Potsdamer Platz, view 1
Potsdamer Platz, view 2
Near the Museum Island, on the way between the Brandenburg Gate and Alexanderplatz
October 06, 2009
Berlin by Night
A few pictures of Berlin by night, taken with my cell phone... Hotel Berlin, Berlin, really nice:
Potsdamer Platz, view 1
Potsdamer Platz, view 2
Near the Museum Island, on the way between the Brandenburg Gate and Alexanderplatz
Potsdamer Platz, view 1Potsdamer Platz, view 2Near the Museum Island, on the way between the Brandenburg Gate and Alexanderplatz
September 08, 2009
Apocalypse Now: War and Madness
Who is mad? Kurtz, Willard, Kilgore? All three of them? The Americans in general, probably?
You may know or not know how dear is to me everything that touches Cambodia and Vietnam. A film like Apocalypse Now could only have a deep impact on me.
Until last week, Apocalypse Now had been a gap in my culture. I finally dived into it - cautiously, at home, over four days, ingesting this masterpiece bite by bite.
I had indeed strong but mixed feelings about it.
I couldn't relate fully to the visual depiction of the settings (the glance of Saigon through the window of Willard's room, the French plantation, Kurtz's stronghold): they felt almost right... And the story built up in the movie about Kurtz was convincing until the encounter itself: I couldn't relate to Marlon Brando as Kurtz nor to his army which made me think of Willy Wonka's army of Oompa-Loompas in Tim Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory...
But I thought the first two hours of the film were outstanding, building an inimitable atmosphere of palpable absurdity and madness right from the first scene, building two fascinating characters: Martin Sheen's breathtaking interpretation of Willard and Kurtz's character built up in the shadow, through Willard's fantasies and a couple of sentences from his voice in an audio recording.
The depiction of the war's horrors gave me shrills in the spine. I couldn't always stand the intensity of the horror and had to stop several times because of it... But beyond the constant horror, the theme is the absurdity of the war which explains the desperation of the soldiers and the madness of their officers (or does it stem from it?) The scene in the French plantation was critical from this point of view, because of the reflection on the war which it allows at that point in the movie.
I'll let you judge from this few lines:
Transcript courtesy of MovieScriptSource.com
You may know or not know how dear is to me everything that touches Cambodia and Vietnam. A film like Apocalypse Now could only have a deep impact on me.
Until last week, Apocalypse Now had been a gap in my culture. I finally dived into it - cautiously, at home, over four days, ingesting this masterpiece bite by bite.
I had indeed strong but mixed feelings about it.
I couldn't relate fully to the visual depiction of the settings (the glance of Saigon through the window of Willard's room, the French plantation, Kurtz's stronghold): they felt almost right... And the story built up in the movie about Kurtz was convincing until the encounter itself: I couldn't relate to Marlon Brando as Kurtz nor to his army which made me think of Willy Wonka's army of Oompa-Loompas in Tim Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory...
But I thought the first two hours of the film were outstanding, building an inimitable atmosphere of palpable absurdity and madness right from the first scene, building two fascinating characters: Martin Sheen's breathtaking interpretation of Willard and Kurtz's character built up in the shadow, through Willard's fantasies and a couple of sentences from his voice in an audio recording.
The depiction of the war's horrors gave me shrills in the spine. I couldn't always stand the intensity of the horror and had to stop several times because of it... But beyond the constant horror, the theme is the absurdity of the war which explains the desperation of the soldiers and the madness of their officers (or does it stem from it?) The scene in the French plantation was critical from this point of view, because of the reflection on the war which it allows at that point in the movie.
I'll let you judge from this few lines:
WILLARD
How long can you possibly stay
here?
DEMARAIS
We stay forever.
WILLARD
No, no, I mean, why don't you go
back home to France?
DEMARAIS
This is our home, Captain.
WILLARD
Sooner or later, you're --
DEMARAIS
No!
OLD UNCLE
And now you take French place, and
the Viet Minh fight you. And what
can you do? Nothing. Absolutely
nothing.
DEMARAIS
The Vietnamese are very intelligent.
You never know what they think.
The Russian ones who help them,
"Come and give us their money, we
are all Communists. Chinese, come
and give us guns. We're all
brothers." They hate the Chinese!
Maybe they hate the American less
that the Russian and the Chinese.
If tomorrow the Vietnamese are
Communists, they will be Vietnamese
Communists. And this is something
that you will never understand,
you American.
OLD UNCLE
I don't know. Maybe in the future
we can make something with the
Viet Minh.
PHILIPPE
Don't you understand? The V.C.
say, "Go away! Go away!" That's
finish for all the white people in
Indochina. If you're French,
American, that's all the same.
"Go!" They want to forget you.
Look, Captain --
DEMARAIS
See, Captain, when my grandfather
and my uncle's father came here,
there was nothing. Nothing. The
Vietnamese were nothing. So we
worked hard, very hard, and brought
the rubber from Brazil, and then
plant it here. We took the
Vietnamese, work with them, make
something, something out of nothing.
So when you ask me why we want to
stay here, Captain, we want to
stay here because it's ours, it
belongs to us. It keeps out family
together. We fight for that!
While you Americans, you are
fighting for the biggest nothing
in history. I'm sorry Captain. I
will see if your men needs any
help to repair your boat, so that
you can go on with your war. Good
night, Roxanne.
Transcript courtesy of MovieScriptSource.com
September 05, 2009
Pascal Revisited
Pascal said famously:
The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothingToday, we say:
The forces of affection that bind us to each other preceded the rise of the rational brain. Love's reasons have always been subcortical, though love's execution may require careful plotting.Well, that's actually a quote from a book I recommend highly, Social Intelligence, by Daniel Goleman (p. 190). The sequel of Emotional Intelligence, this book is just as fascinating and a page-turner. I hope to write more about it soon.
Farewell to a Faithful Telephone
After over four years of good and loyal service, my Nokia 3100 has passed away.
I came to think of my Nokia 3100 as my guardian angel and I'm parting from it with difficulty.
I pledged to change it only after I reached the number of 10,000 sent text messages... and I actually went beyond that, sticking to it till it stopped working completely, last week.
I bought my Nokia 3100 in late 2004 or early 2005. It was still young when we left for Cambodia but it accompanied me bravely in my endeavours. It fell bravely with me in the Kirirom (in this post it's not in my pocket though a few minutes before in the previous, unexpected, fall into the Kirirom, it was...) after which I dried it, left it off for two weeks and to my great surprise found it working perfectly when I turned it back on!
It fell innumerable times. It was immersed again in the water (in a toilet, to be precise!) at which point I came to think of it as indestructible.
It rode the streets of Phnom Penh with me, behind the motodops. It traveled to Ratanakiri (where it lost its charger at the timeless Terres Rouges hotel). It came home safely to Paris with me. It rode with me 6,000 kilometers in and outside Jerusalem on Jolly Jumper. It visited Petra with me. It made aliyah with me. It rode 1,000 km with me on the new Honda Innova. It walked Wadi Hissa with me.
Lately it was suffering from old age and too many falls. And now its time has come. It fell once too many.
I replaced it with a Nokia 5800 hoping the new telephone will serve and protect me just as faithfully.
Farewell Nokia 3100. Shame I never gave you a name.
I came to think of my Nokia 3100 as my guardian angel and I'm parting from it with difficulty.
I pledged to change it only after I reached the number of 10,000 sent text messages... and I actually went beyond that, sticking to it till it stopped working completely, last week.
I bought my Nokia 3100 in late 2004 or early 2005. It was still young when we left for Cambodia but it accompanied me bravely in my endeavours. It fell bravely with me in the Kirirom (in this post it's not in my pocket though a few minutes before in the previous, unexpected, fall into the Kirirom, it was...) after which I dried it, left it off for two weeks and to my great surprise found it working perfectly when I turned it back on!
It fell innumerable times. It was immersed again in the water (in a toilet, to be precise!) at which point I came to think of it as indestructible.
It rode the streets of Phnom Penh with me, behind the motodops. It traveled to Ratanakiri (where it lost its charger at the timeless Terres Rouges hotel). It came home safely to Paris with me. It rode with me 6,000 kilometers in and outside Jerusalem on Jolly Jumper. It visited Petra with me. It made aliyah with me. It rode 1,000 km with me on the new Honda Innova. It walked Wadi Hissa with me.
Lately it was suffering from old age and too many falls. And now its time has come. It fell once too many.
I replaced it with a Nokia 5800 hoping the new telephone will serve and protect me just as faithfully.
Farewell Nokia 3100. Shame I never gave you a name.
August 31, 2009
Do Snow Leopards Hibernate?
I really wonder whether snow leopards hibernate...
Apparently the answer is no. How did I get interested in this question suddenly?
The story goes like this. I'll upgrade soon my Mac to OS X v10.6 a.k.a. "Snow Leopard" and I'd like it to hibernate after it's been in sleep mode for a while, a functionality absent from v10.5 a.k.a. plain "Leopard". So I type "snow leopard hibernate" in Google...
What do I get? A revelation: Yahoo! Answers telling me that the beautiful and endangered snow leopards don't hibernate; they live in the snow all year round.
I do hope that Apple pays royalties to the Snow Leopard Protection Society. And I care less about my computer for a moment.
Apparently the answer is no. How did I get interested in this question suddenly?
The story goes like this. I'll upgrade soon my Mac to OS X v10.6 a.k.a. "Snow Leopard" and I'd like it to hibernate after it's been in sleep mode for a while, a functionality absent from v10.5 a.k.a. plain "Leopard". So I type "snow leopard hibernate" in Google...
What do I get? A revelation: Yahoo! Answers telling me that the beautiful and endangered snow leopards don't hibernate; they live in the snow all year round.
I do hope that Apple pays royalties to the Snow Leopard Protection Society. And I care less about my computer for a moment.
August 29, 2009
Swearing helps withstand pain
From Science & Vie, September 2009:
See also:
Cursing diminishes the experience of pain and increases tolerance to it. Richard Stephens and hiscolleagues at Keele University in Great Britain have observed the behaviour and pulse of volunteers immersing an arm into water at 5 C. The result is astonishing: they could keep their arm immersed for a longer time when they were allowed to swear and curse ad libidum than when they were using a neutral word used to describe a table. Moreover, their cardiac rhythm increased, a proof of natural survival reflex. According to the researchers, cursing could cut the link between fear and experience of pain, therefore providing both psychological and physical benefits. Researchers note that this universal reflex should be used only in case of pain, lest it would lose it's effect. It has not been proven yet whether, in addition to allowing withstaning pain longer, it also allows withstanding stronger pain.
See also:
August 27, 2009
A Liberating Dream
I just turned 10 and my name is Joseph. I live in Paris with my parents and sister. The environment at home is so oppressing that I still occasionally shit in my pants.
I suffer especially from the meals which are taken ritually in the kitchen: they are a concentrate of coldness and stress. There are rules ranging from how to hold your fork to eating everything in your plate. The vegetables are the cheapest my father could get and the fruit have no taste. Whether I like the food or not is not even a question: I have to eat it and belonging to "clean plates club" is not optional. But the worst is that I cannot even speak. I cannot say what I like and what I don't, that's obvious. But I cannot even speak of my day in school or raise an opinion on the subject Mister Father has brought up - except in the most perfect and accurate idiom approved by the bible of Mister Father: Grevisse1.
Precisely in the kitchen, that evening, my father interrupts me to correct my grammar. It doesn't matter that he makes mistakes in French (his native language is English) and hates being corrected. It doesn't matter that he hates being interrupted. He reacts with an expression of the disgust at the slightest infringement to the sacred rules of grammar and interrupts immediately to correct with an irritated voice. I cannot express myself without being at the constant mercy of his grimace and irritation.
Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday: there's no escaping it.
But today, for me it's the last straw. I don't know what I've just said, all I know is that he has interrupted me one time too many, grrr.... "That's enough!", I shout to him. "How many more times are you going to miss my point and insult me?" I ask at the top of my preadolescent voice.
My mother's there but she's ignoring the scene. Her French is perfect so she's on the safe side. And defending her children is really not in her habits. She actually has her back to me - probably cleaning a salad or some fruit in the sink.
I grab the bowl of hot water which is in front of me on the table and I throw it furiously at her, without adding a word.
I leave the room in a mixture of rage and tears and for a long moment I go through my rage and despair, experiencing the relief of having set free what was consuming me. Being insulted thirty times a day by someone who claims to be my father while my mother stands by as if nothing was going on: what could be more infuriating?
But I don't stop there. I return to the kitchen and grab my father by the neck till he falls from his chair. I drag him on the floor to my room and bash him in the belly, in the upper torso, in the face. I can barely see, I feel only his fat under my fists. The tears in my eyes and the rage in my mind. I shout: "You don't understand! Why do you do this? What's the point??? All these corrections, for what?!!" and I continue to hit him. Under the blows he says faintly: "A good father behaves like the grandfather..." I'm taken aback. "What do you mean? Which grandfather? This guy wasn't a grandfather, he was a monster! Sensitive like a rubber sole: that's what he was. The guy never even wanted to meet me. It's a fact. People know he's still alive and he doesn't want to see me, I know it also!"
I'm calmer now. I eat the raw onions and cook the cucumber and tomatoes. I'll do it my way from now on.
1Le Bon Usage, by Maurice Grevisse
I suffer especially from the meals which are taken ritually in the kitchen: they are a concentrate of coldness and stress. There are rules ranging from how to hold your fork to eating everything in your plate. The vegetables are the cheapest my father could get and the fruit have no taste. Whether I like the food or not is not even a question: I have to eat it and belonging to "clean plates club" is not optional. But the worst is that I cannot even speak. I cannot say what I like and what I don't, that's obvious. But I cannot even speak of my day in school or raise an opinion on the subject Mister Father has brought up - except in the most perfect and accurate idiom approved by the bible of Mister Father: Grevisse1.
Precisely in the kitchen, that evening, my father interrupts me to correct my grammar. It doesn't matter that he makes mistakes in French (his native language is English) and hates being corrected. It doesn't matter that he hates being interrupted. He reacts with an expression of the disgust at the slightest infringement to the sacred rules of grammar and interrupts immediately to correct with an irritated voice. I cannot express myself without being at the constant mercy of his grimace and irritation.
Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday: there's no escaping it.
But today, for me it's the last straw. I don't know what I've just said, all I know is that he has interrupted me one time too many, grrr.... "That's enough!", I shout to him. "How many more times are you going to miss my point and insult me?" I ask at the top of my preadolescent voice.
My mother's there but she's ignoring the scene. Her French is perfect so she's on the safe side. And defending her children is really not in her habits. She actually has her back to me - probably cleaning a salad or some fruit in the sink.
I grab the bowl of hot water which is in front of me on the table and I throw it furiously at her, without adding a word.
I leave the room in a mixture of rage and tears and for a long moment I go through my rage and despair, experiencing the relief of having set free what was consuming me. Being insulted thirty times a day by someone who claims to be my father while my mother stands by as if nothing was going on: what could be more infuriating?
But I don't stop there. I return to the kitchen and grab my father by the neck till he falls from his chair. I drag him on the floor to my room and bash him in the belly, in the upper torso, in the face. I can barely see, I feel only his fat under my fists. The tears in my eyes and the rage in my mind. I shout: "You don't understand! Why do you do this? What's the point??? All these corrections, for what?!!" and I continue to hit him. Under the blows he says faintly: "A good father behaves like the grandfather..." I'm taken aback. "What do you mean? Which grandfather? This guy wasn't a grandfather, he was a monster! Sensitive like a rubber sole: that's what he was. The guy never even wanted to meet me. It's a fact. People know he's still alive and he doesn't want to see me, I know it also!"
I'm calmer now. I eat the raw onions and cook the cucumber and tomatoes. I'll do it my way from now on.
1Le Bon Usage, by Maurice Grevisse
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