We often repeat that reading takes us far away, in this case, the journey already starts with the title.
You know I never anticipate what one will discover when reading, so I ask you: what does your ‘far away’ correspond to?
A place?
Or a concept, perhaps: something far away from you.
You can create distance in space, in time, in the heart, in the mind.
Johann Wolfang Goethe left us this reflection: One never goes so far as when one doesn’t know where one is going.
Do you agree?
I often remind of Shrek and the Kingdom of Far Far Away.
Jessica also mentions Shrek but for a different reason, I still took it as a sign, a kind of affinity.
In particular, I appreciated the passages where the book dwells on the description of the environment with the attention of someone who cares about it.
Jessica then keeps the focus on female strength, declined in the variations in which it can make a difference.
She herself describes a good book as a bridge to other worlds and a way to live more than one life at the same time.
I will leave you one of her introductions by subscribing to it:
To tell the truth, for me the beauty of presents is the search, the moment when you think of the most suitable thing for the person who will receive it, the instant when you look at the eyes, hoping it will be a surprise, hoping to see joy.
But I also have been so lucky to receive gifts of the kind that
The excellence of a gift lies in its appropiateness rather than in its value. Charles Dudley Warner
So here it is:
the illuminated sign
which my husband has already strategically placed in my reading corner.
Pachinko パチンコ is the name of something that is perhaps less understandable to Westerners, but only because we have other manifestations of alienation and ludopathy.
Pachinko パチンコcould be synonymous with mockery.
Verbal Kint taught us that the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he did not exist. And like that… he is gone.
Even gambling in Japan “does not exist” because it is banned. And it disappears under the name “entertainment” definition by which Pachinko is classified.
Pachinko is a hybrid game, we could say it is the representation of contamination: halfway between a pinball machine and a slot machine.
The trick is precisely the balls that from the game become the very object of winning but cannot be exchanged for money.
By playing Pachinko you can only get prizes of various kinds: chocoloate bars, pens, lighters, candy, T-shirts, cosmetics, bicycles, shopping vouchers, up to so-called “special” prizes i.e. silver or gold objects enclosed in plastic bags.
I found precise regulations regarding the installation of these phantom vertical pinball machines, but the risk of addiction?
These Pachinko Parlors are places where people are subjected to extremely high noise levels and bright lights.
The players appear to be sitting helpless, completely estranged, as if without identity in the flow of these slow, mechanical movements that cancel out time.
I am very struck by the slogan of a company that runs Pachinko Parlors:
Lost is an entirely unreleased track that anticipates the planned April release of the 20th anniversary celebration edition of Meteora.
2003: after Hybrid Theory, Linkin Park unveils Meteora and still do not know that their work will not be a meteor and will consecrate them to music history.
I don’t know if in the days during which the countdown appeared before the release of Lost you also tried to solve: clicking on the CD case a word game to guess appeared.
Cute, right?
Overall Lost was really a surprise, and honestly hearing Chester Bennington‘s voice in a totally unreleased track triggered a number of seesaw thoughts for me.
Among other things, the lyrics are particularly striking:
… a scar somewhere down inside of me Something I can not repair ...
… I’m trapped in yesterday Where the pain is all I know …
… I’m lost in these memories …
But then, considering the official tweet set on the profile, I agreed to consider Lost as a “time capsule.”
In a less metaphorical sense, now the term time capsule is used to refer to an external hard drive for wireless storage, but it also remains the classic “time capsule” we are used to seeing in American movies and beyond.
For example, there is a capsule in the Well Room of the Torre Ghirlandina at the Civic Museum of Modena, which in this video tells us various interesting facts about it
What would you like to put in a time capsule?
According to the International Time Capsule Society there would be more than 10 thousand time capsules in the world. Only one in a thousand is found.
On Focus you can see a gallery with the nine most wanted capsules in the world.
Linkin Park, however, made us find their time, their sense, and they put Anime in it.
Anime アニメ as Kasabake explains on the blog As Circles in the Water comes from “animēshon,” Japanese transliteration of the English word “animation.”
Unfortunately I have huge gaps in the subject, although I find the word Anime poetic and intense, maybe you would like to add something about this wonderful subject?
In the meantime, enjoy your viewing and listening
In an interview Mike Shinoda stated that Lost was not included on the Meteora album because of the sound being too similar to Numb.
West Side Story was born as a play on Broadway and Jack Gottlieb tells us how it was conceived by drawing inspiration from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and how Jerome Robbins had initially imagined Juliet as a Jewish girl and Romeo as an Italian Catholic. The action, set during the Easter / Passover season, was supposed to take place on the Lower East Side of New York City. So the title could have been EAST Side Story or Gangway.
I find it totally understandable that Steven Spielberg said it was the toughest film of his career.
I started looking at it together with all the positive assumptions, and with all the curiosity to find out how the arduous challenge had been solved.
The beginning shows the imminent demolition of the neighborhood and, personally, I interpreted it as the metaphor of a breaking wrecking ball but not about the past.
Time is to be demolished.
Because despite all the years that have passed, studded with dramatic events, it is as if history had been written today.
And Rita Moreno becomes like a fulcrum of human suffering, around which the repeated cyclically recurring pain manifests itself despite the passage of time.
In this video she receives the Oscar for the interpretation of the character of Anita in 1962
And following is the post with which she congratulates Ariana DeBose for the recent victory for having played the role of Anita, differently and yet with equal effectiveness.
For Rita Moreno in Spielberg’s film the role of Valentina was created: Doc’s widow, who helps and supports Tony after his misadventures with justice, but in various interviews she has been defined as the “mother” of West Side Story for how she advised, assisted, supervised tirelessly.
And obviously all of this entered my heart.
Not to mention her iconic joke for me: Tony asks her to translate “forever” because she wants to declare herself to Maria in Spanish and she, frightened by that tragically unreal idea of absolute, replies something like “why don’t I just say I’d like to have a coffee with you?”
Eh!
Undoubtedly, it is still an important statement, right!?
And while drinking your coffee, I once again recommend you the detailed and professional analysis of Matavitatau.
Is there a particular song you prefer from the West Side Story soundtrack?
They are all songs destined to stay in your mind once you listen to them, but, just to name three sensationally super famous, are you more for Tonight, Maria, or America?
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