awareness Archivi - Keep Calm and Drink Coffee

WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TODAY TO EARN YOUR PLACE IN THIS CROWDED WORLD?

Jan 12, 2022 | BOOKS, MOVIES, BOOKS, MOVIES, MUSIC, MUSIC

What have you done today to earn your place in this crowded world?

The character played by John Cusack asks this question to everyone in Utopia.

In naming Utopia my first association of thought is Thomas More.

Among other things, remaining in the field of cinematographic fiction, Thomas More is mentioned in Leonardo’s Cinderella played by Drew Barrymore, for example.

But I discovered that Utopia is also a movie about Australian Aborigines, and seeing the painful trailer let think that situation has stopped at the time as told by Baz Luhrmann.

Utopia however is in any expression of thought.

It is art, as described in this comment, it’s a song by Björk, it is not for The Offspring, it’s even a video game.

Utopia is a controversial Channel 4 series then revised for an Amazon production by an exceptional showrunner: Gillian Flynn, author of Gone Girl and screenwriter by David Fincher, who appears in three different cameos, and disseminates various Easter eggs.

Utopia thus becomes a graphic novel. Viral …

A weird group of fans in search of this mysterious “comic” to be interpreted by riddles, find themselves catapulted into a reality that prefigures dystopia rather than Utopia.

Comics to tell the truth not really, it is a series of drawings by the artist Joao Ruas: some of the inspirations behind his work are the dawn of mankind, folklore, magical realism, the concept of wabi-sabi (侘寂) and human conflict.

Gillian Flynn, in an interview with the New York Times said: “I think it’s a Rorschach test … It’s a show designed to let you find what you want from it, and have different points of view, which is exactly where we are right now.”

Speaking of points of view, John Cusack, in his first role in a series, plays Kevin Christie … but rather than my Agatha, it is inspired by well-known characters of a completely different genre.

Those who follow him have the opportunity to know how much John has a certain aversion to some of Mr. Christie’s alter egos, which is why it was a cathartic interpretation.

In his interview published by The Guardian in addition to defining himself a kind of Cassandra, he gave me an amazing ending!

Cusack rubs his tired eyes. He drinks from his big tin tankard of coffee. (!) Who knows, he says? “Maybe being outspoken hurts your career… I’m just aware it helps me sleep better at night, knowing that I wasn’t passive during this time.”

After all, isn’t such an awareness already a kind of Utopia for many of us?

How do you see Utopia?

An exceptional admirer saw Utopia like this:

Stephen King writes:
I’m loving UTOPIA, on Amazon Prime. Might not be everyone’s cup of tea, given the times we’re living in, but it has the slow build to full steam that I associate with page-turning novels. Horrifying, violent, and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny.

And what song goes with the trailer?

It’s the end of the world as we know it.
R.E.M.

But this world, how should it be earned every day in your opinion?

I would rather ask: what have you done today to improve this world?

Even if to tell the truth I would be without answers …

MAYBE MAKING CASTLES IN THE AIR IS NOT WRONG

May 16, 2020 | ECONOMY, ITALY, WORK, WORLD

We have had evidence of how our custom can easily collapse like a house of cards.
Have you ever thought about it in these terms?
In a whisper the daily habits went from being routine in some cases even the subject of complaints, to being a precious certainty that we would like to have again.
In this, I believe we can say that we are united on a global level, although everyone has their own story, everyone walks their own path, and everyone has their own habits.
Habits that for some had perhaps become heavy bricks like habituation, for others instead modular and elusive as sand, or, just like in the tale of the three houses, built with cards.
Cards that say who we are as documents or badges, cards that frame us, allow us access, lead us, regulate us, finance us: cards, tickets, maps, contracts, banknotes.
Cards that represent our actions, our life.
Cards that we accumulate, cards that we keep in balance.
Or balances that keep us standing.
Technically to build a castle too new or perfect cards slip: there is need of “lived” ones.
Cards that have played, cards that have been held in the hands. Hands that must be firm.
Hands that can never shake, because balance cannot be held in hand.
And never before have we had concrete and disturbing proof of this.
The question is: what exactly do we learn from this demonstration?
Who or what really has power over so many “houses” and how could we let them fall in the sudden way we witnessed?
We now have fewer cards available to rebuild, and we will have to adopt different “customs”, which will not be chosen.
Or maybe we should take the opportunity to learn to question, to ask ourselves questions, to consider all the hypotheses, always.
In the Operette Morali Giacomo Leopardi asks:
“… why is any custom, even if corrupt and bad, difficult to discern from nature?”
The answer seems to be Erasmus of Rotterdam:
“There is no practice, however infamous, however atrocious, that does not impose itself, if it has the custom on its side.”
Custom as well as a constant way of proceeding, is also a source of law. The unwritten source for excellence, which consists of two elements: one of a material type, that is, the reiteration of a certain behavior by a community; the other, of a subjective type although objectively verifiable, is instead the widespread belief that that behavior is, not only morally or socially, but legally mandatory.
So we should consider rebuilding on some unusual bases and starting first of all from the awareness of what is the true important essence of our life.

TIME IS A VALUABLE THING

Mar 24, 2020 | MUSIC, ROCK

I go on thanking for the comments and this time I take this opportunity to reply from here to Duncan Weick: this blog is a gift from my husband and the structure was developed by Zeus.
I try to write and use the images that I hope will make sense.
In this regard, I would like to take this opportunity to talk about inspiration: is there anything in particular that facilitates writing, or in general the creation of something that you are passionate about?
What does arouse a state of mind in you, thanks to which you can feel in the right mood, feel at peace with yourself, if not with the world?
My inspiration almost always comes from music.
Rock, to be exact.
“Play it fuckin ‘loud!” as Bob Dylan taught us.
Power. For me, absolutely energy. But it is impossible to give a definition, to harness in a concept, to circumscribe in a description, because basically it is the absence of barriers.
An idea that clashes a lot with this particular moment in which we are actually “enclosed”.
This is why I thought of the phrase “time is a precious thing“: time is not precluded, indeed, now we could say that we have a perception of it dilated, at times perhaps impending.
“Watch it fly by as the pendulum swings” continues Mike Shinoda when he sings in a crescendo that I perceive as a fantastic invitation to shout.
The magic of some songs is precisely eclecticism, and the power to adapt multifaceted to multiple visions and situations, and in this case too, obviously the interpretations are different.
Personally, my favorite one is relevant to the awareness of time. Concept in turn not entirely universal in the sense that its perception is variable according to the point of view, but more generally, I consider the pendulum symbol linked to the most modern society.
Now that pendulum is particularly dominating all of us who are stopped, and who should make serious and necessary reflections, I believe.
But without going to talk about atomization, I would remain in the simplicity of our cup: will your conception of time change from now on?
Or … in the end, it doesn’t even matter?