"... we are sweeping everything under the carpet, but the oddness is cropping up all over the place. And then, the carpet starts to move…".
Michael Haneke, "le manipulateur" who introduced his latest film,
Caché, at Cannes with a half-amused “
I wish you a disturbing evening”, is the proponent of a "
cinema of disturbance". A cinema of
loving self-mutilation, where
time is non-linear and everything happens in
long take shots; in Haneke's world, guilt destroys lives
decades after the original sin. All his male characters are "Georges" and his female characters are either "Evas" or "Annas", "
because I lack fantasy". Unsurprisingly, he is a
Bresson and Tarkovsky fan. He'll direct
"Don Giovanni" at the Paris Opera in early 2006: "In 20 years of working in the theater, I only staged one comedy, and that was my single failure".
posted by matteo
on Nov 18, 2005 -
19 comments
Music is nothing.
Sound could become music.
The end must be in the beginning,
and the beginning in the end.
I am here because I am not here.
Music lives in the eternal now.
Music is the now becoming now.
What I learned from
Sergiu Celibidache, by
Markand Thakar. More inside.
posted by matteo
on Oct 14, 2005 -
6 comments
"Should comic book characters age? A Boy Wonder doesn't stay a boy for long if a book is set in real time. That makes it so that any Robin can have an active career for, what, ten years? And that's if you buy that a fighting mad ten-year old can really kick anybody's ass." Some insightful comicbook commentary by
Erik Larsen, creator of
Savage Dragon.
posted by grabbingsand
on Sep 27, 2005 -
35 comments
"If time has to end, it can be described, instant by instant," Mr. Palomar thinks, "and each instant, when described, expands so that its end can no longer be seen." He decides that he will set himself to describing every instant of his life, and until he has described them all he will no longer think of being dead. At that moment he dies.
In memoriam of
Italo Calvino, who
died exactly 20 years ago.
"Calvino's novels" by his friend Gore Vidal.
Calvino's obituary by Vidal, il maestro
William Weaver's essay
on Calvino's cities, Jeanette Winterson on
Calvino's dream of being invisible, and
Stefano Franchi's philosophical study on
Palomar's doctrine of the void. More inside.
posted by matteo
on Sep 18, 2005 -
18 comments
Lakota Winter Counts. Lakota and other plains tribes counted time by winters. An appointed recorder would choose one major event to mark the year, depicting that event by
name and symbol. Early records dating back to the 10th century were often painted on
buffalo skins; more recent winter counts were recorded as
text journals. These fascinating records offer insight into natural and historic events for our land that precede accounts of European settlers. - more -
posted by madamjujujive
on Apr 26, 2005 -
12 comments
For 170 years, crossing the Channel from the UK to France would have brought you 11 days forward in time, and crossing back would have brought you 11 days earlier. Why? Because the Church of England wasn't about to adopt
a new Calendar instituted by
a Catholic pope. After all, if the old style was
good enough for Caesar.... In fact, it took over 300 years for the new Gregorian Calendar to
come into use throughout Europe, causing, no doubt, more than a few missed lunch dates as people forgot to
convert between them as they traveled.
There are, of course,
many other calendars in use around the world, and no shortage of people suggesting that
let's do the time warp again.
posted by John Kenneth Fisher
on Jan 30, 2005 -
16 comments
Yikes! In light of approaching finals do you find yourself excogitating WTHHIBD (what the hell have I been doing) over and over, and wondering if your lost time may have been due to
circumstances beyond your control? While the vindicating qualities (obviously you would have been more productive if you hadn't been somebody else's science experiment) of this alibi are usually ephemeral, it is still curious to think is all this talk of sightings/abductions/misplaced keys just a
hoax,
an elaborate cover up, or some yin yang amalgamation of the two? Is the mystery surrounding
Area 51 nothing more than conspiracy, (even if well
positioned)? To what extent are we inexorably skeptical or prepared to sort through the overflowing, spooky coffers of galactic mystery?
posted by superposition
on Dec 7, 2004 -
6 comments
Just in time, you’ve found me just in time. Richard Linklater, like
Wong Kar-
wai, is a lyrical and elegiac filmmaker. In many of his films, as in many of Wong's (and as in
Ming-liang Tsai's
What Time Is It There?), the subject is
time -- the
romance and poetry of
moments ticking by, the wonder and anguish of living through and then remembering an hour or a day.
In 1995 Linklater made
Before Sunrise, the story of
the chance encounter of two strangers (an American young man and a French young woman) on a European train and their sleepless night in Vienna. Now ten years have passed, and they meet
again in Paris: they -- and the audience -- only have 80 minutes to make up for the time they lost,
Before Sunset. Linklater's new film,
shot in uncut Steadycam takes (the longest clocks in at 11 minutes), in a sense
is about how we create selves just by talking. But it’s also about how we become prisoners of time.
Towards the end of the movie,
Celine, sitting in the backseat of a car with
Jesse, starts to caress his head while he isn't looking, then suddenly pulls back, and that simple curtailed gesture carries in it a sense of tragedy,
the consequence of the weight of time...
(more inside, with Nina Simone)
posted by matteo
on Jul 20, 2004 -
22 comments
Home is where the heart is. Karl Taro Greenfeld, journalist and author of
Speed Tribes, among others, has a nostalgic piece in Time Asia (Aug. '03) recounting his heady youth in Tokyo alongside his thoughts on his ailing Japanese grandmother.
posted by gen
on Jul 9, 2004 -
5 comments
The False Controversy of Stem Cell Research. Kinsley: In fact, thinking it through is a moral obligation, especially if you are on the side of the argument that wants to stop or slow this research.
It's not complicated. An embryo used in stem-cell research (and fertility treatments) is three to five days past conception. It consists of a few dozen cells that together are too small to be seen without a microscope. It has no consciousness, no self-awareness, no ability to feel love or pain. The smallest insect is far more human in every respect except potential.
posted by skallas
on May 31, 2004 -
64 comments
The Paper Trail "But TIME has obtained an internal Pentagon e-mail sent by an Army Corps of Engineers official—whose name was blacked out by the Pentagon—that raises questions about Cheney's arm's-length policy toward his old employer. Dated March 5, 2003, the e-mail says "action" on a multibillion-dollar Halliburton contract was "coordinated" with Cheney's office. The e-mail says Douglas Feith, a high-ranking Pentagon hawk, got the "authority to execute RIO," or Restore Iraqi Oil, from his boss, who is Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. RIO is one of several large contracts the U.S. awarded to Halliburton last year"
posted by Postroad
on May 31, 2004 -
28 comments
"Time passes, or rather doesn't pass. It is just there,
solid as a coffee mug on the
diner's counter. Time
hangs like the reek of old tobacco
in the hotel furniture". We all think we know
Edward Hopper's images, even if we've never
seen his paintings. Somehow
the solidity of the world -- even
the sky is like a wall -- is at odds with the
transience of the
people in it, however long they
sit and
stand and
wait. Hopper's people, like
Manet's
figures, often appear consumed by
the irreducible business of being.
Hopper, too,
would descend into his own silences, would delay himself in self-doubt...
(more inside)
posted by matteo
on May 25, 2004 -
19 comments
You may be familiar with the story,
reported here, about the southern California watch maker who supplied wrist watches for Mars scientists to get to
work on time. You may not have seen these time applications that make the time story equally as compelling for the rest of us. What is interesting from a graphics standpoint is the different qualities expressed with these versions, as a
table of exact times for specific locations (this site has a lot of great detail about the mission), or as an approximate time with shadows projected on the
Mars map (for Mac OS X).
Any other Mars time graphics that you know about?
posted by xtian
on Jan 23, 2004 -
5 comments
24:39 NASA is running their Spirit Martian explorer program on Martian solar time. With the project day running 39 minutes longer than a real day, engineers found they faced difficulties adjusting to this virtual timezone. Their solution was nearly as old as timekeeping itself.
posted by Ogre Lawless
on Jan 9, 2004 -
13 comments
What time is it? Tonight marks the transition in many parts of the US between daylight savings and non-daylight savings time. Don't forget to set your clocks back one hour!
posted by silusGROK
on Oct 25, 2003 -
46 comments
A bold paper published in the August issue of Foundations of Physics Letters seems set to change the way we think about the nature of time and its relationship to motion and classical and quantum mechanics. The work also appears to provide solutions to
Zeno's paradoxes. (Via
Kurzweilai.net. More inside...)
posted by Pinwheel
on Aug 1, 2003 -
41 comments
Spring Forward, Fall Back... Daylight Savings Time is just around the corner. This Sunday at 2am to be exact, for Americans.
This is just a friendly reminder. In Europe it's already happened. Time's weird. Humanity's been trying to figure it out since
Stonehenge and we still have to reset our clocks twice a year. You think by now we'd have gotten it right. Even
MetricTime would require regular fixin'. Why can't we just
stop the madness? Or would that be even worse?
posted by ZachsMind
on Apr 2, 2003 -
34 comments
Timehunt. Time, philosophy, alchemy, tons of interactive puzzles and great flash. I can't tell you more, I'm still figuring it out.
posted by talos
on Oct 16, 2002 -
9 comments
Facing Time: A family's yearly
self-portrait from 1976 to 2002 is both uplifting and unsettling; a bit like human life itself. How does one separate the morbid fascination with aging from the spiritual joy of growth? Not to mention the element of voyeurism... [
From ZoneZero, via Eclectica.]
posted by MiguelCardoso
on Oct 14, 2002 -
30 comments
"I asked who was playing. A Moroccan group, said the cabbie. He told me its name. Did I want to know what it was singing? Certainly. It was a plea to Israel from the Arab people. The chorus was, 'We have the same father. Why do you treat us this way?' Who might the father be? I asked. '
Ibrahim,' he said. 'The song is called Ismail and Isaac,' after his sons."
posted by artifex
on Sep 24, 2002 -
8 comments
How the U.S. Missed the Clues Time magazine assessmeznt of what went wrong in evaluation of intelligence pre-9/11. I am not yet sure why I find the conclusions a bit evasive but it seems to me the article tries to satisfy differing perspectives rather than taking a stand for a specific point of view. But then that may be my reading and wrong headed.
posted by Postroad
on May 27, 2002 -
7 comments
Temporal Anomalies in Time Travel Movies discusses time travel concept discrepancies in popular movies, such as Back to the Future, 12 Monkeys, and Flight of the Navigator. Although they're really just movies, and time travel isn't real (as far as we know), author M. Joseph Young provides very logical arguments for why those things couldn't really happen.
posted by lnicole
on Mar 18, 2002 -
25 comments
The Case for Profiling 'As it happens, the suicide bombers who attacked us on Sept. 11 were young, Islamic, Arab and male. That is not a stereotype. That is a fact. And there is no hiding from it, as there is no hiding from the next al-Qaeda suicide bomber. He has to be found and stopped." From what can be read
here,
here, and in another Time article
here , it would appear that profiling is a touch harder to do than this lightweight rant suggests. Whether one agrees with profiling or not, there seems little point in Time Magazine cheerleading it with an article that can only add to the high level of ignorance already surrounding this subject.
posted by RobertLoch
on Mar 15, 2002 -
23 comments
Does anybody really know what time it is? If anybody really cares, the NIST is the place to go for not only the answers (including a list of government operated open access NTP servers), but more information than you probably ever wanted to know about standard time.
posted by baylink
on Jan 5, 2002 -
15 comments
