turns out the temporary unavailable sign was for my background image. well, here's a temporary replacement then.

lift off those bold capital letters please!

i wonder how long 'temporary' is for blogger. to my surprise, this morning, i saw those words: temporarily unavailable. written in bold and capital and repeating all over the blog. didn't like it. but i'm not sure i would have posted anything if i hadn't seen them.

i miss a lot of things.

how does this justify the demand for polanski's release?

'the outraged middle class feminists and liberals demand their pound of flesh from Polanski while the real criminals in America—CIA and military torturers and killers—go free'.

petition for polanski

i can't believe the list of names

cold case

roman polanski detained in zurich

gilberto perez writes, simply, and beautifully

nobody understands lacan very well. it may be that he is difficult to understand because he is profound - he is so obscure that it's hard to tell - but it seems to have been his intention to make himself difficult to understand. in his youth he was associated with the surrealists and all his life he seems to have kept up the surrealist program of bafflement on purpose. he may have been an important thinker or he may have been a charlatan and it's indeed surreal that it should be hard to tell; he was probably a bit of both. his vogue among american academics he no doubt enjoyed as part of the surrealist joke. the purpose of academics in making themselves difficult to understand is to stake out a field of specialized expertise to which outsiders will defer. they set up a jargon impenetrable to outsiders that they themselves may not understand very well, and after a while they may not even know that they don't know whereof they speak because they speak what has become the idiom of the field, the language in which they talk to one another by common consent.

from 'the material ghost'

support for ahmet yildiz

http://ahmetyildizismyfamily.blogspot.com/

http://www.bianet.org/bianet/diger/116920-ahmet-yildiz-cinayeti-davasi-basladi-sanik-baba-firarda

inglourious basterds

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/sep2009/bast-s01.shtml

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/may/20/cannes-film-festival-tarantino-inglourious-basterds

http://twitter.com/zizekspeaks/status/3591466984

we do not know what a photograph is; we do not know how to place it ontologically. we might say that we don't know how to think of the connection between a photograph and what it is a photograph of. the image is not a likeness; it is not exactly a replica, or a relic, or a shadow, or an apparition either, though all of these natural candidates share a striking feature with photographs - an aura or history of magic surrounding them.

...

we said that the record reproduces its sound, but we cannot say that a photograph reproduces a sight (or a look, or an appearance). it can seem that language is missing a word a this place.

from 'the world viewed', s. cavell

egg issues

why do the male penguins protect their (super fragile) egg-children from the cold, rotating from the centre to the periphery, in their circled colony? why do the salmon, after traveling miles in the ocean, after having seen new worlds, swim against the current to travel back to the origin of the stream where they were born? why do the turtles, on the other hand, lay eggs in the sand and leave them there to hatch?

left on a jet plane

took me 24 hours to come to istanbul. (mental note: always have a connecting flight; never change airlines; don't ever wait for more than four hours in between flights)
but i must admit this method beats jetlag.

in less than 24 hours

say goodbye to seattle

the reason why i don't wear suspenders is the fear of social exclusion.

what I have seen with my eyes was simultaneous: what i shall transcribe, successive, because of the very nature of language.
how can the predicates “simultaneous”, “total”, “perfect”, be translated into the order of discourse whose predicates are “successive”, “fragmentary”, “imperfect”?
moreover, there is no solution to the central problem: how to enumerate, only partially, an infinite ensemble?

borges, the aleph

top documentary films

a web site i've run into:

http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/

we feed the world

a documentary by erwin wagenhofer

http://www.we-feed-the-world.at/en/film.htm

my response should be more than just crying. but it feels like, no it's obvious, the whole world is parceled out by the largest corporations and trying to run out of one's trap you fall into the other's. the image i have on my mind is of monsters sucking and depleting and destroying everything they see, happily, and towards the end, themselves, without any regret. it's not a funny image. really, if this is the point we've reached in our civilization, there's no doubt we are all essentially evil.