Riots - from Salman Rushdie's "Satanic Verses"

This is so beautiful, I had to share it. The book was published over twenty years ago, which isn't that much really, but long enough to make us think "look how the same rituals still exist".

Just a little background to the story, not even to help you understand what's happening, but because it's funny to us Mediterranean types: one of the book's characters, Gibreel, wandering around London and being homesick for India, wishes for warmer weather. Because there are supernatural forces at play, the weather does become unusually hot, and so the city erupts into the usual hot-weather activities: riots, police brutality, minority protests, false arrests and so on.

So, the attached pages describe the police seizure of the night club where the protesters keep their headquarters, as seen on the TV news:

A slideshow template

I spent the last two days looking for a tutorial to make a slideshow for a website I'm designing. I even came close to paying for a ready-made template, and then I found this page, which not only gives the code and explains it, but also has a .zip file (scroll down to find it) that you can download completely free and just tweak the parameters and add your own pics to make it work for you.

Enjoy :]

מצא את ההבלים

אומה יקרה,

אני מאמינה שחשוב לעודד אנשים כשהם עושים את הדבר הנכון. במיוחד אם מדובר באנשים שאצלם זה לא יוצא בקלות, ולא מה שמאפיין אותם ביומיום. כמו כן, כשאנשים מתנהגים בצורה עלובה, חשוב להצביע על כך בפניהם, ומהר. קיום שתי המצוות האלה הוא שמביא אותי היום לכתוב את הפוסט הזה.

גם אני מאד לא אוהבת את ראש הממשלה נתניהו, את מעשיו, את אביזריו, את המראה שלו, את הסובבים אותו, ואת הזווית של החיוך שלו שגורמת לו להיראות כמו איש עסקים מושחת שחושב שהצליח להערים על באטמן. לכן כששמעתי שהוא הצליח לחתום על עסקה להחזרתו של גלעד שליט - דבר ששימח אותי מאד - עשיתי מאמצים לפתח אליו כמות כלשהי של רגשות חיוביים. זה לא היה קל, זה היה מאבק פנימי קשה שנראה לעתים אבוד, אבל ביומיים האחרונים סוף סוף הצלחתי, וזה קרה בזכות מיזם "ביבי גאמפ" המטופש והעלוב שאתם כל כך מתלהבים לעסוק בו.



אובייקטיבית, מה בדיוק הבעיה עם התמונה הזאת? יש פה צילום של אירוע היסטורי, והדמויות המעורבות בו. זה שאנחנו אוהבים את משפחת שליט ולא אוהבים את ביבי זאת בעיה אישית שלנו. וזה לא שגלעד ואבא שלו דיגמנו לפורטרט משפחתי ופתאום הנדחף הזה הופיע - הם קבוצה של אנשים בתנועה, עם צלמים של דובר צה"ל מסביב, זה הפריים שיצא, וטבעי שהצלם ינסה לתפוס את ראש הממשלה יחד עם החיבוק.

ההשוואה לפורסט גאמפ - באמת? מה, הוא הושתל שם דיגיטלית כדי לנסות להוסיף לו חשיבות? הוא נדחף בכח לאירוע היסטורי שלא נוגע לו, כמו לימור לבנת באולימפיאדה? לא. הוא דמות חשובה באירוע ההיסטורי שהוא היה אחד מיוצריו, יש לו את כל הסיבות להיות שם, וזה שיש לו חיוך מגעיל זה מצער, אבל לא רלוונטי.

אבל אם כבר פתחתם פוטושופ, בואו תנסו תרגיל כזה: הפכו את התמונה לשחור לבן, ושימו את מנחם בגין או יצחק רבין ברקע. נראה פתאום הגיוני, נכון? ואם במקום ביבי היה שם שמעון פרס או אריק איינשטיין (ששניהם גם מגעילים מאד בעיניי), הייתם הרי מדפיסים מזה חולצות, נכון או לא? ואם זאת היתה שלי יחימוביץ, שגם החיוך שלה לא הכי פוטוגני? זה היה הופך לפוסטר שהיה מנצח לה את הבחירות בשנה הבאה.

לסיום, תזכורת: הסיסמא שכולנו היינו נורא מבסוטים ממנה "איפה השליט שיחזיר את שליט?", זוכרים? אז הנה.

October

Why I detest Lady Gaga

I know I've already written a lengthy rant about this, but I want to make it clear. I don't hate Lady Gaga because she is a bad singer. I hate her because she is an amazing singer. Because she has a Liza Minnelli voice and a Paris Hilton personality. Because she can do this:



... but chooses to do this instead:

The Three Musketeers 2011

People who didn't spend their primary school years carrying around Alexander Dumas' novel everywhere they went, can probably let this year's cinematic adaptation pass without comment. I am not such a person, and also I'm not a person who likes to let things pass without comment. And so, here we are.

From this point on, this post contains spoilers for both the book and the movie. The movie, of course, cannot be spoiled, and if you haven't read the book by now you have only yourselves to blame.

The creators of this film obviously found some of the book's elements too vulgar for their tender tastes. For example, all the nasty extramarital affairs, and unsightly female deaths. So they took them all out - the gentle queen Anne, of course, did not have an affair with Buckingham, and the sweet young Constance was not, of course, married. How could she be? She was waiting for the love of her life to ride in from the sticks on his orange horse. And of course she survives all the dangers on the way to have her kiss at the end of the movie. Even the wicked wicked Milady gets to live - and why shouldn't she? Her worst crime in the film was loving her career more than her moody boyfriend Athos. Surely spoiling her outfit with a little salt water is enough to sort her out. Also gone are the captain of the musketeers De Treville - one of my favorites characters, the musketeers themselves - apparently disbanded just before D'Artagnan shows up due to double-dip recession, and most of the plot, especially everything that happens after the diamonds adventure.

Strangely, after cleaning the storyline of these nasty nasty things, the writers found that they needed to add some vulgarities of their own - as big and vulgar as they could think of. So they turned the musketeers - the only three they had left (hey, the title only calls for three after all) into some kind of Mission Impossible secret scuba squad (I'm not kidding, they scuba!), added flame-throwing air ships (they make the annoying trip to and from London so much easier), turned the Duke of Buckingham into a total douchebag (that way the queen couldn't possibly like him), crash-landed into the roof of the Notre Dame, and, of course, had D'Artagnan kill Rochefort in a long and boring rooftop sword fight. At the end of the book, of course, D'Artagnan and Rochefort become friends, but that would've just confused today's tender-hearted viewer. Oh, and Rochefort had an eye missing. Scars are so subtle.

Having said all that, I need to insist that there were several excellent things in this movie, which made it almost worth watching:

All of the production design was breathtakingly beautiful, as was Milla Jovovich (what the hell is that woman made of?!). Most of the casting was spot-on, in ways that it hasn't been in previous adaptations. D'Artagnan was an adorable young goofball (the kid leading the horse), and so was the king - excellent! It was very smart to make them so much alike, in fact in all their scenes together they look like they're about to collapse into each-other's arms.

Usually the Cardinal and Athos (feather hat guy) are the sexiest men in the story, but this time Athos was totally flat, and Christoph Waltz as the Cardinal was good, but unexciting. This made room for two very sexy actors to take the parts of Porthos and Aramis (the big one and the one with the cross). I dare any hot-blooded  woman to watch this film and not fantasize about a threesome with those two!

The fact that they made Buckingham a strutting douchebag bugged me, but on the other hand Orlando Bloom as a strutting douchebag was great, and it's about time for him to lay off the elf stuff.

In conclusion ... oh hell, I don't have a conclusion. Long live the king, long live Paris, long live the Louvre, Notre Dame Cathedral and the Musee d'Orsay!

psssst.... a little side project

http://menlions.blogspot.com/

Fat lies and the fat lying liars who make us fat.

Al Franken once wrote a book named "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them". It's hard to think of another title for this post, when I think about how millions of people in the world torture themselves with low-fat and low-calorie diets.

I was lucky enough to be exposed to most of this information in my early twenties, when I developed some blood sugar problems, but I didn't have a good enough tool to pass the information on to others, until now.

The first three parts explain how there really is no connection between cholesterol and heart disease. Weird, right? Well, it has been known for decades, and still they keep lying to us. The last two parts explain why eating low-fat food and counting calories will not help you lose weight, but will in fact make you miserable and fuck up your metabolism. Sound a little more familiar? I should hope so.











P.S. The documentary Mr. Naughton keeps mentioning is called "Fat Head". It's his answer to "Super Size Me", and it covers all those issues and many more, but in kind of a "talk to the audience as if they were kids" way that I don't approve of. Still, it's an hour and a half well spent, if you want to check it out.

We live in a world where good men are murdered and mediocre hacks thrive.

Jesus - murdered; Martin Luther King - murdered; Malcolm X - murdered; Gandhi - murdered; John Lennon - murdered; Reagan... wounded.


Thus spoke Bill Hicks (Him again? Oh alright then...) back in the 80-s. Well what about our hellish decade, in which Amy Winehouse is dead and Lady Gaga gets to perform with Brian May and be cheered by millions? How lucky is Bill not to have lived to see it, and how sad the world without him.

Welcome, Anna ;)

The most interesting thing I learned this year about sex and people.

I'm not sure how much "Game of Thrones" - the book or the TV series - has to teach us about life. Probably something about how winter is what happens while you're busy making other plans. Whatever.

The one thing I learned, not from the show but from looking up stuff about it on the internet, is that there's an unbelievable amount of people out there who think that if a sexual act is performed from behind, in necessarily means that it is anal sex. I wouldn't have believed it if someone told me about it, but the number of times I've read something like "...and how come they all only do it in the butt?!" is staggering. To me, all these people are repressed virgins and/or perverts.

I'm not sure why the citizens of Westeros choose to do it from the back 90% of the time - perhaps the rocks are cold and the ground dirty, or their seven gods don't approve of eye contact, or maybe that's the more practical way if you need to keep an eye out for dragons. Either way, if it was all anal, there wouldn't be so many bastards walking around, now would there?

The funniest comments are the ones accompanied by some deeply pseudo-intelligent analysis of the literary and/or cinematic qualities of the book/show.

Too literal, Amy baby...

The Anmation Professional's Circle of Life

1. Study animation
2. Work in animation
3. Work in animation some more (applies if lucky)
4. Become unemployed
5. Get a job teaching animation to new generation
6. Celebrate 35-th birthday
7. Pick new career
8. Watch Disney classics with your children

Waking Life

Me, a couple of days ago: "It's, you know, like when you're trying to dial a phone in a dream, and you can't see the buttons and can't get the numbers right..."

Me, last night while dreaming: "Man, this is just like when you're trying to dial a phone in a dream and you can't see the buttons and can't get the numbers right..."

A Song of Ice and Fire, or how to lose your fans in five extremely complicated steps.

Since A Game of Thrones began, I've been wondering how, being a known fantasy geek, and moving in geeky enough circles, I could've missed hearing about the Ice and Fire books, and how come I don't know anyone who's ever read them? Now that I've almost finished reading the currently published four books, and learned more about them, I understand why this is.

George R.R. Martin's "A Song of Ice and Fire" books are very long, very complicated, and very rich with characters. So rich that there's an iPhone app to help you keep track of who is who and what they've done. There are about fifteen main characters, through which the story is told. Meaning that each chapter is named after one of those characters, and is told through their point of view. The first three books, published respectively in 1996, 1998 and 2000, tell the story very well, switching from one POV character to the next, and moving forward in time through all of them. Then, apparently, Martin spent five years writing book 4, and announced in 2005 that it had become so long and complicated that he had decided to split it into two books. He published the first of them around the end of that year, and the next one is due this July. However, here's the little surprise: the book was split in two not chronologically, but per character. Meaning that both of them would cover the same time period, but each would feature only half the main characters.

So, to sum up; in 2000 Martin published book 3, which ended with rather nasty cliffhangers for most of the characters. Five years later he released book 4, which only continues half the story, and the other half is expected this July 2011.

Now, I became an eager Harry Potter fan in the worst possible moment, just after book 4 was published, so I know something about authors blueballing their readers, but even I have to say that this is beyond cruel. Much like the mad king from the Ice and Fire novels, who once placed a man in a situation where he had to watch his father burn or hang himself in the attempt to save him, George R.R. martin is abusing his power over his audience. And I know about the time it takes to create as well, and about artistic perfectionism, but it's too much. The thought that there are people out there who've been wondering about the faith of Tyrion Lannister, the only relatable character in the bunch, for over ten years, makes my blood run cold.

Where was I going with this? Oh, I remember. So, I now understand that the reason I hadn't met any Ice and Fire fans until now, was that they've all probably died, lost their minds, or are trying to forget the books ever existed. As well they should. Not cool Mr. Martin, not cool at all.

What me racist?

I've just deleted a post because someone complained about it being racist. Looking at it from a few months' perspective, it was quite tactless. I might have some racist content for you in the future, but only the kind I can get behind entirely.

Nosy Bear by Fran Krause

Contrary to what we were thought in highschool, I've seen that people who take things easy sometimes accomplish more in life. Take me for example - I take nothing easy and I don't accomplish much. On the other hand, you can take this story of how Fran Krause made his short "Nosy Bear" in his sketchbook, probably while sucking on a straw, as an example of the opposite:





Original Post Here

me vs the world 6

Stuck in Boromir limbo

Something needs to be done for actor Sean Bean. He appears to be stuck in the worst case of typecasting I've ever seen. It's not that he keeps playing the same type of character, he seems not to have had a change of clothes since 2001.

This is him in "Fellowship of the Ring"

"Black Death"


...and now "Game of Thrones"




















As we say in the cyber circles, what the wtf?!

P.S. My libido is very much in favor of this look, and isn't concerned at all with the damage to Mr. Bean's carreer.

Where the passive-aggressive assholes shop!

This commercial is my current pet peeve. For those of you who don't speak Hebrew, the idea is that the husband wakes up in the middle of the night with a cold, so he wakes his wife up and sends her to "Super Pharm" to get him some medicine. While there, she spots the nail polish rack, buys two almost identical colors, and asks him which one looks better. Luckily for him, she got him headache pills.

Mmmm, where to begin, where to begin?

First of all, kudos for managing to degrade both men and women equally. Really, nice job.

Secondly, here's my definitive list of midnight medical conditions that would justify waking up the spouse: if you're bleeding in a way that might cause loss of consciousness. If you are choking. If you're experiencing heart or appendicitis symptoms. If you've soiled the bed in some way. If an internal organ has popped out. If your water broke. If a wild animal is eating your face. If you woke up and don't remember who you are. Anything else wrong - you wait until morning. If you wake up with a cold, put on a warmer shirt, a scarf maybe, make yourself a hot tea quietly! then try to go back to sleep.

Thirdly, and more importantly, is this: I know that I'm very old-fashioned and outdated, but I remember when commercials used to send the message of "buy this, it's what all the successful people are buying". All the cool kids eat these chips, all the rich businessmen have this car, all the modern women wear these shoes, etc. Lately, and I didn't notice exactly when this happened, the people in the commercials are bastards, swindlers, morons, they have bad marriages, dysfunctional relationships, they are bad parents - and still I'm supposed to want what they have! How'd you like to be stuck in line behind this passive-aggressive asshole? Not that this one would ever be caught shopping for himself - I'm sure that his wife buys everything for him, from underwear to birthday presents for his parents.

In conclusion, the next step that I recommend for the creators of this commercial, is what Bill Hicks used to recommend to all advertising and marketing people, i.e. this:

Czernobog / Bielebog

This is from Neil Gaiman's "American Gods" - a book I've developed a strong fetish for. The part where Shadow and Wednesday stay with the Russian gods is one of the best parts, where surrealism mixes with the reality of an old immigrant's household:

Czernobog shook his head. He looked up at Shadow. "Do you have a brother?"

"No," said Shadow. "Not that I know of."

"I have a brother. They say, you put us together, we are like one person, you know? When we are young, his hair, it is very blond, very light, his eyes are blue, and people say, he is the good one. And my hair it is very dark, darker than yours even, and people say I am the rogue, you know? I am the bad one. And now time passes, and my hair is gray. His hair, too, I think, is gray. And you look at us, you would not know who was light, who was dark."

"Were you close?" asked Shadow.

HTML

One of my minor achievements that I'm pleased with, is that I've learned basic HTML. Nothing that will get me a Noble prize, I know, but it comes in useful every day. For example, I have built my website by myself. I can tweak the controls of this blog, for example, and I can add the little window on the side here that takes you to my new "Self Portraits" page. Make sure you check it out - I won't be showing any new additions here anymore.

Roman Polanski's "Bitter Moon"

A couple of years ago I sat in the first lecture of a course about Roman Polanski in the Tel-Aviv university, given by a much beloved but very pompous professor. He began by listing all of Polanski's films, and I fell into his silly little trap by raising my hand and pointing out that he had left out "Bitter Moon". His well-rehearsed answer was "I've left it out, because it isn't worth talking about, and I'd rather forget that it was ever made".
Then he spent a month talking about "The Tenant".

"Bitter Moon" - in French, "Lunes de Fiel", meaning "Moon of Gall", as opposed to "Lunes de Miel" which means "Moon of Honey" i.e. "Honeymoon" - is one of the most underrated films in history. Just as the wonderful "Starship Troopers" is mistaken for a cheesy action film, when it is in fact an earth-shattering social commentary, so "Bitter Moon" is mistaken for a romantic drama gone wrong, when it is in fact a grotesque indictment of the modern ideas of romantic love.

As I read some of the reviews for this film, my hands start to shake with anger. The consensus seems to be that Polanski started out with the intention to describe a moving love affair, then got lost in his stupid desire to create provocations by inserting as much soft-core porn as he could get away with. They mock the cliche lines that Peter Coyote's character speaks with a straight face: "Have you ever truly idolized a woman? Nothing can be obscene in such love. Everything that occurs in between it becomes a sacrament." and nobody knows what the hell Hugh Grant and Kristin Scott Thomas' characters are doing there. Roger Ebert is the only one who seems to have some kind of idea of what this film is really about. So, listen carefully, I'm only going to explain this once:

Oscar and Mimi are living out the romantic fantasy of romantic Parisian romance that we've been conditioned to want and fantasize about. He is a brooding American writer who lives in Paris and expects to become the next Henry Miller or Ernest Hemingway. He meets a divine creature on the bus and falls in love at first sight, but doesn't get to speak to her. After looking for her for months and almost giving up, he finally runs into her by mistake, and this "written in the stars" affair can finally begin. Of course she remembers him, of course she has also fallen in love with him at first sight. As they crash into each-other's arms with phrases like "I might have been Adam with the taste of apple fresh in my mouth. I was looking at all the beauty in the world, embodied in a single female form.", they reach the point where Meg Ryan films usually end, and step into uncharted territory. What happens next, or rather what doesn't happen, is that they never reach the comfortable, "boring" stage of the love affair. They never learn to enjoy eating breakfast together without tearing their clothes off and licking milk off each-other. They giggle and kiss while shopping for sex toys, but they will never giggle and kiss while shopping for groceries.

And so the grotesque part of the story begins - how far can you go on desire alone? At what point does sexual exploration become a silly cartoon? What do you do when a person kneels at your feet and tells you "You can do anything you want to me, just don't send me away"? How does it feel to go in an instant from being all-powerful to being completely powerless? And after all the battles have been won and lost, how do you spend eternity? Perhaps by poisoning the lives of a young couple you meet along the way, by mocking their seemingly boring and lustless relationship, and forcing your personal hell on them.

Just like Mimi and Oscar's love, Roman Polanski the masterpiece director is gone now, and it's too late to hug his ankles and cry "Please don't go, I'll do anything!". Instead, we can quote another cliche and say "We'll always have Paris", we'll always have "Chinatown", "Rosemary's Baby", and "Bitter Moon".

Good Night - a self portrait

The Millemium Trilogy

This is what it feels like to read Stieg Larsson's Millenium Trilogy:

The first book is fascinating, though vulgar, and you fall completely in love with Lisbeth Salander. The second one is exciting, though far-fetched. By the middle of the third one, you just want all the characters to take their women's rights, their journalistic integrity, their hyperactive libidos and their overblown IQ and end it all in a nearby fjord.

I shudder to think what the other seven books would've been like.