The Crippled Corner

[Meho Krljic]

Samo neprijatelje socijalizma i naroda generalno.

[crippled_avenger]

"Naroda generalno", meni se to sviđa. Volim generalizacije.

[Meho Krljic]

Veliki ljudi samo u njima i razmišljaju.

[Albedo 0]

Blog like an Egyptian tananana

[crippled_avenger]

Volkswagen Commercial: The Force

[crippled_avenger]

četvrtak, 03. feb 2011, 17:42 -> 09:33
Vređao policiju da bi ga ubila?

Bliski prijatelj poznatog glumca Mela Gibsona otkrio je da su antisemitske izjave koje je ,,ozloglašeni" Mel uputio policajcu bile, u stvari, njegov pokušaj da izazove organe reda da ga upucaju. Zvezda ,,Hrabrog srca" bila je rastrojena, jer ga je supruga sa sedmoro dece napustila.

Mel Gibson je pokušao sebi da oduzme život uz pomoć policije kada ga je supruga napustila i tražila razvod posle 26 godina braka, tvrdi bliski prijatelj australijskog glumca.
mel-gibson-1.jpg

Zvezda filmova Smrtonosno oružje je, navodno, pokušao antisemitskim uvredama da izazove policajca da potegne pištolj i puca u njega, pošto je zaustavljen zbog vožnje u alkoholisanom stanju.

Incident koji se dogodio pre četiri godine doveo je do pada nekada blistave Gibsonove karijere u Holivudu i oštre osude u javnosti.
mel-gibson-v.jpg

Jedan njegov prijatelj je, međutim, nedavno otkrio za časopis Veniti fer (Vanity Fair) da Gibson nije bio antisemitski raspoložen, već da je želeo da izvrši samoubistvo, zbog toga što ga je supruga Robin napustila.

Samoubistvo uz pomoć policije, tzv. death by cop, navodno je popularan samoubilački metod u Americi gde ljudi svesno provociraju policajce i teraju ih da upotrebe oružje.

Gibson (55) je bio rastrojen tog dana kada se vratio u Los Anđeles sa snimanja filma i otkrio da su se njegova supruga i sedmoro dece iselili iz kuće.

Ubrzo posle toga, zaustavljen je zbog vožnje pod dejstvom alkohola i upustio se u sada već poznatu tiradu u kojoj je rekao da su ,,Jevreji odgovorni za sve ratove u svetu".

,,Smatrao je da je zakazao kao ljudsko biće", rekao je izvor Veniti fera.

,,Mel je pokušao da isprovocira policajca da izvadi oružje i ubije ga", objasnio je on.
mel-2.jpg

Gibson se kasnije izvinio za svoj antisemitski ispad u seriji intervjua koji je dao, opisujući svoje ponašanje kao ,,žalosno".

Osuđen je na tri godine uslovno i morao je da se podvrgne programu odvikavanja od alkohola.

[Meho Krljic]

Pa tom čoveku su žene toliko zla nanele da ga niko ne bi okrivio kada bi sad, recimo, snimio film protiv njih.

[crippled_avenger]

Mehmete, vidiš da sada i telohranitelj koji je prvo harangirao protiv Mela kaže da je Oksana "seksualna vračara" i da joj je pomagao da laže. Mene to moram priznati ne iznenađuje jer kada sam video na početku akciju sa Oksanom bilo mi je jasno da je ključ isključivo u seksu i to u nekim tehnikama koje su običnom svetu nepoznate.

[Meho Krljic]

Znači... Jevreji su na kraju ipak krivi za sve?

[crippled_avenger]

Hm. Pa ko je tu Jevrejin? Mislim da je Oksana naša...

[crippled_avenger]

FASTER George Tillmana Juniora pokazuje koliko je zapravo teško napraviti dobar film u 70s revenge stilu. Iako se najveći deo filmova filmova ovog tipa smatra manje ili više exploitationom koji su radili osrednji reditelji, i uprkos tome što su neki veliki filmovi i autori bili izuzetak koji potvrđuje pravilo, sada je valjda svima jasno da je za pravljenje te naizgled jednostavne forme potreban jedan istančam filmmejkerski instinkt za vladanje samom suštinom pripovedanja i sposobnost prepoznavanja koja je osnovna izražajna nit.

FASTER je film koji u osnovi ima predispozicije da bude odličan - scenario Joe i Tony Gaytona je relativno interesantan, Rock u glavnoj ulozi je adut kakav se samo poželeti može, Billy Bob Thornton kao čovek koji ga juri je izvrsna podela, ostatak ekipe je takođe vrhunski.

Međutim, Tillman ne uspeva da dovede sve te elemente u pravi odnos.

Pre svega, njegov tretman Rocka na makroplanu strukture i na mikroplanu unutar samih scenanije dobar. Čovek koji izgleda kao Rock je sam po sebi već film, a on je s druge strane još odavno pokazao da je respektabilan glumac. Međutim, umsto monolitnog osvetnika kakvog bi u nekom 70s filmu igrao Jim Brown, Tillman ga drži na toj liniji ali mu ne daje dovoljno screentimea već dopušta da nadogradnje likova postanu svrhe same sebi. Otud, mi imamo duge deonice filma bez Rocka usled čega se ozbiljno dovodi u pitanje ko je tu zapravo glavni lik. S druge strane monolitini osvetnik sa tako upečatljivim telom, ako nije glavni lik, nema previše smisla u ovoj vrsti filma - ovo ipak nije SOUTHLAND TALES.

Unutar scena, Tillman takođe ne shvata koliko je Rock potentan element u kadru, tako da situacije prosto pogrešno akcentuje, iako se ne može govoriti o doslednom rediteljskom konceptu, to rediteljsko lutanje između ostalog pokazuje i u tome što mnoge scene prosto režira "spolja" u nekim uopštenim rešenjima, bez tačne ideje šta je u svakom trenutku zapravo važno. Otud se u nekim dramatičnim scenama ne samo ne vidi da je Rock tu glavni, nego su rešene kroz neke pismeno postavljene ali potpune neznakovite pozicije kamere.

Isto tako elementi nadogradnje lika, naročito u Thorntonovom slučaju postaju sami sebi svrha i mnogo bolje bi funkcionisali da se dešavaju uporedo sa događajima iz glavnog dramskog toka, a to je priča o osveti i poteri.

Ovako, FASTER ima previše digresija u odnosu na jednostavnu i efektnu priču kojom se bavi.

Uprkos tome što je Tillman suštinski upropastio šanse da FATSER bude dobar counteprogramming srećom glumačka ekipa je raspoložena za nadigravanje i jaka je na svim mestima, sve je realizovano sa blagom dozom humora gde se Tillman nalazi, i to dozom humora koja proističe iz situacija a nije nametnuta ili dopisana, tako da FASTER na svom elementarnom nivou održava potreban nivo high spirita. Šteta je samo što u tome svemu ne uspeva da bude i dobar.

* * 1/2 / * * * *

[Meho Krljic]

Grrr, radovao sam se fasteru. Ajde, videćemo.

[crippled_avenger]

Radovao sam se i ja. Nećeš prestati da se raduješ ni posle gledanja. Ali prosto nije film koji uspeva da od radovanja napravi nešto više, kao što mi volimo.

[Meho Krljic]

Evo nečeg za prave muškarce:

Hulk Hogan VS Kim Jong-il - Epic Rap Battles of History 5

D nejm'z Kim Džong, aj gad a lajsens tu Il.

[Meho Krljic]

Ni ovo nije skroz nesimpatično:

Darth Vader vs Hitler. Epic Rap Battles of History 2

D nejmz Adolf Hitler, Komendr of d trd rajh, a litl noun fekt: olzo doup on d majk.

[Meho Krljic]

I treća sreća jer Srbi ipak vole Čaka Norisa:

Abe Lincoln VS Chuck Norris Epic Rap Battles of History #3

[Albedo 0]

Hulk odigrao kao u pravim kečerima, dva na jednoga

Hitlera i Vejdera su totalno pogodili  

[Meho Krljic]

So many dudes been with your mom, who even knows I'm your father? 

[crippled_avenger]

Pogledao sam CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF MEATBALLS Chrisa Millera i Phila Lorda. Ovaj film upravo ima sve one adute koji nedostaju MEGAMINDu,a to je vladanje formom animiranog filma i vešto pomeranje akcenta sa situacija u kojima to bolje prolazi u igranom filmu na animaciju.

Likovi su odlično i duhovito dizajnirani, a pred glumce je stavljeno dosta vokalnih zadataka koji proističu iz radnje tako da su talenti Bill Hadera, Jamesa Caana i naročito Anne Faris odlično iskorišćeni. U ovom filmu ne samo da je radnja dobro postavljena i prilagođena animaciji već je i glumačka igra daleko od vrlo čestih varijanti u kojima All-Starovi unovčavaju svoje ime iz igrane produkcije.

Lord i MIller odlično vladaju ne samo dizajnom i akcionim situacijama već i humorom i naročito je zabavno kako ubacuju duhovite situacije u drugi plan koji je vrlo razigran i retko kada tako dobro realizovan izvan Pixara.

U tom smislu CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF MEATBALLS, ako imamo u vidu da je baziran na krajnje bizarnoj premisi ilustrovane knige Judy Barrett, izuzetno dobro funkcioniše i donosi dosta dosta istinski duhovitih stvari sa obiljem suptilnih pop kulturnih referenci koje ga srećom ne pretvaraju u kolekciju animiranih gegova na račun poznatih filmova.

Lord i Miller su se nametnuli već sa svojim debijem kao imena na koja treba obratii pažnju. Vrlo je zanimljivo kako će 21 JUMP STREET rimejk funkcionisati, naročito ako imamo u vidu da animatori mogu biti sjajni live action reditelji.

* * * 1/2 / * * * *

[Meho Krljic]

Meni je CWACOMB bio dovoljan već na nivou premise koja je dobro realizovana: sami prizori džinovskih komada hrane koji padaju s neba su za mene solidna (mada jednostavna, ali ipak je ovo dečiji film) kritika potrošačkog mentaliteta.

[Albedo 0]

ocjena tri i po, izgleda da ću pogledati još jedan crtać.

[crippled_avenger]

Meni je CWACOMB bio dovoljan već na nivou premise koja je dobro realizovana: sami prizori džinovskih komada hrane koji padaju s neba su za mene solidna (mada jednostavna, ali ipak je ovo dečiji film) kritika potrošačkog mentaliteta.

Dečji je film, tako je, ali je sjajan. I stvarno je jako, jako duhovit.

A kritika je vrlo cool, nije preachy, a jasna je i deci.

[crippled_avenger]

The 032c Interview: Simon Reynolds on Ballard, part 2
Author: Simon Sellars • Dec 7th, 2009 •

Category: Brian Eno, Lead Story, New Worlds, Philip K. Dick, William Burroughs, interviews, music, science fiction, short stories

'Magisterial, precise, unsettling': Simon Reynolds on JG Ballard

interview by Simon Sellars.

Ballardian: Simon Reynolds

In the wake of J.G. Ballard's passing, Berlin's 032c magazine asked me to rework my 2007 Simon Reynolds interview. I put some new questions to Simon, and here is the result...

"'Magisterial, precise, unsettling': Simon Reynolds on JG Ballard", originally published in 032c, no. 18, winter 2009/10, pp. 126-9.

Simon Reynolds is one of the most recognizable music critics around. He possesses a willingness to tackle pop music as an art form worthy of intellectual discourse rather than a fleeting moment of adolescent flash. Reynolds breaks new ground, melding unchecked enthusiasm with a robust theoretical foundation in a body of work that is exciting for its eclecticism alone: he's just as compelling writing on hip hop, Britney, and rave, as he is on grunge, prog rock, and grime.

Reynolds's work reached a peak with the publication of Rip It Up and Start Again, a timely excavation of post-punk: Cabaret Voltaire, PiL, Magazine, and so on. What's more, J.G. Ballard was a thread throughout the book, as Reynolds charted the influence of JGB — and especially his experimental novel, The Atrocity Exhibition — on the era.

Simon Sellars: For you, what's the relationship between J.G. Ballard and music?

Simon Reynolds: Obviously I always loved music, but it was things my parents had introduced me to — Beethoven, or Hollywood musicals, plus stray things I'd heard on the radio like the Beatles. And then when I was around fifteen, I was inducted into that whole rock apparatus of taking music -pop culture, youth culture, rock criticism — seriously. And what I was into on a fanatical level immediately before entering rock culture was science fiction, and particularly Ballard. The new fanaticism simply replaced the old one, and I stuck to music journalism!

SS: Do you still return to his work?

SR: It's only in the last decade or so that I rediscovered science fiction, and particularly Ballard. I've also started reading more of his critical work, his interviews and journalism, and become more impressed by him — he was clearly the most advanced writer and thinker in his field.

SS: Which of his books have impacted you the most?

SR: In some ways the one that grabbed me most, and has yet to relinquish its hold, was the first one I read, The Drowned World. Penguin used to do these great science fiction paperback editions, and they had one series with really evocative paintings — glossy, garish, almost hyperrealist — on the covers. The Drowned World, The Drought, and The Wind From Nowhere were all in that series and looked particularly good. But in The Drowned World, the severity of Ballard's imagination was what hooked me, and just the idea of the protagonist who — as in all Ballard's cataclysm novels — is perversely drawn towards the heart of catastrophe, and finds his true self in the transformed landscape. That really grabbed me.

Also, the idea of the world you know being drastically transformed ... I lived near London, in a commuter town 30 miles north of the capital, and went down to the city quite frequently; so imagining it submerged was exciting.

Ballardian: Simon Reynolds

Two David Pelham-illustrated 'softcover classics' (both Penguin, London, 1974).

SS: Has he influenced your work in any way, either as a critic of popular culture, or stylistically?

SR: Actually, the influences on my writing and thinking come from a totally different place, although there are certain affinities — a sense of the power of the irrational, these atavistic drives pulsing inside culture. I've long felt that pop music is driven by ambivalent, sometimes outright malevolent energies. But I've probably derived that more from various French thinkers, and Nietzsche; or certain rock writers. Still, you can see the connection between music and the Ballardian worldview, which sees human culture as fundamentally perverse. And the self-reflexivity in science fiction is very similar to music criticism, because neither genre gets respect from the literary establishment, give or take a Kingsley Amis or an Anthony Burgess in science fiction. Both science fiction and rock writing have an inferiority and superiority complex. Science fiction writers love to think of what they're doing as one really crucial, contemporary form of literature — a literature of ideas with elements of speculation and an estrangement effect.

Rock critics are just the same: they crave that validation from mainstream art criticism, but they also like being the renegade form. Ballard exemplifies this meta aspect of science fiction, although he goes beyond it as a great cultural critic.

SS: His work can also be read as philosophical inquiry, an approach that seems to sum up a particular late-capitalist mode of being. What makes the Ballardian worldview so prescient?

SR: He was dealing with similar things as Marshall McLuhan, and, later, as Jean Baudrillard. But he was doing it with far greater clarity, sharper perceptions, and more style and wit than either. All the obscenity of mass communication, simulation, and social implosion in Baudrillard's books was being explored earlier, and more effectively, in Ballard's fiction. He was dealing with the pornification of everything very early.

SS: You've remarked elsewhere that Ballard's short stories have more appeal to you than his novels.

SR: After the disaster novels, the mid-1970s urban breakdown ones like Concrete Island and High-Rise, I think that, as a critic, Ballard's shorts are his supreme achievement — so magisterial, so distilled and precise, atmospheric and unsettling. I recently re-read "The Ultimate City," which is about a young man who lives in a near future that's very green-conscious and placid and dull. So he goes to the deserted city and starts up urban life again — gets generators going, and then misfits start to flock in from the eco-communes and garden towns. But of course the whole thing goes haywire.

It was only a few years ago that I finally read Crash all the way through. I was writing Rip It Up and Start Again, and I wanted to understand why it had such a big influence on post-punk. In away, I prefer the side of Ballard that relates to someone like John Wyndham over the side that relates to William S. Burroughs. I like that dour, flat Britishness confronted by something alien or catastrophic.

Ballardian: Simon Reynolds

SS: I was surprised by your Ballard tribute in Salon, in which you wrote: "While his novels of the late 1980s and thereafter, such as Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes, have admirers, few would argue they've contributed a jot to his enduring cult." For me, Super-Cannes seems to be one of his very best, a hyper-aware distillation of the "pornification" you were talking about earlier, a sense of entrapment within a system that only recognizes exchange values as authentic modes of being.

SR: It's not about the relative merits of his books, but about what his cult is based on. It's a bit like with rock stars. Morrissey put out a number of solo albums, ranging from dire to mediocre to excellent. But the basis of his cult will always be the Smiths. The same goes for the Rolling Stones — their last album, A Bigger Bang, was actually a really fine album, but "Stones-iness" was defined by the 1960s albums, plus Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main Street. It's hard to imagine many people starting their Stones fandom with A Bigger Bang, just as it's hard to imagine many people becoming obsessed with Morrissey on account of You are the Quarry. I think the same thing applies to Ballard's work. Not to say you're wrong about Super-Cannes.

SS: You've mentioned Ballard's influence on post-punk. Growing up on this music, Ballard was always a vague referent, glimpsed through obscure Cabaret Voltaire or Ultravox interviews. So I appreciated the way Rip It Up and Start Again unpacked the connection. But what about today's crop? Is there a continuum from then to now? For example, the dubstep musicians Kode9 and Burial — every second review of their albums seems to invoke the dreaded word "Ballardian," possibly becoming as much a cliché as it was during the post-punk period.

SR: That relates more to the Spaceape's contribution to the Kode9 album Memories of the Future. His lyrics and delivery are a bit like Linton Kwesi Johnson reading excerpts from The Atrocity Exhibition. With Burial, the connection is that his album is supposed to be a concept record about South London becoming flooded when the Thames Barrier breaks in the global-warmed near future. I think Katrina and New Orleans is more likely to be the inspiration, but there's an obvious parallel there with The Drowned World.

There is also an urban psychogeography thing going on in Burial's music that recalls Ballard in Crash. The album draws a lot from South London, this inter-zone of semi-suburbia between Brixton, where the tube line stops, and Croydon, which is on the city's periphery. So it's a hinterland similar to the outer London areas near Heathrow where Ballard situated Crash. A real anomie zone, but possessed with a certain desolate beauty. Burial has also talked of putting his tunes through the "Car Test," driving around South London playing music from his car to see if it has the atmosphere he wants, the "distance" he's looking for.

People have also compared Burial to Joy Division in terms of bleak urbanism. And Martin Hannett, their producer, used to do a similar thing: drive around Manchester's most brutally industrialized zones in his car, stoned, listening to Joy Division, PiL, or Pere Ubu.

SS: Does "Ballardian" mean anything substantial to you, or do you think Ballard's work is too complex to be contained in this way?

SR: It has become something of a cliché, and that's perhaps the inevitable result of having an impact and becoming famous — that your ideas become simplified, reduced to a caption. So Ballardian equals "picturesque, postindustrial decay," "kinky technophilia," and "perverted obsessions with celebrities."

When the Diana and Dodi crash happened, people in TV newsrooms were apparently like, "Let's get Ballard on the phone."

SS: You've casually mentioned that Ballard and Brian Eno are "the two greatest British thinkers of the second half of the 20th century."

SR: That's slightly over the top, isn't it? I wonder if it really stands up. Then again, as thinkers specifically on culture, in the British context, I can't honestly think of too many rivals, especially for the generation who came out of the 1960s and developed during the 1970s.

One of the fantasy projects that I've toyed with for a while is a book on Ballard and Eno. They feel like the patron saints of post-punk to an extent. But it's difficult, because they've said it all better than anyone else. I suppose you could historicize or contextualize them – Ballard with the ICA milieu and Eno with the UK art schools. In some ways the affinity seems as much temperamental as anything conceptual. They have this wonderful Englishness — you imagine they would get on like a house on fire, trading ideas over whisky in a Shepperton living room. One thing they both do is take ideas from science and set them loose in culture, find applications.

Ballard is like a British McLuhan, except better because he's a far better writer and thinker — more original, more convincing. In some ways, Eno is almost like a British Barthes.

Ballardian: Simon Reynolds

SS: While explaining his collage method in The Atrocity Exhibition, Ballard said he wanted to produce "crossovers and linkages between unexpected and previously totally unrelated things, events, elements of the narration, ideas that begin to generate new matter." Could you draw parallels to Eno's formulation of "generative" music?

SR: I'm not sure about that. It seems more related to Burroughs, and perhaps also to Ballard's debt to surrealism.

Eno's generative music is much more cybernetics-meets-Zen, emptying out the authorial ego, setting up a process and then withdrawing. I don't think Ballard has that Eastern mystical aspect. With Ballard, there's always more of a violence bubbling up from below, even though the writing is cold and controlled. If Eno is a British Barthes, a languid sensualist, Ballard would be a British Bataille. I can also imagine Ballard enjoying Camille Paglia's writing, which I can't imagine Eno doing — it would be too passionate for him.

SS: Both Ballard and Eno inverted, retooled, and then abandoned the genre they started out in. As Richard Sutherland writes, "To call Ballard's work science fiction is a bit like describing Brian Eno's music as rock 'n' roll."

SR: Yes and no. Eno is like the culmination or extension of certain ideas within rock to the point where they verge on un-rock. But when he started he owed a lot to Syd Barrett's Pink Floyd, a certain English kind of psychedelia. And he could do the "idiot energy" thing with "Third Uncle." As for Ballard, to divorce him from his genre is unnecessary. The methodology in his disaster stories and in the bulk of his short stories is totally science fiction.

SS: As someone who has successfully integrated critical theory into writing about music, what do you think of the growing incursion of theory into music criticism?

SR: I'd make a distinction here between theorizing about music and applying critical theory to music. The former happens a lot, obviously — and you could argue that any critical position is at some level theoretical. What I don't see a lot of is people using ideas from critical theory or philosophy to explicate pop music. Even I don't do nearly as much as I used to. But I certainly still generate theorems and analytical ideas that go beyond the thumbs up/thumbs down consumer guidance aspect.

SS: To return to Ballard, is it possible to imagine, after his death, what his enduring legacy might be?

SR: That's too big a question really. But I guess his legacy is due to his invention of a completely original way of perceiving reality, which merges reality with the unreality of the entertainment-scape. He did this to the point where it seems almost obvious, even cliché, as we discussed earlier. You see that a lot in music. I've argued that coming up with a cliché is the highest achievement in dance music, a sound or a beat or a riff pattern that everyone wants to copy. Becoming a cliché is, in lots of ways, a triumphant success for any artist.

[crippled_avenger]

Thursday, Apr 23, 2009 07:30 ET
The unlimited dreams of J.G. Ballard
His dark, perverse fiction is unforgettable. But the author of "Crash" and "Empire of the Sun" was also a visionary who mapped the collision of culture and technology, media and desire.
By Simon Reynolds

    *

Earlier this week a literary colossus made his exit, after a long struggle with cancer. The ovation that accompanied J.G. Ballard's departure was fully deserved. He was a visionary, one of the few fiction writers of our era with an imagination so singular that he was granted the suffix treatment: the attachment of an - esque or -ian to their surname, à la Kafka-esque or Dickensian.

But in death as in life, Ballard never quite got his full due as a thinker as well as a storyteller; he was a penetrating and endlessly provocative theorist about the intersections between culture and technology, media and desire. This tendency to think of him only as a fabulist is understandable to an extent, given that he never wrote a full-length book of nonfiction that condensed and focused his ideas. Instead his insights, speculations and polemical barbs are scattered across a panoply of reviews, columns, memoiristic essays, think pieces and single-topic commentaries written for or spoken to newspapers looking for the Ballardian take on some current event, issue or innovation. (Thankfully, a decent-size heap of J.G.'s wit and wisdom has been shoveled into a single spot by the esoteric San Francisco publisher RE/Search: The 2004 "JG Ballard: Quotes" is a pocket-portable collection of mind-bomb aphorisms and pithy observations. "A User's Guide to the Millennium," a scrappy but absorbing anthology of essays and reviews, is currently out of print.)

Of course Ballard's ideas are also present in his novels and short stories, and arguably at their most potent there. He was drawn to science fiction as the preeminent literature of ideas of our time, the only form of fiction that could take the measure of the 20th century. At his most full-on, Ballard transformed SF into a kind of theory-fiction, his short stories and novels functioning in a manner similar to Marshall McLuhan's "probes," the latter's term for speculative aphorisms as opposed to fully developed theories backed up by research and empirical data. McLuhan is an apt comparison because his primary concern -- mass communications and man's increasingly symbiotic relationship with technology and media -- overlapped with one of Ballard's key zones of obsessive investigation: the post-WW2 culture of media overload, what he called "our perverse entertainment landscape." In a 1983 interview he characterized it as "a completely new thing, a parallel world which we inhabit," presciently anticipating the virtual and post-geographical realm of Web culture.

Operating as a fabulist, Ballard was less tethered than even McLuhan by the restraints of academia or journalism. But even his most disturbed and hallucinatory stories generally started with reality, extrapolating from its emerging tendencies to create extreme but plausible scenarios in a near-future more often than not located just past the present's horizon. Classic science fiction methodology, in other words. There's an impulse among some Ballard fans, especially those who are "proper" literati themselves, to elevate Ballard and argue that his work transcends the ghetto of genre fiction. Although Ballard occasionally expressed frustration with SF's pulpy aura, and later in his career wrote novels that fell outside its parameters, he generally was content to situate himself in the genre and loudly championed its potential. "I believe that if it were possible to scrap the whole of existing literature," he once declared, "... all writers would find themselves inevitably producing something very close to SF ... No other form of fiction has the vocabulary of ideas and images to deal with the present, let alone the future."

The work on which Ballard's reputation is based -- his novels and short stories of the 1960s and '70s -- is either science fiction or based on speculative techniques very close to SF. The only real exception is 1970's "The Atrocity Exhibition," whose delirium of experimental prose has more in common with William S. Burroughs than Robert A. Heinlein. An unstructured collation of 15 micro-novels written during the late '60s and bearing titles such as "Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan," "You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe" and ''The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race," "The Atrocity Exhibition" reads like an infinitely perverse cross between "The Golden Bough" and a forensic science textbook. Ballard described his approach as gathering "the materials of an autopsy" and treating reality "almost as if it were a cadaver." (As a young man he'd briefly studied medicine.) But his true interest wasn't everyday life but media hyperreality. He clinically probed the grotesque (de)formations of desire created by media overload and celebrity worship, a new psychomythology in which the deities were movie stars, politicians and murderers. Doubleday was all set to publish "Atrocity" in the USA but lost its nerve and pulped the entire print run; three years later it belatedly saw American release courtesy of Grove Press under the title "Love & Napalm: Export U.S.A."

"Crash," the infamous 1973 novel that developed from "Atrocity's" coldly seething matrix of obsession, is ostensibly set in the present but it feels like a form of SF -- if only because its cast of auto accident survivors turned flesh-on-metal perverts are presented as a kind of erotic avant garde, heralds of a future sexuality. Ballard had become interested in the role of car crashes in Hollywood movies and the emergence of an appetite on the part of a mass audience for a voluptuous and highly stylized violence. He diagnosed this carnographic entertainment culture as a symptom of suburbanization and anomie, the loss of meaning and community in people's lives, and a corresponding hunger for sensation. "'Crash' is an attempt to follow these trends off the edge of the graph paper to the point where they meet, " he explained some years after the novel was published. As a kind of research experiment, in 1970 he presented an exhibition at a London art gallery that involved the display of wrecked automobiles, and was gratified by the extreme emotional responses of the attendees. For Ballard this was the "green light" to start writing "Crash."

An early reader of the novel at one publisher advised: "This author is beyond psychiatric help. Do not publish!" (Ironically, Ballard was living a stable domestic existence of responsibility and respectability in Shepperton, near London Airport, bringing up his three children as a single parent -- his wife having died tragically young -- and squeezing in writing between escorting the kids to school and helping with their homework.) Many reviewers rejected "Crash" as pornography. It isn't actually a titillating read (for most people, anyway), but where it does resemble porn is in its clinically graphic language and extreme repetitiveness, with certain buzz phrases ("bloody geometry," "perverse logic") and tableaux (angles of conjunction between genitalia and instrument binnacles, semen emptying across luminescent dials, and so forth) recurring in a manner finely balanced between the incantatory and the numbing.

"Crash" is generally considered by Ballard buffs to be the first installment of a loose trilogy of novels set in a recognizable present-day (i.e., mid-'70s) London. But "Concrete Island" (1974) and "High-Rise" (1975) could equally be seen as a reversion to the narrative-driven approach of Ballard's first four novels, "The Wind From Nowhere," "The Drowned World," "The Drought" and "The Crystal World." This tetralogy, published between 1961 and 1966, firmly belonged in the science fiction camp, and specifically the SF sub-genre of the cataclysm story, where some kind of natural or man-made environmental catastrophe causes the breakdown of society. "High-Rise" simply localizes the post-apocalyptic scenario to a more confined area, a giant apartment building in the Docklands area of East London, whose warehouses and harbors would actually be redeveloped and gentrified in the 1990s. But Ballard's inspiration was the urban redevelopment boom of the 1960s that razed the old Victorian slums of urban Britain and replaced them with skyscrapers and gigantic housing projects linked by concrete walkways and tunnels. Built in a spirit of neo-Corbusian idealism, these massive complexes rapidly deteriorated into behaviorist social laboratories blighted by vandalism, crime and drugs. "High-Rise" takes the fraying of the social fabric several steps further than anything actually going on in '70s Britain, hooking the reader from the opening sentence: "As he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months."

"Concrete Island," a slim and deceptively slight novel published the previous year, focused the cataclysm/collapse scenario down to the level of an individual. Losing control of his car, a man crashes into an area of overgrown scrubland circumscribed on all sides by highways and overpasses. Injured and unable to climb up the steep embankments, he's forced to survive as a modern-day Crusoe surrounded by the endless streams of traffic, whose drivers steadfastly fail to see, or actively ignore, his plight.

"High-Rise" and "Concrete Island" share with the earlier, more overtly SF-oriented catastrophe novels a similar psychological narrative: the protagonist who finds himself perversely attracted to the cataclysm, feels at home in the drastically altered landscape it's created. "The Drowned World" -- easily the best of the disaster tetralogy, although I'm biased perhaps because it was my initiating dose of Ballard -- takes place in what now seems like an uncomfortably possible near-future where sea levels have risen in sync with temperature. The setting is a London half-submerged by water and encroached by tropical jungle. While the surviving remnants of humanity are gradually migrating to the Arctic Circle, Ballard's protagonist is last seen heading in the opposite direction, toward the uninhabitable Equatorial zones.

Ballard has argued that the devastated but dreamlike landscapes of these four '60s novels are "far from being pessimistic" but are actually "stories of psychological fulfilment. The characters at last find themselves." In a 1977 essay on the catastrophe subgenre written for an SF encyclopedia, Ballard ventured that SF was just a "minor offshoot of the cataclysmic tale" that had existed for millennia. He claimed that these fictions spoke to primal and antisocial urges, citing both the rattle smashing of the infant child and "psychiatric studies of the fantasies and dream life of the insane" that " show that ideas of world destruction are latent in the unconscious mind." But he also argued that doomsday novels were positive expressions. On the one hand, they involved a form of imaginative adaptation (he cited Conrad's dictum "immerse yourself in the most destructive element -- and swim!") in preparation for the worst the 20th century had up its sleeve. On the other hand, they used the imagination to create "alternatives to reality" and thus represented a legitimately angry and subversive response to "the inflexibility of this huge reductive machine we call reality."

Seeing them as "transformation stories rather than disaster stories" makes sense, if only because it helps to explain what the reader gets out of them -- which is less to do with dread and more a kind of twisted utopianism or sublimated revolutionary impulse: a hunger to see the world turned upside down. The appetite for doomsday scenarios in fiction could also have something to do with the longing for an emptier world, a response to our overcrowded, stimuli-saturated civilization. J.G. Ballard didn't have to daydream about cataclysm, though; as a teenager he lived through conditions of total collapse. Born in Shanghai in 1930, his childhood began in fairly idyllic quasi-colonial circumstances (Dad worked as managing director of a textile factory, they lived in a fancy house, had lots of servants). But with the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War, Shanghai was occupied in 1937. When Japan joined with the Axis powers against the Allies,  all "enemy civilians" were herded into internment camps. Ballard's experiences of post-invasion chaos and prison camp life lead to 1984's best-selling and prize-winning novel "Empire of the Sun," the book that took Ballard from culthood to the middlebrow mainstream (helped, of course, by Spielberg's 1987 movie version, with the young Christian Bale playing the J.G. character, Jim).

For many of Ballard's original fans, though, there was some disappointment in discovering there was a biographical source, however exotic and dramatic, for his trademark imagery of drained swimming pools, deserted roads, abandoned airfields and empty hotels. All of a sudden we had a pat psychoanalytic explanation (trauma on a young psyche, the aesthetic equivalent of abused children re-creating similar psychosexual arrangements for themselves as adults) for Ballard's sensibility, all his talk about "the magic and poetry one feels when looking at a junkyard filled with old washing machines, or wrecked cars, or old ships rotting in some disused harbor." It all felt somehow reductive and demystifying -- which is one reason I've never been drawn to actually read "Empire of the Sun."

The fans' misgivings were lent some credence by Ballard's post-"Empire" fiction, which seemed to lose its spark, as though confronting his childhood experiences had defused some crucial mechanism of creativity. While his novels of the late '80s and thereafter such as "Cocaine Nights" and "Super-Cannes" have admirers, few would argue they've contributed a jot to his enduring cult, based solidly on the early cataclysm fiction, on "Atrocity" and the urban trilogy of "Crash"/"High-Rise"/"Concrete Island," and above all on the distilled, magisterial economy of his short stories, which regularly appeared through the '60s and '70s in collections with titles like "The Terminal Beach" and "Low Flying Aircraft." Happily, W.W. Norton will be publishing " The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard" this fall, a massive compendium that ran to 1,200 pages in its U.K. incarnation.

Stylistically what connects the avant-porn of Ballard's experimental phase with the perverted adventure yarns of his cataclysm and urban-collapse novels is his inattention to traditional fiction virtues like character or dialogue. But more than plot, his books are about atmosphere, defined as a physical space colored by or charged with a psychological mood. Really the Ballard narrative is a machinery for delivering up landscapes and tableaux that linger in the reader's mind's eye. In the '50s, before turning to writing, he tried his hand at painting, then gave up when he realized he had no flair for it. "I would love to have been a painter in the tradition of the surrealist painters who I admire so much," he once confessed. In his fiction, vision reigns supreme over all the other senses, from touch (sex in "Crash" is about the arrangement of limbs and objects in compelling patterns, about geometry rather than sensuality) to sound (Ballard professed to have minimal interest in or feeling for music, although he did write a couple of very good short stories involving music of the future).

All through his career, he maintained a connection to visual artists, drawing inspiration from and befriending the British division of pop art (Richard Hamilton, Eduardo Paolozzi, et al.), whose infatuation with American advertising and pop iconography had obvious affinities with Ballard's mass cult obsessions. But the surrealists remained his first and greatest love . He passionately defended Dalí from fashionable detractors, while the critic Chris Hall has noted the parallels between the dreamscape-like vistas that teem through his writing and Yves Tanguy's "strange beaches," Max Ernst's "silent forests and swamplands, weathered scenery and gnarled post-apocalyptic detritus." Ballard, again, could connect it to his own teenage experiences, describing "prewar and wartime Shanghai" as "a huge Surrealist landscape ... There was a complete transformation of everything, complete unpredictability, while formal life went on, just as in Bunuel's films or Delvaux's paintings -- a bizarre external landscape propelled by large psychic forces."

A problem for anyone who wants to write about Ballard is that the author is his own best critic. You'll come up with a perception, spot a pattern, then have the smile wiped off your face as trawling through his interviews or essay you'll find it preempted by some remark of his own -- expressed more sharply, taken further. These ideas about what he's trying to do, or what fiction can be, are also embedded in the stories, which means that they sometimes verge on metafiction (but without being tediously postmodern -- indeed, Ballard may well have been the last great literary modernist). At his height, every image is an idea and every idea is embodied as an image, sensation, mood.

Ballard's achievement relates to the adjectivization of his name: the fact that "Ballardian" has become a glib descriptor for certain landscapes and cultural phenomena is a measure of his impact. For some of us, Ballard has imposed his way of seeing between us and reality. For this sort of hardcore fan, it was impossible not to think of J.G. within seconds of hearing about Princess Diana's crash (for added Ballardianism, she and Dodi were harried to an early grave by the image-vampires of the paparazzi, whose wages are paid by the general public's voyeurism). Katrina and New Orleans, too -- the flooded wards, the refugees clustered on partially submerged highway overpasses, the chaos and squalor of the overcrowded dromes, seemed to come straight from his pages. Perhaps reality caught up with his imagination, outstripped it. That might have been his message all along: that truth was already becoming stranger than fiction, something he'd glimpsed in occupied China in the 1940s.

Strangely, although we live in an ever more Ballardian reality, I can't really see a Ballardian school of writing out there, even within science fiction. Perhaps J.G. is easier to parody than to be positively influenced by. Instead, his direct impact is most evident in music, particularly late '70s and '80s postpunk. Ironically, the art he had the least feeling for was the one that responded most fervently and productively to his vision. Probably his most famous fanboys were Joy Division. Their final studio album, "Closer," featured an aural abbatoir of a track titled "Atrocity Exhibition," with Ian Curtis playing the role of freakshow barker, luring voyeurs with the chorus "this is the way, step inside" and pointing to the twisted bodies on display. The band's debut album, "Unknown Pleasures," pulled a Ballardian maneuver by aestheticizing the postindustrial desolation of late '70s Manchester, finding a somber glamour in its derelict factories and baleful motorways.

Industrial groups like Joy Division's friends Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire venerated the two Bs: Ballard and Burroughs (the latter a major influence on J.G., who read "The Naked Lunch" in the early '60s and drew huge impetus from Burroughs' "severity" and unblinking, nonjudgmental gaze, a reprieve from the naturalistic and moralizing fiction that still ruled literary England). The Normal's 1978 synth-punk classic "Warm Leatherette" was a three-minute precis of "Crash": the catchiest couplet goes "The hand brake penetrates your thigh/ Quick -- Let's make love, before you die." Gary Numan's "Cars" and David Bowie's  "Always Crashing in the Same Car" bear slightly smaller debts.

Another group of Ballard fans was the Human League. Founding member Ian Craig Marsh, later part of Heaven 17, raved to me about "The Atrocity Exhibition" and "High-Rise" ("the proles sending piles of human excrement up in the express penthouse elevators, the documentary maker who still carries his camera on his shoulder like it's some symbolic totem, even after the lens is all smashed to fuck!"). But the Human League also made fun of the alienation chic of postpunk's Ballard casualties in their 1980 song "Blind Youth," singing "high-rise living's not so bad" and "dehumanization is such a big word." Elsewhere in '80s mainstream pop, the Buggles, those MTV-inaugurating one-hit-wonders, loosely based "Video Killed the Radio Star" on the Ballard short "The Sound Sweep."

During the grunge years, Ballard's influence dipped away, but more recently it's crept back, from Radiohead to the Klaxons (who named their Mercury Prize-winning "Myths of the Near-Future" after one of his short story collections) to numerous electronic musicians, most notably another Mercury nominee, Burial, whose debut LP was framed as a concept album about South London being flooded. And would you believe it, as I'm writing this feature, a publicist's e-mail pings into my in box touting a new band named Empire of the Sun. Just as each new generation of angsty and imaginative youth discovers the music of bands like Joy Division for itself, it seems likely that half-lives of the Ballardian vision will keep reverberating through pop culture for a long time to come.

    * Simon Reynolds is the author of "Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-84." A collection of his writing, "Bring the Noise: 20 Years of Writing About Hip Rock and Hip Hop," is being published in the U.K. in May 2007. He maintains a blog at http://blissout.blogspot.com. More: Simon Reynolds

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Screenwriting Guru Robert McKee Rates the Oscar Nominees
The longtime screenwriting teacher weighs in on the debate about accuracy in biographical films such as "The Fighter," "The King's Speech" and "The Social Network."
February
5
1:00 PM 2/5/2011 by Gregg Kilday
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Robert McKee
Olivier Laban-Mattei/AFP/Getty Images

All right everybody, settle down. Class is in session. And Robert McKee, the creative writing instructor who travels the world lecturing about how to write a successful screenplay and whose book Story: Substance, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting is one of the go-to texts in the field, is about to grade this Oscar season.

His judgment? Surveying the 10 screenplays competing for the two writing trophies at the 83rd Annual Academy Awards, he says: "This is quite a nice year. None of them are embarrassing." (OK, class, everyone can relax a bit -- especially those of you like Toy Story 3's Andrew Stanton who have sat in on McKee's seminars.)

McKee credits the writing in such TV series as In Treatment and The Wire for raising the level of screenwriting by educating audiences to appreciate subtext and not just spectacle.

"Great writing is in the subtext," he explains. "Often producers and marketing people, they want it all in dialogue or voice-over because they have no respect for the audience. But the Academy has always favored what I would call 'indoor movies' -- intimate, psychologically complex stories. The Fighter, King's Speech, The Social Network, even Winter's Bone are all really indoor stories, the kind of thing cable TV does, but they are outnumbering the big productions here."

"But I'll tell you what most impresses me," he says, pointing to Winter's Bone and The Kids Are All Right, from director/co-writers Debra Granik and Lisa Cholodenko, respectively, as well as True Grit, with its spunky heroine, Mattie Ross. "It's the number of women writer-directors and the number of women protagonists." Pointing to a recent study of Wikipedia that found that less than 15% of its contributors are women, he notes, "Some professor who studied this says that 85-15 is normal balance of male to female in any enterprise. Women are just not assertive enough. But I look at this list, and it's higher than that, and it's about time. If there's anything this world needs in terms of storytelling, it's, for god's sake, let's hear what women have to say as writers and directors. I never had a sister or a daughter, so mother-daughter relationships fascinate me, and The Kids Are All Right had a lot of that."

The other thing that strikes McKee about this year's movies is how adaptations dominate. (And having been portrayed onscreen by Brian Cox in 2002's Adaptation, McKee knows a thing or two about that subject.)

Setting aside the Academy's distinction between what's adapted (Toy Story 3, for example, because it's based on existing characters) and what's considered an original (The King's Speech, for instance, though it draws from the historical record), McKee counts seven of the 10 nominated screenplays as adaptations of novels, existing characters or real-life events. And it's those true-life stories in particular that presented real challenges.

"The first problem any writer faces with a biographical subject is the enormous amount of material," he says. "Every life has hundreds of thousands of hours and many characters, and you have to boil it down to two hours. The problem is interpretation -- realizing that whatever interpretation you might come up with, someone else might take the material and turn it on its head."

In the case of 127 Hours and King's Speech, he says, the writers did have the advantage of a set end-point -- Aron Ralston's arm-severing escape, King George VI's climactic speech -- toward which they could work.

The Fighter had that too. But, in McKee's view: "One of the most interesting things about The Fighter is trying to discern what kind of drama it is. Is it a sports movie? A coming-of-age drama? No, what it really is is a domestic drama. The family as a group is really the protagonist with all this self-destructive stuff going on, promoting the kid while they are tearing him down. It's an impressive piece of writing in terms of figuring out where its heart really is."

But his highest marks go to Aaron Sorkin's Social Network because the life in question, that of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, "doesn't give you a great ending the way The Fighter did, so you have to make some ending about some other thing that changed and make audiences care about it. Sorkin had a great challenge because he had a protagonist who is not particularly empathetic because he's awkward and closed-off socially. But he did a brilliant job of making the hows and whys of what he did quirky enough so that the process really intrigues us. He knew exactly where to create tension in the audience's mind. You don't have a big climax, but you have a big resolution."

Journalists are busy debating the veracity of such movies as King's Speech and Social Network, but McKee has no patience for that. "I will never understand that debate," he says. "All story is fiction. Autobiography is fantasy. Biography is fiction in the sense that you have to make choices. And out of the enormity of the material, the sliver of choices that you make is an interpretation of what could be dozens of contradictory interpretations. And they are all more or less true.

"All we ask of biographers," he adds, "is that they make a fair, heartfelt and honest interpretation of their characters, knowing that 99% of the facts will be cut out, certain things will be merged and the chronological order of certain things will be changed."

He adds: "Journalists get trapped because they don't understand the difference between fact and truth. They think fact is truth, but fact is not truth. Truth is how and why what happened; it's always an interpretation. If you don't like it, go write another movie." 

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Pogledao sam DUEL AT DIABLO Ralph Nelsona, dinamičan cavalry vestern iz 1966. fokusiran na akciju u kome se, u jednoj rasno ambivalenoj situaciji protiv opsade Apača bore belci predvođeni James Garnerom i Sidney Poitierom. Nažalost, nema prilike da se u političkom smislu razjasni pozicija Poitierovog lika u odnosu na Indijance, odnosno nešto na temu onoga što ljude njegove rase čeka u zemlji koju su belci oteli od Indijanaca i moglu bi se reći da je uvod u kasnije politilčki angažovanije radove Ralpha Nelsona kao što su TICK TICK TICK ili WILBY CONSPIRACY odnosno izuzetno značajni SOLDIER BLUE jedan od bitnijih antivesterna.

Iako DUEL AT DIABLO vrca od čitljivih rasnih tenzija, on ipak ostaje u domenu vrlo dinamičnog i efektnog akcionog vesterna sa James Garnerom koji je dosrastao zadatku i glumački i fizički, uostalom on je poznat po vrlo raspoloženom prilasku stuntovima.

DUEL AT DIABLO ima svoje mesto u istoriji vesterna jer najavljuje nke kasnije značajnije radove a sam po sebi se u repertoarskom smislu jako dobro drži.

* * * / * * * *

[crippled_avenger]

Jel ga se sećate?

Mimi

Svetski priznat naučnik
Dr Miodrag Mićić: Ne vraćam se u Srbiju
Suzana Sudar | 06. 02. 2011. - 00:53h | Komentara: 0

Njegovo poznavanje egzaktnih nauka bilo je daleko ispred znanja vršnjaka, škole je završavao pre vremena i bio najbolji među najboljima. Miodrag Mićić, nekada čudo od deteta, mali Tesla i novi Leonardo, kako su ga zvali, dete o kome su pisale sve novine, snimale se specijalne emisije, dokumentarni film... Za njega nije bilo mesta na Beogradskom univerzitetu. Zato je svoju sreću potražio preko okeana, gde je za kratko vreme postigao sve o čemu je maštao.
Sa 37 godina obezbedio je sebi kuću, jahtu, avion ,,pajper čiroki", mercedes kabriolet i za nas neobične kućne ljubimce divlje mačke

U Americi sam lepo prihvaćen, moj naučni rad je cenjen i nagrađen i, što je najznačajnije, moje ideje se realizuju. Čini me srećnim što su se društvo i kompanije za koje sam radio obogatile od mog znanja i rada, jer su moji naučni radovi materijalizovani, proizvodi koje sam stvorio pomažu naučnicima u celom svetu i stvaraju nova radna mesta od kojih živi mnogo porodica. To je moje najveće bogatstvo kaže za ,,Blic nedelje" dr Miodrag Mićić.



Dobro obavešten i bez dlake na jeziku, kritičan je kada je reč o stanju u našoj nauci. On smatra da je jedina pozitivna promena u tome što se društvo otvorilo prema inostranstvu i protoku informacija.



Dobro je što su bar delimično obnavljane naučne laboratorije, ali u mnogim slučajevima su nabavljani neadekvatni sistemi koji ne udovoljavaju stvarnim potrebama istraživača i institucija, i bez budžeta za održavanje i kontinuiranu nadogradnju. Nažalost, o mnogim drugim pitanjima, stvari su se znatno pogoršale. Osnovni je problem što su sredstva koja se izdvajaju za nauku mala i razvodnjena, raspoređena neselektivno, tako da finansiranje naučnih projekata postaje socijalna kategorija za održavanje zaposlenosti i nesposobnih, umesto da podrži istraživanja koja mogu doneti rezultate. U Srbiji je svako na nekom projektu, a u SAD ili u EU manje od 20 odsto prispelih projekata se finansira, ogromna je konkurencija kvalitetnih projekata, od kojih samo najbolji dobiju sredstva.



Svetle tačke u našoj nauci nastaju samo zbog neverovatnog angažovanja pojedinaca.



Naši naučnici iz oblasti prirodnih nauka, fizičke hemije, hemije, fizike, astronomije, bioloških nauka i pojedinci iz tehničkih, agrotehničkih i medicinskih nauka objavljuju rezultate u svetskim vodećim časopisima i imaju dobru reputaciju u međunarodnim krugovima. Šta to vredi, kad za to nisu adekvatno nagrađeni, jer ih guše oni koji objavljuju radove u domaćim pseudonaučnim časopisima. Generalno, kod nas ne postoji osmišljena strategija naučno-tehničkog progresa zemlje. Nikoga ne treba da čudi što ona malobrojna tehnička inteligencija odlazi u beli svet, gladna istraživanja i dokazivanja, a sve je više onih kojima je svet pružio šansu još u toku školovanja da iskažu svoj talenat. Pogledajte samo ovu naših generaciju fenomenalnih matematičara koji su osvojili čuveni Kembridž .



Iako često službeno dolazi u Beograd, gde sarađuje s akademikom Ljubišom Rakićem na istraživanja dijagnostičkih metoda ranog otkrivanja Alchajmerove bolesti, sa prof. Ksenijom Radotić na problemima biofizike ćelijskog zida, do posla recenzenta za konkurs ,,Najbolja tehnološka inovacija u Srbiji", Miodrag Mićič iskreno kaže da ne namerava da se vraća u Srbiju.



Nekoliko mojih veoma cenjenih kolega u svetu se vratilo misleći da se situacija u Srbiji promenila, poverovali su pričama Ministarstva za nauku, a onda su se našli u nezavidnoj situaciji jer niko nije dobio obećani posao iz čiste ljubomore, pošto je većina njih imala više naučnih radova i citata nego oni kod kojih je trebalo da se zaposle. A to kod nas ne prolazi. Klanovi vladaju svuda, pa i u nauci. U Americi ljudi vole da se druže s uspešnijima od sebe i u većini slučajeva vole da vam pomognu i da čuju sta želite da uradite, jer ako vi uspete, to je i njihov uspeh priča sa setom Miki, kako ga zovu američki prijatelji, koji je zahvaljujući talentu i radu sa 37 godina uspeo sebi da priušti skoro sve o čemu je maštao kuću, jahtu, avion ,,pajper čiroki" , mercedes kabriolet i za nas neobične kućne ljubimce divlje mačke.



Meni novac nije primaran, nego nauka i moji hobiji. O svemu ovome bih mogao da sanjam da sam ostao u Srbiji, iako sam to svim srcem želeo. Moje ideje, kao i mnogih drugih inovatora i naučnika, ostale bi samo mrtvo slovo na papiru. Jedino mi je žao što nisam otišao mnogo ranije, nego sam čekao da u svojoj zemlji postanem višak. Bio bih mnogo uspešniji i doprineo bih više svetu, sebi i naravno Srbiji zaključuje Miodrag Mićić, koji odavno svojim naučnim radovima i novim proizvodima pomera granice mogućeg.



Karijeru je započeo kao stručni saradnik-pripravnik na Fakultetu za fizičku hemiju u Beogradu, ali iako je bio najbolji student, odbijen je za mesto asistenta.



U Ameriku se otisnuo 1998. gde je prvo bio postdiplomac-asistent na Univerzitetu u Majamiju, a potom je radio kao istraživač u Pacifik Nortvest nacionalnoj laboratoriju u Ričlandu, te kao viši naučni savetnik u ,,Veeco Instruments", vodećoj kompaniji za proizvodnju nanotehnoloških instrumenata.





Naučnik, pilot, nautičar
Pod Mićićevim rukovodstvom izrađen je i lansiran prvi komercijalni upotrebljivi optički mikroskop u bliskom polju (NSOM) i mikrospektrometrijskl sistem, Aurora3-Spec. Od 2004. je na mestu potpredsednika za istraživanje i razvoj MP Biomedicals LLC-a, gde je pokrenuo nov odeljak firme za proizvodnju instrumenta i razvio trenutno jedan od najpopularnijih sistema za ekstrakciju molekula DNK, FastPrep-24 i FastPrep-96, koji se koriste u više od 6.000 laboratorija širom sveta. Strastveni je pilot i nautičar, i član najveće organizacije vlasnika, uzgajivača i ljubitelja velikih mačaka LIOC (Long Island Ocelot Club). Živi u Rančo Santa Margariti u Oranž Kantriju, Južna Kalifornija.

[crippled_avenger]

With a film adaptation of the 80's TV series "21 Jump Street" on the way, it sounds like the filmmakers are actively trying to get original show star Johnny Depp for a cameo, an idea Depp has previously indicated he's open to.

"I really hope he does it. It would mean the world to us and I think everyone wants to see him do it... and he's enough of a madman to do it" says actor Channing Tatum who stars in the upcoming film.

Talking with The L.A. Times whilst doing promotion for the upcoming release of "The Eagle", Tatum said the film will slightly differ from the original's show's premise of young cops going undercover in high school or college.

"This is more like 'Back to the Future', you get to go back and relive your high-school life" he says, adding that the film will mix moments of fantasy with outrageous comedy. "I've never read a script that I'm like, 'How are they letting us do this?'. I don't even mean the censoring board. I'm like, 'No, I can't believe they're going to put this in a movie.' It's freaking ridiculous" he says.

This change of tone includes the characters he and Jonah Hill are playing - "It's a total reversal. Jonah's the cool one and I'm the loser." The story itself concerns a new drug that has run rampant at a high school, and Tatum and Hill are tasked with cutting it off at the source.

Shooting on the project kicks off this spring under the helm of Phil Lord and Chris Miller.

[Josephine]

Jel ga se sećate?

Mimi

Svetski priznat naučnik
Dr Miodrag Mićić: Ne vraćam se u Srbiju

Ko je još ovde uspeo na osnovu znanja i pameti? Tužno mi je da čitam ovakve tekstove.

[crippled_avenger]

Pogledao sam odličan i nedovoljno poznat 70s cop flick THE SEVEN UPS Philipa D'Antonija koji je po meni olako otpisan kao D'Antonijev pokušaj da naplati neverovatan uspeh njegovog prethodnog filma THE FRENCH CONNECTION. D'Antoni je ovog puta smatrao da mu ne treba reditelj i sa mesta producenta se premestio u ulogu reditelja i moram priznati da iako THE SEVEN UPS nije na nivou FRENCH CONNECTIONa (a šta pa jeste?) ovo je jedan odličan i dinamičan pandurski film, koji ne može da crossoveruje u nekekav Panteon filmskih klasika ali u okvirima svoga žanrsa stoji savim dobro.

Roy Scheider, Friedkinova second banana ovde igra glavnu ulogu, vođu tima zvanog "Seven Ups" nazvanog po tome kolike robije dobijaju njihovi uhapšenici, koji se uključuje u jednu neobičnu istragu koja se tiče otmica ugednih njujorških mafijaša za koje u jednom trenutku i oni sami bivaju osumnjičeni.

Milje u kome se SEVEN UPS dešava je old school pandurski, sa sve detektivima odmetnicima koji legitimišu upotrbu torture, ballbuster šefovima koji im ipak na kraju svega veruju, sa mafijašima u elegantnim mantilima, sa negativcima psihopatama koji odstupaju od racionalne "negativnosti" mafijaša i kao takvi zaslužuju apsolutni prezir... Ovaj film nudi sve po redu.

Uprkos osporavanjima D'Antonija, ono što mu ne mogu osporiti je izuzetbno efektno realizovana akcija, a naročito car chase u kome je D'Antoni pokušao i uspeo da dostigne svoje producentsko čedo, a koje se smatra delom Billa Hickmana, čuvenog stunt coordinatora koji u ovom filmu igra i jednu od zapaženih epizoda kao hitman i sidekick Lynchovom psihotičnom negativcu.

I zaista, potera u THE SEVEN-UPS je fascinantna i tako moćne stuntove koje prave pravi ljudi i pravi automobili, danas u vreme CGIa, sve ređe viđamo. D'Antoni je bio s pravom ubeđen da će se film pamtiti po toj sekvenci, ali srećom ni ono što je oko nje nije uopšte loše.

* * * / * * * *

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Evo jedne kritike koja dobro sumira adute CLOUDYja

Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs (2009)

Director: Chris Miller, Phil Lord

Time Out rating
Average user rating
22 reviews
Movie review

From Time Out London
The Pixar crew have been smugly ensconced as kings of their computer-animated castle for a while now, secure in the knowledge that while the other animation houses – with their sass-talking sloths and farting ogres – might amuse the little 'uns for a couple of hours, they'd never trouble the pantheon of cartoon greats. Sony Pictures's 'Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs' may not scale the artistic heights of a 'Finding Nemo' or 'Wall-E', but it's the most satisfying and original non-Pixar CG animated movie to hit screens in a while.

On a remote island principality in the mid-Atlantic, the populace have been living on sardines since the canned-fish market dried up. So plucky young scientist Flint Lockwood, inventor of overactive hair-unbalder and spray-on shoes (which you can never remove), commits himself to solving the problem. His answer is a machine which turns water into food, creating anything from sliced pizza to ice cream with toppings. It's a success – until a freak accident happens, the machine goes berserk, and it starts to rain cheeseburgers.

The makers of the film are not remotely interested in pop-culture references or celebrity cameos: the voice cast favours stalwarts like Anna Faris and James Caan over inappropriate A-listers. Banishing such petty distractions frees director Phil Lord to focus on more important issues, like story and character: the plot is wonderfully twisty, building to an eyeball-frazzling culinary climax of truly epic proportions. The characters are equally well drawn, from self-absorbed, overambitious doofus Flint to his expressionless but somehow heartbreaking sad-sack dad, Tim.

But the film's greatest pleasure – and the element that sets it apart from its smarmy, in-jokey predecessors – is its bizarre sense of humour. Fusing snappy one-liners with a kid-friendly seam of slapstick incorporating everything from talking monkeys to homicidal Gummi Bears, the script provokes comparison with comedy from The Marx Brothers to 'The Mighty Boosh'. This sense of unpredictability, coupled with some breathlessly paced and visually stunning action scenes, makes this the animated success of 2009... at least until 'Up' opens next month.

Author: Tom Huddleston

Time Out London Issue 2039: 17-23 September, 2009

[crippled_avenger]

Fetiš, samo za Albeda i Mehmeta

[Meho Krljic]

Ovo je kao da u oku uragana nađeš još jedan uragan.

[crippled_avenger]

Toliko testosterona na maloj fotki koju je zarobio mali finski uređaj. Nokia je stvarno neuništiva...

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IM Global will commence pre-sales in Berlin this week on the Sylvester Stallone action project Headshot.

IM Global is partnering with Alexandra Milchan's EMJAG Productions and shooting is scheduled to kick off in May in Louisiana and New York

Wayne Kramer will direct from a screenplay by Alessandro Camon about a New Orleans hitman who teams up with an NYPD police officer to avenge his friend's death.

Milchan produces with Alfred Gough, Miles Milllar and Kevin King Templeton, with IM Global's Ford and Deepak Nayar taking executive producer credits.

"Headshot is exactly the type of fast-paced, universally themed action project that suits our business model," Ford said. " Sylvester Stallone is an international icon and we're really excited to be in business with him."

"I'm thrilled and honoured to be working with Sylvester Stallone, whose talent I've long admired, and with this amazing creative team, and could not have asked for a better partner than IM Global for this project," Milchan added.

"This is a terrific project and I am very excited to have the opportunity to work with IM Global and to be producing another major film with Sylvester Stallone," King said.

Ford brokered the deal with the producers and Stallone's deal was negotiated by WME and attorneys Jake Bloom and Ralph Brescia at Bloom, Hergott, Diemer, Rosenthal, Laviolette & Feldman.

[Albedo 0]

[Meho Krljic]

 



To je ta duhovna vertikala o kojoj se priča.

[Shozo Hirono]

 

[crippled_avenger]

Albedo, sve ti je jasno

[crippled_avenger]

Tijanić, osamdesetih o Bori Čorbi

[crippled_avenger]

Zoon, inače, na tvojoj sličici fali samo Mel...

Slutim da ga nije bilo u odgovarajućoj pozi.

[Albedo 0]

zaboravio sam Mela 

a ima ga, nije da ga nema






+

[crippled_avenger]

Pa dodaj Mela. To je slika koja je definitivna!

[Albedo 0]

eh sad...



kao da je to lako... ovaj redosljed je pažljivo biran, gdje sad Mel može da stane?

Jasno je da je Tijanić na vrhu, samo je pitanje da li je Mel Kimov sljedbenik ili Kim Melov?

[crippled_avenger]

Mel Kimov...

[Meho Krljic]

Zvuči kao ime nekog bugarskog WWF rvača.

[crippled_avenger]

Hrvača.

[Albedo 0]

ispravljena kardinalna greška