Smashingtelly has a new feature – commercial breaks, sarcastic ones.
Following the post with Murray Gell-Mann’s excellent talk, where he spoke so genuinely, clearly free of having been molested by PR folk, here is a commercial which shows he suffered from their abuse, being seduced probably innocently into an appearance trying to lend credibility to Enron.
Murray Gell-Mann: Beauty and truth in physics
Gell-Mann is possibly the single most important human being alive. Worth a listen. I particularly like his innocent, eccentric giggling at his own jokes and his enthusiasm – the mark of someone who has never been coached in public speaking by a PR flack, because he transcends that kind of crap and appears genuine.
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Day to Day communications at CERN in 1974, what a wonderfully prescient title for a short film about a place that would permanently change global, day to day communications, a decade and a half later, when the Web was invented there.
I love this film. it perfectly represents a time and place. The opening sequence with Cat Stevens and time bleached, aerial footage of Geneva makes the hair on the back of my neck stand on end.
A Smashing viewer suggested this great documentary about seminal electronic music composer, Tristram Cary.
Cary was involved in the design of a pre-Moog synth, created the distinctive Hammer House of Horror sound and composed music running the gamut of the UK film and TV industry from Ealing Comedies to Dr Who.
This is a film that takes a look behind the scenes of Al Jazeera as the Iraq War unfolds. Although this is a staple film posted by those who oppose the Iraq War, that in itself is almost proof that Al Jazeera has an impossible task as an objective news source. For that matter, so do the US cable channels as long as Fox can still get advertisers.
The film is interesting to me primarily because it is about modern media and how war is and will be covered, spun, pushed and distorted by all parties involved, particularly those on the offensive.
1 hr 25 min 54 sec Mar 17, 2007
The innovative 2005 documentary which used state of the art 3d computer graphics to simulate a mission to an inhabited planet around a remote star. The beginning is awful, why is George Lucas an expert in astro-biology? However, the film warms up as it passes some conventional alien life to encounter some really imaginative ones such as the giant 50 foot high beasts that walk over an amoebic sea.
1 hr 33 min 42 sec Jan 31, 2008 www.albca.com
Self indulgence week closes with a drum roll. This excellent solo from Baby Dodds in 1946.
Lewis is on the right. He pronounces almost every vowel as a diphthong, something that is heard only among very old English aristocrats, these days.
I’m sure Lewis would be turning in his grave if he knew that he was a hero of the contemporary Christian right.
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Nietsche is dead, God is not. Sadly.
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On the one hand I hesitate to post The Waste Land since it is clearly self indulgent nonsense. However:
1. This is/was self indulgence week.
2. It’s really good self indulgent nonsense.
3. Eliot himself inoculated the poem by saying it was nonsense.
I do feel uncomfortable with the bits that sound pretty anti-semitic to me. Perhaps someone could elucidate?