minimal Garbage

Musical minimalism.
Taking Out The Garbage from Filo Farnsworth on Vimeo.






Blue Gene Tyranny. and then the last record by Talk Talk.

Mariinskiy organ and Theremin

The Mariinskiy concert hall has a new organ. In the first half of yesterday's concert it sounded rather soft and mellow played by Grigory Varshavskiy. Quite different from the sound of an organ in a stone church - sitting in the Mariinskiy concert hall is like being inside a guitar or a violin.
In the second half the organ accompanied the composer Olesya Rostovskaya on the Theremin. Or Терменвокс as it should properly be known. (Invented in Petrograd in 19919-20 by Lev Termen) Rostovskaya included some of her own compositions: "Свечение" (luminescence) and "Suonare" (Italian..play or ring)
A couple of extra theremin facts: John Otway plays one. Steve Martin made a documentary about the extraordinary life of its inventor. Different versions are available in the UK at reasonable prices.

Moon

I don't think this is quite a spoiler but the main character in Moon wakes up every morning to "I am the one and only" by Chesney Hawkes.

Shown dubbed in the small room of Dom Kino.

Semantic

I have a vague sense that this outline of Four Connectivities by Yao Ziyuan is important. Although maybe it's just a restatement of the idea of the semantic web in less technical language.

Dalai Lama Sunrise / Sunset

This is a Russian documentary nicely shot with a static camera. Monkeys hopping over barbed wire. The peace prize winner always under armed guard (provided by India).

The Dalai Lama gives the same advice and Buddhist philosophy I've heard before but the film-makers seem to take it to heart.... travelling back home from "overpopulated" China to "underpopulated" Siberia. The world needs more monks and not more people. Be nice.

I'd like to check these impressions for myself someday. My experience of travelling in southern England (population density several times that of China) is mostly of pointless empty fields. Once I wrote an article on overpopulation for students of English.

8 Citas

This is light comedy with actors who are apparently well-known TV faces in Spain. The best of the 8 scenes (which are loosely connected because the people all might vaguely know each other) is jealousy: A dinner party for two couples and one (more attractive/ cooler and cleverer) unattached guest.
I guess this bit of reaction wouldn't happen everywhere...same sex kissing always gets a general laugh with the audience at Dom Kino, whereas heterosexual kissing is not seen as inherently funny.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona

This was brilliant, and I don't think watching Woody Allen's film dubbed into Russian cuts out many jokes (although that's just a guess obviously).
But:
It slightly heightened my frustration at the lack of attention to languages in the story. The artist Juan Antonio (played by slightly-too-old-for-the-role Javier Bardem) tells Maria Elena (Penelope Cruz) to only speak English in Cristina's presence, his father refuses to speak other languages ...because he is a poet. If the poet is from Oviedo he might really speak Galician / Asturian anyway...Vicky is writing a dissertation on Catalan identity but there is no mention of the Catalan language anywhere.
At some point in the dubbed Russian Juan says...literally..we speak the same language ("Мы говорим на одном языке") meaning metaphorically. But of course from the point of view of a Russian viewer they really do