Nepenthe

"The past is an immense area of stony ground that many people would like to drive across as if it were a motorway, while others move patiently from stone to stone, lifting each one because they need to know what lies beneath. Sometimes scorpions crawl out or centipedes, fat white caterpillars or ripe chrysalises, but it's not impossible that, at least once, an elephant might appear. . ." When he died last month, the man who wrote those words in The Elephant's Journey , José Saramago , was an old man, 87 years old. His preoccupations and politics and passions might seem to belong to a past age: a diehard communist impatient of dictators, subversive of orthodoxies, disrespectful of international corporations, peasant-born in a marginal country and identifying himself always with the powerless, a radical who lived on into an age when even liberals are spoken of as leftist . . . But the still more intransigent radicalism of his art makes it impossible to di...

The Venice International Film Festival announced Monday morning that Julie Taymor’s The Tempest will close the fest, which runs September 1 through 11th. Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan is the opener. The $20-million indie-funded Miramax pick-up is finally coming out in December via Disney’s Touchstone label, which is fine with Taymor. At Cannes she said that the film wasn’t ready in May (Icon screened it in the Cannes market, though not for press) and would play the fall fest circuit. No matter how commercial Taymor’s latest Shakespeare adaptation turns out to be, with Helen Mirren as Prospera, Ben Whishaw as Ariel and Djiman Hounsou as Caliban, costumes (Oscar-winner Sandy Powell), cinematography (Stuart Dryburgh), production design (Mark Friedberg) and score (Elliot Goldenthal) should be factors in the Oscar mix. L.A. rocker Reeve Carney, who plays Peter Parker in Taymor’s Broadway musical adaptation of Spider-Man , stars in The Tempest as young Prince Ferdinand. TOH!

A whole Telegraph Gallery The sun is clouded by smoke from a forest fire raging near the village of Santa Maria da Feira

Check it on BoingBoing :) And yes, the Ghibli zoetrope, in dire need of a decent video on YouTube, Vimeo, anywhere...

In Lisbon, no less :-[ ) "No, it wasn't scary at all," the girl said as she chatted to her friend on her mobile. "The old horror films are so funny." Much of the packed house at Hackney Empire thought the same of Tod Browning's 1931 movie Dracula, screened to a live performance by the Kronos Quartet of Philip Glass 's score. There were no gasps of shock or horror (though one can imagine a 1930s audience recoiling at the more gruesome implications), only knowing chuckles and the occasional laugh out loud. Vampire films, through countless reincarnations right up to the current Twilight craze, have made the conventions of the Dracula legend – crucifixes, mirror tricks and stakes through the heart – all too familiar. But that becomes irrelevant when you experience this Dracula, an early talkie with no music, with Philip Glass's score. The live soundtrack gives the movie, nicely projected on a big screen above the musicians, instant gravit...

Author Tom McCarthy for The Guardian : There's a scene in Don Quixote where the deluded would-be knight is listening to fulling mills. This is not the famous windmill scene: in that one, the machines are clearly visible; this one, by contrast, takes place in pitch-black night. Quixote, struck by the mills' rhythmic metallic clankings, persuades himself that they are the half-articulated groans and snarls of monsters. He's wrong, of course: they're mills. But then again, perhaps, in the way madmen sometimes are, he's right. Just maybe, in the looping chains of broken syllables, the clashing metre of compounded phonemes, he's picking up a message, a weak signal slowly forming in time's static: an announcement, for those astute enough to hear, of a monstrous age of mechanised industry lurking in the night of the future. For centuries, literature has been haunted by technology. When Blake shudders in fearful awe before the tiger, don't be fool...

From the TLS : Sheila Rowbotham’s adventurous dreamers had marvellous names: Voltairine de Cleyre, Elsie Clews Parsons, Storm Jameson, Maggie Lena Walker, and Clementina Black. More familiar to most readers and writers of feminist histories are Frances E. Willard, Jane Addams, Mary Church Terrell, Octavia Hill and Henrietta Barnett. Rowbotham’s contribution is to demonstrate how both prominent and obscure women in the United States and Britain created new ways of being women. Between the 1880s and the 1920s, they challenged prevailing expectations about sexuality, living arrangements, paid work and motherhood. The American anarchist Voltairine de Cleyre, whose father named her after the Enlightenment philosopher, was an ardent proponent of free love. One should “never allow love to be vulgarized by the common indecencies of continuous close communication”, she maintained, nor was she keen on children, mocking the maternal instinct and defending the childless. Then there ...

Just The Facts A true graphic designer will be able to tell you the names of all the fonts used in the above image. A true graphic designer will have over 10 types of Helvetica available on their computer. In fact, a true graphic designer will have about 20 fonts on their computer that will be indiscernably different Read more: http://www.cracked.com/funny-5647-fonts/#ixzz0uOorW09M Cracked on Fonts In this modern day and age, a person's choice of font is as important as their dress-sense, their taste in music or their level of pendantry. It is a rare thing now that a person can reach the age of 21 without an acute sense of the appropriatness and application of fonts. Fonting Guidelines 1. Never mix serif and sans serif in a single document. Serifs are the little added bits of 'decoration' to a character - so Arial has practically no serifs, while Excalibur consists of little else. Mixing these two fundamen...

From Lapham's Quarterly , unmissable ;)

From The Guardian The modern twin-coil electromagnetic tattoo needle was patented in 1891 by one Samuel O'Riley (sometimes known as O'Reilly), an Irish-American tattooist working out of a barber's shop on Chatham Square in New York. It worked – and, for that matter, still works – essentially like a doorbell, with two coils of wire wrapped around an iron core, two points, and a bar across the top that plunges down when power is applied to the coils, breaking the circuit, then springs back up again to recommence the cycle. Imagine a sewing machine, without the thread. What this means now for Will Wright, a 30-year-old landscape gardener flat on his back on a reclining chair in a handsome brick building on High Wycombe high street, is that three fine steel needles are puncturing his skin roughly 150 times a second. That's just for the initial scratch outline of the red kite Wright is having across his stomach. Later, it'll be a pack of nine needles,...

A new computer program has quickly deciphered a written language last used in Biblical times—possibly opening the door to "resurrecting" ancient texts that are no longer understood, scientists announced last week. Created by a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the program automatically translates written Ugaritic, which consists of dots and wedge-shaped stylus marks on clay tablets. The script was last used around 1200 B.C. in western Syria . Written examples of this "lost language" were discovered by archaeologists excavating the port city of Ugarit in the late 1920s. It took until 1932 for language specialists to decode the writing. Since then, the script has helped shed light on ancient Israelite culture and Biblical texts. (Related: "Oldest Hebrew Text Is Evidence for Bible Stories?" ) Using no more computing power than that of a high-end laptop, the new program compared symbol and word frequencies and patterns in Ug...

See them all at Cracked ;)

Photos by Pedro Lobo ArchDaily

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