Existentialism in literature and film podcast by Professor Hubert Dreyfus
Gapminder: animation shows the world inequality
July 18, 2006
links reminder
Rembrandt the entrepreneur
I haven’t got a chance to blog about my 10-day Erotrip, partly for being busy; but mostly I don’t think I can write better than tour guide books, and my tour can’t compete to what’s in those veteran travelers’ blogs. If merely for the memory of the trip, 300 or some pictures can help me recollect every moment in detail (magic of Europe. Now this is something might worth another touch of blogging when I read today’s Seattle Times about the celebration of Rembrandt’s 400th anniversary over the weekend. When we were in Amsterdam, We stayed at Plantage, about 20 minutes walk to Rembrandt’s house. Several things are very interesting about the house: people slept in small boxes at that time, with heavy curtains down in the front; Rembrandt, at the heyday of his fame, had a wide collection of rare treasure and art from all over the world; and half of the paintings exhibited in the house were later found to drawn or partly drawn by his apprentices.
Compared with Vincent Van Gogh, another very famous and very beloved Dutch painter, Rembrandt led much comfortable life-that’s for sure. In their 20s, Van Gogh volunteered to preach in a poor coal mining field in Belgium, while Rembrandt opened his own workshop in Amsterdam. Living on the support Theo, his brother for most of his life, Van Gogh shot himself to death “for the good of us all”. Rembrandt, on the other hand, lived well on the tuition paid by his apprentice and commission for portraits, a lot of which were accomplished here and there by his apprentices (Rembrandt is a great juggler among several paintings at the same time). In recent years, art historians have been busy in authenticating works then thought to be painted by Rembrandt-a good entrepreneur can even create jobs for fellows 400 years after him! Rembrandt made a lot of money, and he spent a lot and he got bankruptcy too. Nonetheless, his way of making a better living does not shed off a bit of his artistic heritage. Van Gogh lived in his art and his paintings feel like the explosion of his inner passion; Rembrandt seemed to be able to split between art and business(which is very difficult), and he managed to sublimate beyond his mundane living.
At the end of his life, Van Gogh sighed “there is no end to sadness”; I bet Rembrandt felt the same grief after the death of two wives and his only son. Though managing to keep a comfortable and somewhat succesful life, he can’t escape the sadness, which I think is the muse for all and every artist.
July 17, 2006
dig
I don’t usually digg video clips on my blog. But this is really funny (maybe my dig comes a little late). The truncation of Chinese words can be a big pain on the neck in natural language processing; and yes, it’s persuasive that Baidu, the genuine Chinese search engine, might do better job than Google, the foreigner in tall hat, in parsing “you know I(and it can be me in Chinese) know you don’t know I/me don’t know I/me know…..” stuff.
July 6, 2006
crime and punishment
My Netflix subscription is not really a money-saving deal. I realized only watched 1 movie (history of violence, which is surprisingly good here and there, but surprisingly not that good as a whole) in the past three weeks; I figured I should not pay more than I need for cinema, so I watched another one-crime and punishment, o, I am sorry, it’s actually “Match Point”, Woody Allen’s continuous discussion of moral universe vs. survival of the fittest (or luckiest) after his Crime and Misdemeanors. There is not so much punishment, as heavily present in the original novels, as in both movies. A crime is not a crime if not uncovered, and the world goes on turning and everyone goes on living. There is no good or bad, but only win or lose. Then there is this moment when the murderer confronts his victims in his hallucination and says he wished he would be caught and punished, so he could see a sign of justice and a small measurement of hope for measurement of meaning. It’s the only Allen’s movie Bin can sit through, because, I guess, the old man is not keep talking to himself all the time (which is not that annoying to me most of time, especially in Crime and Demeanors and Deconstructing Harry).