Monthly Archives: May 2012

Socrates Tried Again in Athens and Acquitted!

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Another ‘coin­ci­dence’ arised today. After writ­ing the arti­cle about Alan Turing’s ‘par­don’ ini­tia­tive yes­ter­day, I find today another attempt to put right what was done wrong but this time to Socrates. One con­victed of gross inde­cency and the other for cor­rupt­ing the youth. See any pat­tern here? Socrates was forced to drink a cup of cicuta infu­sion as the method of exe­cu­tion. The cause of death of Tur­ing was cyanide poi­son­ing (sui­cide), arguably from an apple found half-eaten beside his bed at the time.

In the spring of 399 B.C., Socrates con­fronted 500 Athe­ni­ans, cit­i­zens, judges and jurors, in his trial ini­ti­ated by the charges lev­eled at him by Mele­tus, Any­tos and Lycon. The trial began with a read­ing of the for­mal charges: “Socrates is a doer of evil, and cor­rupter of the youth, and he does not believe in the gods of the state, and he believes in other new divini­ties of his own.”

Last Fri­day the Onas­sis Cul­tural Cen­tre in Athens gave Socrates a new trial, assem­bling a panel of dis­tin­guished jurists from Europe and Amer­ica to reopen the case. This time the ver­dict was dif­fer­ent. The vote by the jury was a 5–5 tie, which meant Socrates was acquit­ted. The audience’s vote was more deci­sive: 5 to con­vict, 584 to acquit. Of course, it was a lit­tle late for Socrates.

This brings to mind a very reveal­ing para­graph I once read and have not been able to ever for­get and it goes as follows:

Plato painted a very remark­able pic­ture of his teacher Socrates, who is shown –in Plato’s own words– as boy crazy. When Socrates was in the com­pany of beau­ti­ful boys, he lost his senses. Some sort of mania (divine mad­ness) took pos­ses­sion of him and he was almost unable to resist it. He often com­plained about the fact that he was help­less towards ado­les­cents, and said that he could only cope with the sit­u­a­tion by ask­ing dif­fi­cult ques­tions to these beau­ti­ful boys and teach­ing them phi­los­o­phy. So, accord­ing to Plato, Socrates sub­li­mated his passion.

The video of the trial is avail­able and it lasts a lit­tle over four hours, if you want to see it, fol­low this link. Or stay with us and watch this doc­u­men­tary inspired and hosted by Alain de Bot­ton, based on his book The Con­so­la­tions of Philosophy.


This year marks the centenary of Alan Turing’s birth

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I can’t help using a pop­u­lar say­ing to start explain­ing how a feel about an arti­cle on BBC News regard­ing a call from Mem­ber of Par­la­ment Iain Stew­art to ‘par­don’ com­puter pio­neer Alan Tur­ing, so here it is: “L’enfer est plein de bonnes volon­tés et désirs”

Per­haps I am mis­in­ter­pret­ing the mean­ing of the word par­don here, so allow me to use some help from Merrian-Webster:

1: indul­gence
2: the excus­ing of an offense with­out exact­ing a penalty
3
a : a release from the legal penal­ties of an offense
b : an offi­cial war­rant of remis­sion of penalty
4: excuse or for­give­ness for a fault, offense, or discourtesy

I had also read an arti­cle not too long ago regard­ing an e-petition to grant Alan Tur­ing a for­mal par­don. This ini­tia­tives make me trem­ble with right­eous indig­na­tion. For­mer prime min­is­ter (Gor­don Brown) issued an offi­cial apol­ogy on behalf of the gov­ern­ment. So I don’t under­stand the need for a ‘Pardon’. That is one of the prob­lems with rep­re­sen­ta­tives and insti­tu­tions of ‘jus­tice’, they do not apol­o­gize, they grant ‘par­dons’, they were right all along, but they are so mag­nan­i­mous, they for­give our ‘sins’ but we bet­ter com­ply or else…

Tur­ing was arrested under the same law that was used to con­vict Oscar Wilde in 1895. He was con­victed of gross inde­cency fol­low­ing a rela­tion­ship with another man and under­went hor­monal treat­ment (chem­i­cal cas­tra­tion) as an alter­na­tive to prison. Here is an infor­ma­tive arti­cle with some more details about Tur­ing and the whole affair.

Ok,well, enough with the rant. The good news is that this year (23 June) marks the cen­te­nary of his birth and as the arti­cle states, it affords us a great oppor­tu­nity to put right what was done wrong to him. We are hear­ing suggestions.


Sanctuarium Artis Elisarion

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When I was about 15 years old I found a book about homo­erotic love through the ages;  from the authors of antiq­uity to writ­ers and painters of the nine­teen cen­tury in Europe and Amer­ica. I was crazy in love with the book, but it took me a few years to finally get the courage to go to the store and buy it. I could not believe that the things I felt had been felt by oth­ers before me, and not only that but those peo­ple had cel­e­brated these feel­ings and expressed them with the most beau­ti­ful artis­tic cre­ations. I had very strong feel­ings of empa­thy  toward some of these artists as I had never felt before, so much so that at the time I was con­vinced that I had writ­ten some of the poems or carved some of the sculp­tures shown in the book in a past life in ancient Greece. They were imprinted in my genes. The book destroyed all my feel­ings of guilt and change my per­cep­tion of myself as a mon­ster to one of a valu­able indi­vid­ual who could in some way mean to oth­ers in the future what these artists meant to me.

Among the artists fea­tured in the book was Elisar von Kupf­fer. At the time, his paint­ings used to make me feel a bit ‘uncom­fort­able’ for lack of a bet­ter word. Lets just say he was not one of my favorites in the book. How­ever, nowa­days I have a bet­ter appre­ci­a­tion for ‘Elis­ar­ion’ and he is a model for some of the things I’m inspired to do in my life.

Together with his lover, the his­to­rian and philoso­pher Eduard von Mayer (1873–1960), they trans­formed their Minu­sio villa (at the Lake Mag­giore) into an opu­lent col­lec­tion of art, the ‘Sanc­tu­ar­ium Artis Elis­ar­ion’. In 1981 the Sanc­tu­ar­ium Artis Elis­ar­ion was estab­lished as a museum to house von Kuppfer’s work. The cou­ple were also at the heart of a reli­gious move­ment called the Klarismus.

The more I found out about Elis­ar­ion, the more I wanted to be like him and as if I had not enough rea­sons to love him, in 1899/1900 Adolf Brand pub­lished von Kupffer’s influ­en­tial anthol­ogy of homo­erotic lit­er­a­ture, Liebling­minne und Fre­un­desliebe in der Weltlit­er­atur in Berlin. The anthol­ogy was researched and cre­ated, in part, as a protest against the impris­on­ment of Oscar Wilde in Eng­land. I rest my case.

I wanted to show you some audio visual mate­r­ial together with this post but unfor­tu­nately there is lit­tle to be found on the inter­net. So if you read this arti­cle and know of a good source with a nice video, please let me know to add it to this post. Sorry If my writ­ing has been a lit­tle too affected in this arti­cle but what else could you expect of an arti­cle about beau­ti­ful ‘Elisarion’.

And if you hap­pen to be in Lor­cano on 07/31/12, you can visit the Cul­tural Cen­ter — Museum Elis­ar­ion for the event:

The Elis­ar­ion and its ori­gins
The Light of the World Elisar von Kupf­fer and Eduard von Mayer
SPECIAL OCCASION OF THE OPENING OF THE FILM FESTIVAL


!Trash Yourself

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Trash your­self are vocal­ist heidi can­non and dj/producer john bourke from okla­homa and as the name already sug­gests they are deliv­er­ing some top-notch dirty elec­tro. besides pro­duc­ing tracks on their own, they are col­lab­o­rat­ing with pro­duc­ers like trea­sure fin­gers and the toxic avenger.
The toxic avenger also helped out pro­duc­ing their cover of ‘song 2′ by blur and while it is admit­tedly damn trashy, i am sure this will cause some seri­ous dam­age on dance­floors worldwide.


Red

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I became aware of the exis­tence of Russian-American painter Mark Rothko about three years ago. When I first saw some of his paint­ings in my com­puter screen I could not stop star­ing at them. His paint­ing could not be more sim­ple, how­ever when I looked at them It felt as if they were talk­ing to me and con­fer­ring a deep philo­soph­i­cal rev­e­la­tion. His paint­ings make me feel both uneasy and assured at the same time.

I recently had the plea­sure to watch the play “Red” by Amer­i­can writer John Logan about Mark Rothko. The play takes place at a moment when Rothko had been com­mis­sioned to paint a series of murals for the Four Sea­sons restau­rant in New York. I will say no more about the play as I will include a short doc­u­men­tary about it on this post and I don’t want to spoil it for you hop­ing that you also get a chance to see it.

If you want to know a lit­tle more about Rothko, you can also watch the fol­low­ing BBC doc­u­men­tary on YouTube. The pro­gram was divided into 7 parts when it was uploaded so I will post here the first part and I invite you to see the other parts of the doc­u­men­tary directly from our YouTube Chan­nel.

 

 


Diane Arbus in Martin-Gropius-Bau

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Diane Arbus’ (New York, 1923–1971) bold sub­ject mat­ter and pho­to­graphic approach pro­duced a body of work that is often shock­ing in its purity. Her con­tem­po­rary anthropology—portraits of cou­ples, chil­dren, car­ni­val per­form­ers, nud­ists, middle-class fam­i­lies, trans­ves­tites, zealots, eccentrics, and celebrities—also stands as an alle­gory of the human expe­ri­ence, an explo­ration of the rela­tion­ship between appear­ance and iden­tity, illu­sion and belief, the­atre and reality.

The Martin-Gropius-Bau presents a selec­tion of two hun­dred pho­tographs that afford an oppor­tu­nity to explore the ori­gins and aspi­ra­tions in the pho­tog­ra­phy of Diane Arbus. The exhi­bi­tion shows all of the artist’s iconic pho­tographs as well as many that have never before been pub­licly exhibited.

22 June to 23 Sep­tem­ber 2012


Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft: Tanz den Mussolini

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Alles ist gut is the third album by the electropunk/NDW band D.A.F. from Düs­sel­dorf, Ger­many. It was released in 1981 and was the band’s first album on the British Vir­gin label.

D.A.F.‘s most famous songsare “Kebab­träume” and the grimly sar­cas­tic “Der Mus­solini” from the album “Alles ist gut”, a puls­ing dance song. The lyrics “Dance the Mus­solini, move your behind, clap your hands, and now the Adolf Hitler, and now the Jesus Christ”, caused a scandal.

Der Mus­solini 88 Remix:


Listen and download Purple Crush version of “Emerge”

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I don’t know about you, but recently I’ve started to feel fed up with today’s elec­tronic music. Every­thing sounds to “poppy” and “gay” in a bad way. There is no real energy in it, and I think you’ll all agree it’s been ages since the last time you were so hooked onto some­thing you could lis­ten to it con­stantly, on and on.
When I remem­ber myself from five years ago and just how many times I lis­tened to Fischerspooner’s Emerge on repeat, it really wor­ries me how quickly I get over some­thing nowa­days. I’ve been lit­er­ally pray­ing for some kind of elec­tro­clash revival. Luck­ily, Pur­ple Crush have come to my res­cue today. They did this ter­rific cover of Fischerspooner’s Emerge which is also a free down­load.


PKD

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Philip K. Dick is con­sid­ered by many to be the sin­gle most sig­nif­i­cant sci­ence fic­tion author of recent times. For most of his life, his 42 nov­els were rarely taken seri­ously. But since his death, the films Blade Run­ner and Total Recall have brought him main stream attention.

Start­ing yesterday, Simon Critch­ley of The New York Times, has been pub­lish­ing a three-part series arti­cle about Philip K. Dick. I have greatly enjoyed read­ing the first two arti­cles and I can’t wait to read the last one tomor­row. Check out our Twit­ter for all the links.

Philip’s per­sonal life is no less inter­est­ing than his wildest sci­ence fic­tion sto­ries. I highly rec­om­mend that you watch this Prophets of Sci­ence Fic­tion doc­u­men­tary about him.

In the mean­time, watch bel­low another Every­thing Is A Remix video, that ‘coin­ci­den­tally’ fea­tures Philip K. Dick with a very inter­est­ing argument.

“My Sto­ries are attempts at recep­tion, at lis­ten­ing to voices from another place far away. They only come late at night, when the back­ground din and gab­ble of our world have faded out. Then, faintly, I heard voices from another star.”