that he gives himself."
"We often see the weakness of the will brought forward as an argument against freedom. And indeed, although I can will myself to adopt a course of conduct and act the part of a warrior or a seducer, it is not within my power to be a warrior or a seducer with ease and in a way that 'comes naturally'; really to be one, that is. But neither should we seek freedom in the act of will, which is, in its very meaning, something short of an act. We have recourse to an act of will only in order to go against our true decision, and as it were, for the purpose of proving our powerlessness. If we had really and truly made the conduct of the warrior or the seducer our own, then we should be one or the other. Even what are called obstacles to freedom are in reality deployed by it. An unclimbable rock face, a large or small, vertical or slanting rock, are things which have no meaning for anyone who is not intending to surmount them, for a subject whose projects do not carve out such determinate forms from the uniform mass of the in itself and cause an orientated world to arise--a significance in things. There is, then, ultimately nothing that can set limits to freedom, except those limits that freedom itself has set in the form of its various initiatives, so that the subject has simply the external world that he gives himself."
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