Intense documentary about the Jonestown massacre.
Lots of original footage, both sound and video.
Thursday, 20 June 2024
Casefile 60 - Jonestown massacre
Listened to this years ago, must be the one because of the Australian accent.
Blood-curling description of the Jonestown massacre.
Yelena Moskovich - "Virtuoso"
different perspectives, Hungary, girls, mamka, papka, I don't always get it
I got into the high school specializing in languages and impressed everyone by doing nothing but studying, all the time, big books gasping open all around me. My mamka started calling me "the Scholar" and bragged openly about my skills in French and English and German and Russian, all the while I was in my room, learning more and more. My papka was a bit different about it- a layer of discomfort, like coarse hair in a comb, at having a bookish daughter who could only spit only proverbs. He always echoed my mother, "Good job, Janinka!" But something in the way his pupils rolled away when he pushed a smile at me made me want to disappear forever. He observed me the way you look at people who do small tasks with too much passion and precision.
Drop the Dead Donkey
Saw it in the Richmond Theatre, which might have played a role....
Fun to watch, even as I didn't know the original show.
Fun to hear the family-guy-father to the right of me guffaw, while fancy pearls-cladded woman to the left of me was yawning, checking her phone....
"My Neighbour Totoro" - the play
Very sceptical at first, because a) I don't care that much for this film and b) how to translate this to a stage...
but it worked surprisingly well!
(date is incorrect, I watched this a few months ago)
Spirited Away
Not nearly as good as the "My Neighbour Totoro" play, and I like that film a lot less!
boring, to be honest.
It tried to be the film. It failed.
Monday, 17 June 2024
Dan Carlin's "Hardcore History: Twilight of the Aesir"
So good. I need to find the earlier versions.
Inside Out 2
fun sequel, though not as original.
Although "sar-CHASM" made me laugh. And "stream of conscience", and "brain storm"
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets
Luc Besson, following a French comic.
Very Besson like in its visuals, and story-like it's ok, bit meh. Enjoyable if you're tired.
Tuesday, 11 June 2024
Frank Figliuzzi - "Long Haul"
Long haul truckers being serial killers.
The tone it's written in, is not great. Very heavy and portentious.
It's the will and the thrill to load faster, stop less, keep driving with a taped hose, push the envelope of remaining fuel in hopes of the reward that comes with the next load. There's a truck phrase that embodies the spirit: "Risk it for the biscuit"
Hunts Points is home to one of the largest food-distribution facilities in the world, with hundreds of acres making up the Hunts Points Cooperative Market.
There was more to reefer trucking than simply steering a rolling refrigerator. That's because the driver became a part of the ripening process. Dale received daily instructions to carefully adjust the temperature so his tomatoes - or whatever fruits or veggies he hauled - would appropriately ripen as they rambled across the country.
"The things that they were communicating wasn't through actual words," she said. "It was through different emojis and they meant different things. So if we take our child's phone and we're trying to look through it, do we always know what that fully means?"
Lauren Collins - "The Hottest Restaurant in France Is an All-You-Can-Eat Buffet"
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/04/08/les-grands-buffets-and-the-art-of-all-you-can-eat
The writer André Borel d’Hauterive once attempted a taxonomy of eaters: the gastronome (appreciates good food and wine and partakes reasonably), the gourmand (prefers quantity to quality), the friand (has a sweet tooth), the goinfre (eats enthusiastically to excess), the ventru (“makes a God of his stomach”), the glouton (dessert comes and he has no idea what he’s eaten), the goulu (dessert comes and he has no idea how much he’s eaten).
Christian Donlan - "The beauty and drama of video games and their clouds"
https://www.eurogamer.net/the-beauty-and-drama-of-video-games-and-their-clouds
Secret Knowledge, a book about looking twice and noticing what nobody else has spotted,
Andrew Chapman - "Insatiable: A Life Without Eating"
https://longreads.com/2024/04/18/crohns-life-without-eating/
During digestion, physiological responses are triggered in the brain by the vagus nerve, contributing to the feeling of fullness. Hormonal signals also act on the brain: leptin, a hormone produced by fat cells, sends signals to the hypothalamus to inhibit hunger. In patients on TPN or enteral nutrition, leptin does increase after infusions, but it doesn’t appear to be well correlated with decreased hunger.
While the hormones and neural signals are crucial to satiation, so is the sensory experience that takes place during the first phase of digestion—the cephalic phase—which begins at the sight of food. The pleasure that we take during this phase appears to be important to feeling satisfied. Monkeys on TPN continued to eat real food even when their caloric needs were met. Studies in healthy humans found that people on TPN reported being as hungry as those injected with only lactated Ringer’s, a solution designed to replenish electrolytes and fluid rather than calories. I asked an on-call gastroenterologist once what I could do for the hunger.
Chewing food, even without swallowing, helps to activate the cephalic phase, triggering a partial sense of satiation.
The 36 participants were underfed until they lost 25% of their body weight. As the experiment progressed, Ancel Keys, the nutritionist running the study, noticed odd psychological effects. The participants became increasingly focused on food, collecting recipes, and taking down pin-ups of women to hang pictures of food. One even decided he would change careers and become a chef. After the study, most participants gorged themselves long after their weight returned to normal.
Angélica Gorodischer - "Kalpa Imperial" (translated by Ursula K. Le Guin)
story-teller style of a kingdom, a city, of centuries, of what happened. Sometimes zooming out, less interesting, sometimes zooming in.
And then the woman who had been empress died and was buried in the Garden of the Dead, and the emperor shut himself up in her apartments, where he was more comfortable, having at least a decent bed to sleep in, and where he was alone. Fewer and fewer functionaries came to see him. They were afraid of him. It got so they sent one man with messages from all the others, and finally not even that: they left notices about this and that in front of the door. A few hours later, they'd find the emperor's decrees and orders in the same place. Fear is contagious. Soon the whole Empire trembled just at the title, not even the name, of the man locked in the innermost room of the palace, at whose feet blood flowed as easily as water in a river.
He just stood there because he didn't know what else to say to them. To escape from the Protocol was thrilling, and he'd had a wonderful time the day before, but today our young prince realized that it might be dangerous, too. Yes, dangerous: think a little, if you're capable of thought, and you'll see that it's safer to obey a law however stupid it may be than to act freely; because to act freely, unless you're as wicked as certain emperors, is to seek a just law; and if you make a mistake, you've taken the first step towards power, which is what destroys men.
Indian music suggestions
Dil Se Re - Title Track
https://youtu.be/U3hZW62-KGA?si=5vN75REiN-Rtp8KX
Ranbir Kapoor - Sadda Haq
https://youtu.be/p9DQINKZxWE?si=_QKmGrCmVlxd7ISB
A. R. Rahman - Dil Se Re (Berklee Indian Ensemble Cover)
https://youtu.be/qH002u7BRx0?si=H_EvUXyVI5DFuwlJ
Bodkin
Fun enough show about three people making a true crime podcast in Ireland.
Not bad soundtrack, particularly
* The Scratch - "Another round" – great drinking song
* The Murder Capital - "Don't Cling To Life"
Boy Swallows Universe
Series about a boy and his initially silent brother slowly getting pulled into the drugs world of their step dad.
Good soundtrack too, particularly
* Mattiel - "Count your blessings"
Saturday, 25 May 2024
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