Undulating Ungulate

“In a small affair or in a big affair, first consult yourself and find out if there is any conflict in your own being about anything you want to do. And when you find no conflict there, then feel sure that a path is already made for you. You have but to open your eyes and take a step forward, and the other step will be led by God.” - Hazrat Inayat Khan

Went to my first festival film today. Briefly:

Blockade is a documentary constructed entirely from black and white footage shot during the German siege of Leningrad during the Second World War. It is a social document rather than a narrative. What follows is an impressionistic account rather than a summation.

I was struck first by the normalisation of life in a foreign context, the width of the streets, the scale of the columns, the minarets, and the faces of the people.

The daily life of getting on with cleaning up the damage after a night of bombing and destruction; the way everyone, men, women and children, were involved in this process; the commonplaceness of dead bodies lying frozen in the street, people walking by with barely a glance; people pulling sleds with their possessions, refugees in a city under siege in the snow; families sourcing water from streams from broken pipes in shattered streets; at the start, German prisoners being marched through the streets, to a curious, growing, and mostly polite crowd, with some anger shown; contrasted with the mass hanging of (presumably) captured German soldiers before an eager, surging crowd, that the film ends on.

Leningrad was under siege for something life 500 days.

Somehow affecting, despairing, fascinating. The lack of narrative makes it elegiac. All in all, what astonishes is the pointlessness of suffering in wartime.

All that can accurately be said about a man who thinks he is a poached egg is that he is in the minority.

- James Burke, The Day the Universe Changed

(writing is going well, by the way, though i could use minions to do some of the donkey work processing)

In conversation the other night I realised that it is the 10th anniversary of the goattee.

*Boggles*

Presently it is 42cm (clearly, my beard is the meaning of life, the universe, and everything), or 16.53 inches.

A quick review: last night the moose watched Alister Barry’s doco In a Land of Plenty: the story of unemployment in New Zealand.

It traces the transformation within New Zealand from full employment to the use of unemployment as a tool to drive down inflation by lowering wages (the more people there are willing to work for less, the less you have to pay) in the space of a few years in the mid 80’s. Inflation was regarded as the primary enemy by the Rogernomics administration, and that program was carried out even more ruthlessly under the Richardson/National leadership in the 90’s, in collaboration with the Don Brash era Reserve Bank. Parts of it were pretty sickening, particularly the calculation of the poverty line, and the suffering it engendered.

All in all, an amazing piece of recent social history that, despite having lived through it, the moose was pretty much unaware of. Recommended.

(My only criticism is in the narrowness of focus of his narrative he skips the extent of fuckery under Muldoon era protectionism, which makes for a more emotive piece.)

Does anyone happen to have a spare piece of fabric approximately 7 ft long and say 3 or 4 inches wide? Heavier better than light, but anything goes.

That was the best test match I’ve been to in ages.

[/redbloodedkiwimale]

An hour ago it was snowing. Now it is gloriously warm sunshine and blue skies. WTF?

Grindhouse, briefly:
Planet Terror - why bother making sense when you can have tonnes of fun instead?; highly enjoyable.
Deathproof - one wonders if Tarantino will ever make another movie that is not insanely self-indulgent, and actually for an audience; an exercise in style true to the spirit of the overall concept of Grindhouse rather than an individual film; features one amazing stunt sequence which could have occurred in a much more interesting movie.
Random trailers: fun fun fun.

Went to see Nicky Hager talk at Drinking Liberally. It was very good, and I will probably put the audio up in a few weeks. (Delayed at his request.)

I have read no news since whenever it was.

I have now reached the point where I may indicate briefly what to me constitutes the essence of the crisis of our time. It concerns the relationship of the individual to society. The individual has become more conscious than ever of his dependence upon society. But he does not experience this dependence as a positive asset, as an organic tie, as a protective force, but rather as a threat to his natural rights, or even to his economic existence. Moreover, his position in society is such that the egotistical drives of his make-up are constantly being accentuated, while his social drives, which are by nature weaker, progressively deteriorate. All human beings, whatever their position in society, are suffering from this process of deterioration. Unknowingly prisoners of their own egotism, they feel insecure, lonely, and deprived of the naive, simple, and unsophisticated enjoyment of life. Man can find meaning in life, short and perilous as it is, only through devoting himself to society.

The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of the evil. We see before us a huge community of producers the members of which are unceasingly striving to deprive each other of the fruits of their collective labor - not by force, but on the whole in faithful compliance with legally established rules. In this respect, it is important to realise that the means of produciton - that is to say,the entire productive capacity that is needed for producing consumer goods as well as addiitonal capital goods - may legally, be, and for the most part are, the private property of individuals.

. - Albert Einstein, Why Socialism?

One of the more mindblowing reminders that everything that seems solid is really a bunch of resonant vibrating frequency nothing.

Concrete and steel doesn’t usually do that.

via a conversation with nonwrestler