Ukraine voted today

And what a better way to tell others how you voted but wearing the appropriate pair of shoes!...


Kitsch has no limit in Ukraine...

Чей-то День Варенья

What we should eat (I do!)

Marcel Marceau est mort...

A funny clip

some excerpts from a new BBC series "DogFace". BRILLIANT!
Clicking a thumbnail will open a video clip a new window

Clip 1

Clip 2

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NYT: Israeli Fascination with Nazi Porn

By ISABEL KERSHNER
JERUSALEM — It was one of Israel’s dirty little secrets. In the early 1960s, as Israelis were being exposed for the first time to the shocking testimonies of Holocaust survivors at the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a series of pornographic pocket books called Stalags, based on Nazi themes, became best sellers throughout the land. Read in secret by a generation of pubescent Israelis, often the children of survivors, the Stalags were named for the World War II prisoner-of-war camps in which they were set. The books told perverse tales of captured American or British pilots being abused by sadistic female SS officers outfitted with whips and boots. The plot usually ended with the male protagonists taking revenge, by raping and killing their tormentors.
After decades in dusty back rooms and closets, the Stalags, a peculiar Hebrew concoction of Nazism, sex and violence,
are re-emerging in the public eye. And with them comes a rekindled debate about the cultural representation here of Nazism and the Holocaust, and whether they have been unduly mixed in with a kind of sexual perversion and voyeurism that has permeated even the school curriculum. “I realized that the first Holocaust pictures I saw, as one who grew up here, were of naked women,” said Ari Libsker, whose documentary film “Stalags: Holocaust and Pornography in Israel” had
its premiere at the Jerusalem Film Festival in July and is to be broadcast in October and shown in movie theaters. “We were in elementary school,” he noted. “I remember how embarrassed we were.” The Stalags were practically the only pornography available in the Israeli society of the early 1960s,which was almost puritanical. They faded out almost as suddenly as they had appeared. Two years after the first edition was snatched up from kiosks around the central bus station in Tel Aviv, an Israeli court found the publishers guilty of disseminating pornography.
The most famous Stalag, “I Was Colonel Schultz’s Private Bitch,”was deemed to have crossed all the lines of acceptability, prompting the police to try to hunt every copy down. The Stalags went out of print and underground, circulating in specialty secondhand bookstores and among furtive groups of collectors. Mr. Libsker’s 60-minute documentary puts the Stalags under a spotlight for the first time and exposes some uncomfortable truths. One is that the Stalags were a distinctly Israeli genre, created by Israeli publishers and written by Israeli authors, although they had masqueraded as translations from English andwerewritten in the first person as if they were genuine memoirs.
Until the Eichmann trial began in 1961, the voices of the Holocaust had hardly been heard in Israel. In the movie, thepublisher of the first Stalag, Ezra Narkis, acknowledges that it was the trial, in all its sensational and often gory detail, that gave momentum to the genre. More provocatively, the movie contends that Stalag pornography was but a popular extension of the writings of K. Tzetnik, the first author to tell the story of Auschwitz in Hebrew and a hero of the mainstream Holocaust literary canon. K. Tzetnik was a pseudonym for Yehiel Feiner De-Nur. The alias, short for the German for concentration camper, was meant to represent all survivors,a kind of Holocaust everyman. One of K. Tzetnik’s biggest literary successes, “Doll’s House,” published in 1953, told the story of a character purporting to be the author’s sister, serving the SS as a sex slave in Block 24, the notorious Pleasure Block in Auschwitz.
Though a Holocaust classic, many scholars now describe it as pornographic and likely made up. Mr.Libsker, 35,himself the grandson of Holocaust survivors, contends that it is the mixture of “horror, sadism and pornography” that serves to perpetuate the memory of the Holocaust in the Israeli consciousness to this day.

Made in China...

This is how a Chinese toy is being tested for inflammability by the customs officers ....

Diane Ducruet

a very interesting photographer - Diane Ducruet. Here are two samples of her projects. Please visit her website http://www.dididuc.com/ to see more of her astonishing work!

Dialogues

Passengers 2006

One says that things have neither heart nor soul.
Nevertheless, as soon as they are approached, they transform themselves and tell stories as if they had been charged with a special mission.
They gaze at us, we are covering them with our good intentions, they become commodities. They are taking or losing value, turning our lust on or off …A genius would be perhaps a Pygmalion inversed : He would transform a person or an animal into such a perfect object, that we would never know whether they were beings or things…
The endless turnover of the labels would be the major art : everybody entering in the ring in order to see themselves as masterpieces…Nobody would be able to tell whether men are dancing with a thing or a person. We would not talk, forever looking at each other, the reflection of lamps in the partner’s eyes would be the only thing to see.
We would finally get rid of the others and be free of human complications; We would become some gods exhibited in front of other divinities, our appearences squashing any kind of talk or seductions. We would be the strongest, victors with the victors as the only rule. Our world looking empty underneath and above itself.
Forever divinised, trusting in our extraordinary exchange-value for some more and more expressive money, we would organize silent ceremonies, striking poses and staking our territories. The infinite precautions in placing mirrors which could reflect ourselves, showing the precise powerfulness of our image, would be rewarded. We would only be born to be and our triumph would exempt us from learning sciences and practicing virtue. We would have no gender, or there would be just one left, Medusa’s. Alone or amongst billions, we would be identical, and where ever we would be, it would be always in the same place, eminently spectacular to ourselves.
The revenge of a vengeful god.

Rugby

Le joueur écossais Rory Lamont récupère dans de l’eau glacée au lendemain du match Ecosse-Portugal, lundi 10 septembre. Les agences de presse AFP, AP et Reuters ont conclu ce lundi un accord avec le comité d’organisation de la Coupe du monde de rugby sur la diffusion sur Internet des vidéos tournées pendant la compétition. Le comité a accepté de retirer les restrictions qu’il avait posées aux principales agences d’information, limitant à trois minutes par jour la durée totale des vidéos les jours sans match. Les agences pourront couvrir l’événement selon leurs règles éditoriales. Cet accord intervient après celui trouvé sur les photos juste avant le match d’ouverture, vendredi 7 septembre

Did you know that over 70 channels that are devoted to sports in the USA, none, not even one of them, broadcasts the Rugby World Cup? Amazing. This is how a rugby player recuperates after the game by staying in the iced water...

Turgenev at sea...

from a tribute to Joseph Conrad by Brian Thompson
In May 1838, the Tsar Nicholas I, in transit from St Petersburg to Lubeck, caught fire just outside Lubeck's harbour suburb of Travemunde. "We must send a courier to the Emperor!" a hysterical Russian general cried as the ship began to list. The carriages of the rich were lashed to the deck: his was burning as briskly as any.
In the melee, a nineteen-year-old student on his way to university in Berlin a giant of a boy with a disappointingly squeaky voice -offered one of the Danish sailors 10,000 roubles to be saved at the expense of others.
It was not so much his life the young Ivan Turgenev was trying to save as his freedom. Just at the very moment he had unshackled himself from an oppressive mother and a moribund Russian society, fate (or chance) had laid him by the heels.
When the uproar first began, he was playing cards for money in the saloon. As the tables shot across the floor, it dawned on him that for all the poetry he had read and all the literary ambitions that buzzed in his head, he could not swim.
However badly Turgenev actually behaved -and who does well in such circumstances? -the incident was magnified back in St Petersburg as a tale of detestable cowardice, an accusation that dogged him all his life. (Dostoevsky used a version of the incident in The Possessed.) It was vexing, but it did not disturb by a single ripple Turgenev's famously assured sense of self. Forty-five years after the event, he wrote his own account of the fire at sea. Wracked by cancer of the spine and with only a few weeks to live, he characteristically represented this ancient disgrace as farce, though one lit by flames fierce enough to redden the sea. His account was dictated, for he no longer had the power to hold and guide a pen. There is something especially moving in this detail, for the tale was being spun by the man he had become since being saved: that is, by the supreme storyteller and a literary hero to his times. The incident was depicted as farce because at heart all human experience is so.
"A Fire at Sea" was almost the last thing Turgenev wrote. He died two months later, in September 1883, in a little town outside Paris, located on a bend of the Seine where it sweeps north for a while. He carried into posterity as much accumulated love and respect as any writer of the century.

Where In The World I've Been So Far

Just read

REVIEW QUOTES:
"A piece of invention as original as any of Tokien's or C. S. Lewis'."
--New Statesman
"One of those absolutely unclassifiable beauties that come along every so often, just as you've about given up hope of ever again finding a new book with a human voice behind it and a way of looking at the world that hasn't been predigested and pre-read...I wish I'd written it. It's one of a kind, and those are the only sort of books that mean anything to me."
--Peter S. Beagle, author of The Last Unicorn

"Mr. Hoban is unclassifiable, thank goodness. His narrative is so minutely and compellingly realistic that after a time you cease to notice that he has stood reality on its head."
--The Sunday Times (London)

"First novels of outstanding quality are so rare that they call for a certain amount of celebration. One's enjoyment of the novel derives from Mr. Hoban's unusually vivid imagination, his immensely striking use of words to describe the being-with-the-lion feeling in a world where there are no lions. And, finally, most welcome of all, his use of these powerful images in conjunction with a sense of the ridiculous which verges on the total."
--Auberon Waugh, The Spectator
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
MEMORABLE LINES AND PASSAGES:
There is only one place, and that place is time. (p. 51)
"Why did [my father] never talk to me? Why did he always seem to be talking to a space that I hadn't moved into? Why was he always holding up an empty suit of clothes for me to jump into? He talked to clothes I never did put on." (p. 135)

There were times when it seemed to him that the different parts of him were not all under the same management. (p. 75)

...'I am glad to hear that,' said Jachin-Boaz, 'because the past is the father of the present, just as I am your father. And if the past cannot teach the present and the father cannot teach the son, then history need not have bothered to go on, and the world has wasted a great deal of time.'
Boaz-Jachin looked at the maps on the walls. 'The past is not here,' he said. 'There is only the present, in which are things left behind by the past.' (p. 13)

and my personal favorite:
"It's dangerous to have balls, but there's something nice about it"...

Sarkoleon I

Erotic Lashings

From a review of Niklaus Largier's "In Praise of the Whip. A Cultural History of Arousal" Zone Books 2007 by Bettina Bildhauer

Hurting oneself goes against all basic common sense. It is hard to understand, and easy to mock or deride. Images of madmen, masochists, or monks beating themselves are stock figures of human stupidity, decadence, or aberration. This is because common sense, as social consensus, has a vested interest in human integrity and intactness, and self-harm offends its most central value. If we want to understand why humans hurt themselves, we have to use something other than common sense. In his book In Praise of the Whip, Niklaus Largier uses the case study of whipping to do so from a historical perspective.
As the title and subtitle already indicate, whipping for Largier is an example of a technique of hurting oneself to induce a state of intense excitement or ecstasy that transcends language and the body... Moreover, the flagellated people aim for their bodies to become texts in various ways, to be seen and read, either as a realization of Scripture or as pornography.
...he sees a clear shift around 1700, when the interpretation of the ecstasy of whipping changed from a predominantly ascetic to a predominantly erotic and medical one. Eighth century hermits might have been the first to practise self-whipping, although the evidence is unreliable. Voluntary self-flagellation first became common in the eleventh and twelfth centuries in the monastic orders, where whipping had previously been used only as a punishment. The eleventh-century Benedictine writer St Peter Damian played a crucial role in popularizing this practice. It was incorporated into rituals of penitence and confession, of praying or singing the Psalter, but also into private devotion. The late Middle Ages, Largier's specialist area, get the most expansive and most sensitive treatment -and perhaps here, whipping came closest to being part of mainstream culture.
In 1260/61, flagellation became a mass movement. The city of Perugia, perceiving itself to be in crisis, officially suspended work for a month in order to allow the citizens to repent and whip themselves. A procession went to Bologna, and flagellant processions soon started up throughout Europe, as people everywhere took out a month or longer to repent in this extreme manner.
A 1703 treatise by Jacques Boileau first expressed the fear that flagellation might have erotic undertones, and from then on, whipping was always suspected of inducing sexual arousal. Openly pornographic texts, like those of the Marquis de Sade and other French eighteenth-century writers, continued the tradition of allowing images and performances -and Largier here counts Sade's evocatively described tableaux vivants among them -to do what linear narratives cannot, and feed into critique of the Enlightenment's overemphasis on reason....

Read the complete text of the review here

Sergey Maximishin: Photograper par excellence

Please visit the website of this amazing Russian photographer - his images are at once poetic and sly, hip and old-fashioned,tragic and comic www.maximishin.com

NYT: Gut Feelings

Gut Instincts Should Guide Our Decisions, Scientist Says
By CLAUDIA DREIFUS
Two years ago, when Malcolm Gladwell published his best-selling book “Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking,” readers throughout the world were introduced to the ideas of Gerd Gigerenzer, a German social psychologist. Dr.Gigerenzer, the director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, is known in social science circles for his breakthrough studies on the nature of intuitive thinking. Before his research, this was a topic often dismissed as superstition. Dr. Gigerenzer, 60, was able to show how aspects of intuition work and how ordinary people successfully
use it in modern life. And now he has written his own book, “Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious,” which he hopes will sell as well as “Blink.” “I liked Gladwell’s book,”Dr.Gigerenzer said during a visit to New York City in July. “He’s popularized the issue, including my research.”
Q:O.K., let’s start with basics: what is a gut feeling?
A:It’s a judgment that is fast. It comes quickly into a person’s consciousness. The person doesn’t know why they have this feeling. Yet, this is strong enough to make an individual act on it. What a gut instinct isnot isacalculation.You do not fully know where it comes from. My research indicates that gut feelings are based on simple rules of thumb, what we psychologists term“heuristics.” These take advantage of certain capacities of the brain that have come down to us through time, experience and evolution. Gut instincts often rely on simple cues in the environment. In most situations,
when people use their instincts, they are heeding these cues.
Q:In modern society, gut thinking has a bad reputation. Why is that?
A:It is not thought to be rational. One of the founders of your country, Benjamin Franklin, suggested to his nephew that when
he made important life decisions, he should do it like a bookkeeper — list all the pros and cons and then make the decision,
after weighing everything. That is the classical rational approach.
Q:I make my decisions that way. What’s wrong with it?
A: In some situations, that demands too much information. Plus, it’s slow. When a person relies on their gut feelings and
uses the instinctual rule of thumb “go with your first best feeling and ignore everything else,” it can permit them to
outperform the most complex calculations.
Q:Where can gut instincts fail?
A:Here’s an example: after 9/11, many Americans stopped traveling in airplanes and drove on highways instead. I looked at the data, and it turned out that
in the year after the attacks, highway fatalities increased by an estimated 1,500 people. They had listened to their
fear,andsomore died on the road.These kinds of fatalities are easily avoided.
Q:Some of your critics say that gut instincts just aren’t scientific.
What’s your answer?
A:We study these things, where intuition is good and where it’s not. One should also not overlook that in science itself, you need intuitions. All successful research scientists function, to a degree, on gut instincts. They must make leaps, whether they have all the data or not.
Q:Do you think of yourself as intuitive or rational?
A:Both. In my scientific work, I have hunches. I can’t explain always why I think a certain path is the right way, but I need to trust it and go ahead. I also have the ability to check these hunches and find out what they are about. That’s the science part.Now, in private life, I rely on instinct. For instance, when I first met my wife, I didn’t do computations. Nor did she.

Just read...

Il y a beaucoup de façons de lire ce livre. Il peut apparaître, successivement et au choix, comme un aperçu de la carrière de Chateaubriand, comme une étude sur Hortense Allart, comme une contribution à la vie et à l'oeuvre de Julien Pontarlier. Comme un roman d'aventures, comme un roman policier, comme un roman d'espionnage. Comme une sorte de poème en prose sur les problèmes les plus généraux. Comme une histoire d'amour. Comme une quête des origines, comme une introduction à l'eschatologie. Comme plusieurs autres ouvrages encore et, en fait, comme presque tous, ou plutôt comme tous, que la seule idée de Dieu suffit d'ailleurs largement à couvrir et à justifier. A plusieurs égards et à l'extrême rigueur, comme une autobiographie, non seulement de l'auteur, ce qui est assez courant, mais, chose plus rare, du lecteur.

In Memoriam: Pavarotti 1935-2007

New record: Paris-London in 2hr 3m 39sec

L’Eurostar a relié, mardi 4 septembre, Paris à Londres en deux heures, trois
minutes et trente-neuf secondes, nouveau record pour le train à grande
vitesse mis en service en 1994 entre la France et la Grande-Bretagne.

Macau: Ruins of St. Paul

Macau: The City

Hong Kong: Lamma Island

Hong Kong: Kowloon Park

Hong Kong: Subway