meditations on art and cultural bridges

With a little help from Kaurismaki.

[1] dialectics (with a little Italian lesson in subtitles)

[2] If Finns and Russians can have so much fun, Finland being the last country to swiftly repulse a Russian invasion, indeed the last country to repel swiftly a superpower invasion... why can't we have such as this below between Australia and Indonesia or Vietnam, or China and Japan? Some background on the Leningrad Cowboys and the Red Army Choir here.

And for those who fear Arabs as a class of people, meet Yasmine Hamdan.

and if you have time enjoy the movie in which that scene takes place, near the end

Jim Jarmusch made the film, surely America's answer to Finland's Kaurismaki

— Everyone speaks slowly, so the Spanish subtitles are an excellent language lesson

With Tilda Swinton and John Hurt, not really your average vampire movie,
but a voyage into the jadedness of world-wandering people who live a very very long time...

 

on dreams and sleep

The Conversation runs a series for 'Curious Kids'. Today an answer to a question about dreams.

I thought the answer was a bit limited, in focusing on the history of psychological interpretation of dreams. So I ventured into the physiology:

Dennis Argall

logged in via Google

I think it’s important to connect dreaming with the state of our whole body. While we sleep, it is normal for the sugar level in our blood stream to decline. Towards morning this process reaches a point where the body responds by lifting adrenalin llevels. Adrenalin, more scientific name epinephrine, is what gives us a charge to run away from something or chase madly after something when challenged when we are awake. It has broad roles like that in body systems and as we sleep and sugar levels fall adrenalin’s rise wakes us… But along the way it churns up other things, bladder alerts, appetite alerts and brain alerts which can mean dreams of better or worse kind. We may dream at other times, unaware. The dreams remembered are those just before waking.

I think there are a couple of things that flow from this. First is the need to maintain healthy levels of protein, sugar and caffeine (chocolate, tea, coffee, cola) without big spikes. And to treat sleep with respect, allowing it to happen and not getting too caught up in dramatic phone or tablet games in bed.

A recent news story suggested that billions of dollars would be saved in the US if schools began later…in the case of the US meaning not 8am but a bit later, because adolescents need to sleep in a bit and there would be better school results and fewer teenage car accidents if that were respected. Which suggests to me also that adolescent sugar-adrenalin cycles are different. Perhaps most young people sustain blood sugar levels better. Perhaps parents should just envy the capacity to sleep in! But perhaps also adjust bedtimes to get enough sleep altogether. Because…

During the day we yank minerals out of muscle and bone to do all kinds of work, including brain work. When we sleep those resources have to be put back. These processes are called catabolic and anabolic. Modern society with its levels of stress put people into problems because they may not get their resources restored in sleep. Crash. And nightmares.

So my thought is that we need to think very broadly about the importance of sleep, not as a dead zone but critical to life. I had sleep and nightmare problems for decades but eventually did a sleep test and found that my nightmares were not caused primarily by brain ruckus but because my breathing was stopping (sleep apnea) and the adrenalin rush to keep me alive, as we normally have gently in the morning, was violent in the middle of the night. Good habits of sleep when younger may have avoided that nonsense.

Korea, hysteria, self-examination

It was pleasing to read this morning that the leader of the opposition Labor Party here in Australia, who, according to polls, should be elected prime minister, will be visiting Seoul and Tokyo, not hanging on Trump's words as Prime Minister Turnbull does at the moment.

From The Guardian

V Putin has also spoken sensibly on Korea.

An article at The Conversation this morning talked about what 'sniffer aircraft' can tell us about the DPRK's nuclear explosion the other day.

I offered these thoughts:

Maureen Todhunter, a writer at John Menadue's blog offered wisdom on finding ways forward to sanity:

...Exposing ourselves to others’ ways of seeing life and its crises, and revealing our own ways to others, may seriously challenge most of us. But I think it’s an important step in developing empathy, capacity and will for collective remedial action. This is action that rejects war and cultivates peace, that nurtures the irritations of resistance and civil disobedience into pearls of civic-minded behaviour caring for all people and planet. Importantly then, a 21st century update on Marx: imaginations of the world, unite!
An exciting place for learning, thinking and imagining collectively is the IPAN (Independent and Peaceful Australia Network) National Conference 2017 in Melbourne on 8, 9 & 10 September 2017. Its theme: War, Peace & Independence: Keep Australia out of US Wars. http://www.ipan.org.au/#/To register for the conference www.trybooking.com/286873
Maureen Todhunter is an academic copy editor and member of Just Peace Qld

In reply I drew on the comment I'd made at The Conversation, adding a note at the end about past difficulties in endeavouring to walk down the middle between the left and the right.

The weekly scribbles

My writers group sets homework. This feels irritating at times but does drive the brain down interesting unexpected holes. Here I past 500 word-ish pieces from the last two weeks. I seek to get down to 400 words which is an easy paced three minutes reading, beyond which listeners have difficulty, but it's hard when ideas flow.

The first item here then is an attempt to be inside the mind of a person with some dementia, the black hole many of us are to be sucked into, but out from which we don't get news. This is perhaps the beginning of a longer story to be written.

The second item, below, is about moments in life, arguing that there are no momentous moments which do not alter space.

1

The assignment: to create a character using name of school friend and name of place where the school was; story to include “if he can find her in enemy territory”.
I’m not good at boys’ own adventures. My work is introspective. This comes solely from my mind. Third person didn’t work, I have tried second person.

The difficulty is remembering your name. Cover that with an air of disdain. Unfriendly; but don’t let them think you’re demented.

They asked about your early life but that was private, not for strangers. You look back to childhood and remember no names, too many schools.

But there was a girl back in Queensland, in the place where we sat on a kindergarten bench in blue shirts and shorts – and short skirt – and bare legs and feet and wrote on slates with slate pencils at a shared desk. How did that end, was it just that you left? You remember mood and warmth. And she seems the only person back there now. She seems to be Greek, her skin olive. Was her name Mary... Mary Borough. No, that was where we were. Would she still be there?

After that time, way back, the years after that, later in schools, one, two, at least three of them, there seem mainly a sense of bitterness and distances from people.

Is ‘remembering’ what you’re to do now? Is that what life was anyway?

“Where are my shoes? Did I take those tablets? Am I hungry? I want my kitchen.” Hang on cobber, you’re talking to yourself, and watch it, they’ll see you laughing...

Had you thought of being a spy? Maybe you hadn’t. But this tunnel of existence is a bit spy-like: hidden in enemy territory, tongue locked from saying who you are.
Yesterday they asked you who the prime minister was. You smiled sardonically. If they didn’t know who the bastard was they had no hope. Why should you tell them?

Yesterday they said to each other that you were ‘disinhibited’. They needn’t feel threatened: scrawny scratching shrink and miserable nurse. On the other hand that person who takes you to the shower and is just a tiny bit indecent with you...

OK! Retreat to remembered sensation. Keep your news to yourself. 

News, news! Hello, here comes an afternoon edition... The Dutch art student. Also with exceptional skin but she was fair. Funny to think how she and you ran out of words then and in this enemy territory they say you have no words now. You might not have a lot of time ahead; this is not a territory for having time ahead. Instead, better, now in this tiny news moment conjure up time past, exceptional-skin past, moments-innocent past. You were both so innocent, but so much intense feeling from such tiny moments. Can you resume conversations you didn’t know how to have so long ago... if you can find her now in this enemy territory. 

2:

"Write about your moods and emotions from a memory of a moment of your life." But I did something a little different. This is a personal reminiscence, of many moments. As with the previous short essay, this is written in a form to be spoken, read aloud. Which requires cadence and rhythm, and turns and angles to keep the audience alive.

I went away last time thinking of momentous moments, times when sudden events shifted space.

Such as picking up brain MRI scans for my wife in 2000, opening the envelope straight away and seeing the impossible, the size of a peach, in a frontal lobe. Bigger than any other moment in life. Whereas I thought I’d had an equal relationship, suddenly the biology sneered at us.

I drove out of the carpark next moment, to head home. I realised I was in a strange state when I saw a woman looking at me with an expression of horror as I went by. I can still see her face now.

Or ... when long ago I put a friend on a plane in Rome after a couple of days wandering the city, he going on to his first overseas posting in Nigeria... then to get a call from Mac in the High Commission in London asking did he get on the plane, did he get the plane... because it landed a kilometre too early at Lagos. The call was the moment, the plane departure was just... plane.

Intense conversations, so many kinds, pressures in head, all moments remembered or hidden: with close people and people you really need to convince... shifting your world in some way. Later remembering mainly moments of being stupid.

The milliseconds that last a very long time when you crash a car.

The strange sensation of knowing that you are about to be dead when you roll sideways through 600 degrees on a tractor. Then to watch it continue downhill, while lying on the ground after it throws you safely away into the largest and driest scotch thistle in eastern Australia. I can still hear it roar with anger at me. And feel my own anger and annoyance at my stupidity, plus shame: a childish expectation of getting into trouble.

I suspect that the biggest, most-remembered moments that alter our worlds are the negatives. The ones ‘for the good’ more often creep up... unless you have serendipitous eye-locking wonder-moments. More often we guard against nice surprises.

Sex.

That's a three-letter paragraph wanting not to be just four letters.

In between the sex and the other jolts, so many interminable moments, long drawn out phases of physical, spiritual, mental, or emotional homelessness. We may wish they were over in a moment. With what drug do we try to shorten them?

In physics, moment is what swinging objects have, weights heading for hitting something. There is no comprehended time-moment that does not connect with space; that does not hit.

Captain Oates dramatically, gangrenously, septically and with dysentery said to hapless Captain Scott of the Antarctic that he was just going outside for a moment.

We say: “I won’t be a moment” and that’s a lot more honest than “I’ll just be a moment” when you walk out the door. Through how many moments have we wished we could just walk out, alter the planet, alter life, start afresh. 

What moments, in the physics sense, hold us back? We cling to pendulums.