i have been a fan of my friend zachary's work for a long time. he recently graduated from art center college of design in pasadena and is now living in berkeley. you can see his drawings at giant robot in brooklyn from march 17 until april 18.
"that pleasure which is at once the most pure, the most elevating and the most intense, is derived, i maintain, from the contemplation of the beautiful"...edgar allen poe
"there he stopped and leaned against the parapet to catch his breath. his legs were aching. below, the moscow river moved its slow, dense, brown waters, and from their depths emerged a flimsy upside-down city that existed only at night, created by a thousand shimmering intertwinings of streetlights, headlights, floodlights. the walls, churches, the bell towers of the underwater city trembled with a desire to break free, to float away with the current, to leave the oppressing, crowded, dangerous moscow far, far behind; but the night held them firmly, and they stayed on forever tethered to their places by infinite golden chain of reflections. other things were luckier in their flight -- a dead branch, a billowing white scarf, a fleet of cigarette butts, a gasoline stain widening in the beam of light...unable to tear his eyes away, sukhanov looked at the rainbow-colored film spreading across the water. the invitation burned in his pocket, and that unnameable feeling was beating its great black wings in the hollow of his soul..."
"They began to come across from time to time small cairns of rock by the roadside. They were signs in gypsy language, lost patterns. The first he'd seen in some while, common in the north, leading out of the looted and exhausted cities, hopeless messages to loved ones lost and dead. By then, all stores of food had been given out and murder was everywhere upon the land. The world soon to be largely populated by men who would eat your children in front of your eyes and the cities themselves held by cores of blackened looters who tunneled among the ruins and crawled from the rubble white of tooth and eye carrying charred and anonymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell. The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor and the cold crept down and the dark came early and the scavengers passing down the steep canyons with their torches trod silky holes in, and drifted ash that closed behind them silently as eyes. Out on the roads the pilgrims sank down and fell over and died and the bleak and shrouded earth went trundling past the sun and returned again as trackless and as unremarked as the path of any nameless sisterworld in the ancient dark beyond."
the lives of others...i saw this film for the second time tonight, and was blown away even more this time. i cant find anything that i dont like about this movie. the acting is amazing, the writing is smart, dramatic, and funny, the music is beautiful and complements the film - even at times adds a sense of irony to the story. its amazing because the ddr oppressed so many people - even the members of the stasi. one of the main characters, hauptmann gerd wiesler, is hired to maintain constant surveillance over actress christa-maria sieland and writer georg dreyman. although wiesler has control over the fate of sieland and dreyman, he, too, becomes a victim of the stasi. wiesler is lonely, isolated, and controlled by the higher powers at the stasi, and because of his sadness and isolation, he ultimately begins living vicariously through the lives of the people he is watching. he evolves from being a dominating professor and interrogator to an individual who gains empathy for and experiences emotion through the relationship of sieland and dreyman. wiesler isnt the only stasi police member who is victimized by the system, the building he lives in is full of stasi - all of them are frequented by prostitutes who fleetingly provide them with a sense of perverse motherly comfort and physical satisfaction. the lives of others covers so much ground, it is challenging to take it all in upon the first viewing.
- paulo coehlo
