Biutiful

Not to exaggerate, I'd call it the first honest and kind (even despite of some cruel scenes) movie that I saw for several past years. Many thanks to Sr Alejandro González Iñárritu.

70

That love is all and love is everyone...

Evolution

When I was 15, I dreamed about standing with a guitar on stage in front of a hall full of excited girls. A cowboy hat, a black leather and a smoking cigarette were a must.

When I was 21, I dreamed about standing with a guitar or beside a keyboard in front of a hall full of concerned people who came to listen to music. A cowboy hat probably was a must, but all the other stuff wasn't anymore.

Now that I'm 28, I dream about having a concrete box to lock myself inside with a guitar/piano/flute/whatever and play for myself, catching every little piece of sound, enjoying every single note, every single offbeat, every string vibration. I'd also prefer a cozy bathrobe to the hat. And this one is the sweetest dream of all three for me.

Books

The cover of the latest Time issue contains a photo of Jonathan Franzen accompanied with the following message:

Great American Novelist. He's not the richest or most famous. His characters don't solve mysteries, have magical powers or live in the future. But in his new novel, Freedom, Jonathan Franzen shows us the way we live now.


The fact that the person placed on the Time's cover is a living novel writer was so surprising, that a number of other media sources dedicated a news entry for it. It appeared that Jonathan Franzen is the first writer for 10 years to get to the cover of this magazine (the previous one was Stephen King in 2000).

In my opinion, this fact is not a worse illustration of the way we live now than the mentioned book. For 50 years (1951-2000) as many as 42 living writers were honoured to get to the Time's cover, ~8 authors per decade. The first decade of 2000's was not that rich. However, I cannot say that the shelves of bookstores have become smaller. Conversely, they obviously have become much larger than ten years ago. And the books have become much more colourful and pretty than before (right now I'm looking at my good old Catcher in the Rye, 1975 edition, and I'm sure it would have never been sold in today's bookstore due to its ugly cover).

The abundance on the bookshelves hides the scarcity of modern literature. It is the same entropy loss problem I wrote about some time ago. The problem is that we produce a lot of form, while forgetting about the sense. A typical book available in a store today is nothing more than a coloured pack of printed paper whose life is limited by a trip from New York to San Francisco. What a difference to my Catcher, the Catcher I've bought at bibliopole's, whose pages become yellow with time, who has some wrested pages pasted back in wrong order, who spent his best years being read by a dozen of my friends (and their friends), and who is still alive and carefully dusted once a week on a dedicated bookcase shelf, waiting for succeeding readers.

A major difference between USSR and western rock music of 60-80's is that most of the Russian bands never really cared about the music (yes, I know that USSR != Russia, but as the majority of the bands sang songs in Russian, I will use that term). There were many reasons for that. There were no money, there were no good instruments, there were no good recording equipment. There were no sponsors. There were no local musical heritage, and getting discs with western music was a challenge.

However, even though the music was recorded on handicraft hardware built from spare parts of three different machines, even though the guitars and processors sounded as a mix of Nirvana, Chuck Berry and Bach, even though a drum machine beat the same boring 4/4 far-from-reality rhythm through entire song, even though guitar solos were as simple as in guitar beginner's guide, even though the rehearsals were performed at someone's apartments or (in better case) in underground studios, even though in many cases there were no official discs available, so the listeners had to use their tape recorders to spread records, even though... Despite all of that, Russian bands played the rockest rock I've ever listened to. Every single song was an inexhaustible source of energy, love, truth and wisdom. It may sound oddly, but probably the poor quality of the music was one of the compartments of the inspiration made by the songs... Good enough music would just have prevented the listener from feeling the spirit they carried.

No wrong no right,
I'm gonna tell you there's no black and no white.
Queen, "One Vision"

A small addition to the previous post.

Dividing people (and other things) into black and white on the basis of some particular feature of them is one of the biggest mistakes one can make. Unfortunately, our mind is lazy. It is much easier for us to sort a hundred elements out into two (three, four, ten) groups by some common criteria and operate with those N groups, than to put each one to a separate personal group and deal with 100 groups instead. Sometimes this is called abstracting. Naturally, abstracting is good when used in maths or biology, but it distorts our vision when applied to real-world or social stuff.

Sometimes this feature of our mind is exploited by unfair people. The teams of candidates of presidential/governmental races often try to blacken the opposite candidate by showing them as adulterer, a person of doubtful character and so on. Well, it is difficult for me to understand the relation between PM's sexual temperament and their economical and manager's skills (needed for the state to prosper).

I try to classify the things as vectors of different essential properties. For instance, a typical vector of a person is (name, sex, age, sense of humour (1-10), kindness (1-10), intellectual level (-1-10), positiveness (1-10), honesty, appearance, physical skills, risk-ability, ..., smoking (yes/no), ...). This relates to all people, not only to friends (politics have some of the properties grayed, e.g. honesty ;)). The properties are mostly orthogonal, and thus such classification helps not to sort people into black and white, stupid and clever, or honest and dishonest. Really, there are quite a few properties to consider, and the presence of negative ones does not mean the absence of positive ones.

Our knowledge or, to be accurate, the part of our knowledge responsible for subjective information, is mostly wrong. Our knowledge is being constantly formed by the sources that produce highly distorted information that is often based on assumptions of the authors, false or even counterfeited facts. In many cases only side aspects of the whole picture is presented.

The dissonance between the “real” reality and the reality that is forcibly being boxed up into our minds has increased drastically with the overall commercialisation of the society. News is not a source of up-to-date information anymore, it is a commercial product that is positioned on global or local markets of “news receivers”. Led by the main idea of capitalistic economics, the competition, news companies are forced to run after fun, not after essence. It is more important to have weather forecast presented by a hot blonde in mini rather than to provide accurate temperature values for tomorrow (I have nothing against the blonde herself, even the other way round, yet the *main* purpose of a forecast is informing about correct weather). In order to make information acceptable by as wide set of “news receivers” as possible, the facts are often brushed and beautified to exploit baser instincts at the expense of actuality.

Actually, it is hard to blame news companies for this, as they are just doing their business. Those who do not adhere to the general stream will be knocked down and substituted by the others who will do.

What is sad, is that “thanks” to our oversimplified and running-for-sensations world, we stick to false ideals, we hail losers (or common people in best case) and are not aware of real heroes. The “real” reality has nothing to do with the things propagated. There are no fairy adventures and heroes on white horses, live-for-today’s and good-vs-evil’s, 90-60-90’s and 23-years-old-sexy-nuclear-physics-professors; the real reality is boring and mostly undistinguished, but whom such reality would be interesting to? Pop is king.

Obviously, this cannot last forever. While not being able to discover it today, the people will definitely notice the difference between what they watch, hear or read around and what they see with their eyes. But what would be the price?

Happy Birthday Paul!

Today is Paul McCartney’s 68th birthday.

Sir Paul’s performance in Kyiv on June 14, 2008 was probably the most exciting musical event I have attended for all my life. To say that it was wonderful, impressive, awesome, cool, great, unforgettable -- is to say nothing. There are no words to describe my feelings that summer night -- I just stood open-mouthed and stared at the scene, listening to the songs I loved since my very childhood, the songs which caused me to rend my fingers down to pieces, helplessly trying to play them accurately with my old guitar when I was about 12. Probably, that was the day of pure, absolute happiness.

And what a night it was! A powerful shower was pouring down from the sky for the whole day, so the streets in the city centre looked exactly like channels in Venice; umbrellas were pretty useless -- what one can do with a paper shield against a dozen of steel arrows? :) But the rain was nothing for 350’000 gathered at Independence Square to listen to a live legend, a legend whom many of the spectators have been awaiting for more than 40 years. It was an unique atmosphere of pervasive happiness around.



So, happy birthday Paul -- be just as young as you were there in Kyiv two years ago, and... just thank you for your songs and the joy that you bring with them to our hearts.

Photos: Korrespondent.net, Viktor Pinchuk's fund.

Porn: the most honest genre?

Many popular TV series and movies exploit baser human instincts, 'hiding' sexual relations, violence and humiliation (attractive for major part of people) behind the naughty 'real-life' scenes such as hospital or office work flows. Actually, substituting a hospital with, say, factory, and doctors with workers (keeping individual relations between them intact) will change nothing! And this means that the hospital is an unnecessary element of the scene...

It may sound a bit mind-blowing, but porn movies are thus the most 'honest' ones, having the highest entropy amongst other movie genres.