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History and Traditional Culture

Monasticism Yushu prefecture is rich in Buddhist monasteries. Being a constituent of the former Nangchen kingdom, the area was, for most of the time, not under domination by the Dalai Lama’s Gelugpa order in Lhasa. The different balance of power in this part of Kham enabled the older Tibetan Buddhist orders to prevail in Yushu. Of the 195 pre-1958 lamaseries only 23 belonged to the Gelugpa.

An overwhelming majority of more than 100 monasteries followed and still follow the teachings of the various Kagyüpa schools, with some of their sub-sects only found in this part of Tibet. The Sakyapa were and are also strong in Yushu, with many of their 32 monasteries being among the most significant in Kham. The Nyingmapa’s monastic institutions amount to about the same number, while the Bönpo are only met with in one lamasery they share with the Nyingmapa.

Prior to collectivization in 1958, the entire monastic population of present-day Yushu TAP amounted to more than 25,000 Buddhist monks and nuns, with approximately 300 incarnate lamas among them. On the average about three to five per cent of the population were monastic, with a strikingly higher share in Nangqên county, where monks and nuns made up between 12 and 20 % of the community.

Michael Moorcock, Alan Moore, Iain Sinclair

So Michael Moorcock, Alan Moore and Iain Sinclair had a chat last night.

I was there.

Here are some things I wrote down while I was there.

I am instituting more-or-less arbitrary breaks, signalled by ===, to make this more readable.

There is also some stuff in (parentheses) that is extraneous, added at the time or now.

(This is not a complete transcription.)

Alan Moore has excellent shoes.

Alan Moore is surprisingly spry.

Iain Sinclair says “To write about the city is to write a mythology.”

Ian Sinclair: naming issues — ‘psychogeography’ versus ‘deep topography’.

They are having some problems with the lights.

They are turning off the lights.

Only my row has any light now.

(This makes me feel exposed.)

Alan Moore’s laugh comes over his microphone  a lot. It is deep and throaty, and makes him sound friendly.

Iain Sinclair says “Before we can move forward, we have to absorb everything that has come before, and rip it off.”

Some great stuff in there.

When not working, [Rufus Sewell] enjoys photography and is a fan of Leica equipment. Says Sewell: "My favourite things are just wandering from place to place, going to cafes, taking photographs. My favourite day is a happy accident."^[11]

I grew up reading a lot of science fiction and even now we still aren’t at the point where we can make really hardcore science fiction movies. This is really my genre of choice.

I guess genre at the moment in movies is much more heavily influenced by comics and horror, which are the two major strands going on and I wish I could swing it solidly to science fiction.

Doing a big space opera is something I’ve always wanted to do. To this day it’s still tough to convince the powers that be to go in that direction. I’ve always dreamt of doing The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester or something like that. We are just not there yet.

I hope Proyas continues to make films and that one day he makes something really, really epic. I've always loved Dark City, and last night I really, really enjoyed Knowing.

Oil is being pumped in Iraq right now, but because the country has not invested in its oil infrastructure, production is far below its potential. For the auction, oil companies selected which fields they are interested in and submitted bids detailing how much they could increase production.

In return for a contract, the companies have to be willing to make loans to Iraq's government, which the government would repay with oil earnings. Any oil produced would still belong to the Iraqis.

Such deals won't necessarily be highly profitable for the oil companies. In the next phase of the competition, however, the Iraqi government is expected to open fields that have not yet been explored or developed. The companies that win the right to search for oil might then be able to take a share of what they find. It's that competition — not this one — that would mean big money for the companies.

"This is just everybody kind of wanting to get their foot in the door for the bigger prizes that will be here in a year or two," says Stratfor's Zeihan. No one wants to be left out.

"What makes Iraq special," says Diwan, "is [that] there is room for all the big oil companies at the same time, and for all them to have sizable projects. Everybody will get something fairly large."

Iraq is currently pumping about 2.5 million barrels a day. With modern technology and foreign expertise, experts say, the country could produce four times as much. That would be a bonanza for Iraqis, even if they have to share the wealth with foreign companies.

The endgame quietly unfolds?

A study by the World Institute for Development Economics Research at United Nations University reports that the richest 1% of adults alone owned 40% of global assets in the year 2000, and that the richest 10% of adults accounted for 85% of the world total. The bottom half of the world adult population owned barely 1% of global wealth. Extensive statistics, many indicating the growing world disparity, are included in the available report, press releases, Excel tables and Powerpoint slides.^[9] Moreover, another study found that the richest 2% own more than half of global household assets.^[10] Despite this, the distribution has been changing quite rapidly in the direction of greater concentration of wealth.^[11]

My own sense of helplessness is abated by blogging manically. It's all I know to do. But watching a boot come down on a human face in real time is ... well more than frustrating. But this is the fallen world we inhabit in which power always trumps freedom if it is ruthless enough in the short term. What we look for is the long term, the arc of history, and the rightness of the cause. Our job cannot be to end tyranny or evil, for that is impossible and the attempt can be counter-productive. But we can expose it, explain it, witness it and through the march of time chip way at it.

Saturn 3 is a 1980 science fiction film starring Kirk Douglas, Farrah Fawcett and Harvey Keitel. Direction is credited to Stanley Donen but the project was conceived by John Barry who was due to direct until a dispute with Douglas led to his being fired. The screenplay was written by award-winning British novelist Martin Amis.

The film was widely panned by reviewers as derivative, mediocre and lacking in suspense. Some of the space effects shots appeared lackluster compared to the new standard set by Star Wars. The film included brief nude scenes by both Farrah Fawcett and a 31 years older Kirk Douglas, resulting in an MPAA rating of R.

I'd forgotten Martin Amis wrote a science fiction film. Can't remember where I first read about it. Has anyone seen it?

As security forces and protesters continue to clash in Iran, the government has begun using propaganda and entertainment in an attempt to quiet the populace, TIME magazine has reported—and it turns out that a Lord of the Rings marathon on Tehran 's Channel Two is part of that plan.

The newsweekly was contacted by a resident of the capital, who asked for anonymity. He or she reported that "Iranian television usually treats its viewers to one or two Hollywood or European movie nights a week. But these are not normal times, so it's been two or three such movies a day. It's part of the push to keep people at home and off the streets, to keep us busy, to get us out of the regime's hair. ... Channel Two is putting on a Lord of the Rings marathon as part of the government's efforts to restore peace."

The writer shared that many viewers are finding a political subtext to Peter Jackson's trilogy:

"I wonder which official picked this film, starting to suspect, even hope, that there is a subversive soul manning the controls at seda va sima, central broadcasting," wrote the anonymous Iranian. "It is way too easy to find political meaning in the film, to draw comparisons to what is happening in real life. There are themes that seem to allude to Mir-Hossein Mousavi, the candidate President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claims to have defeated: the unwanted quest and the risking of life in pursuit of an unanticipated destiny. Could he be Boromir, the imperfect warrior who is heroic at the end, dying to defend humanity? Didn't Mousavi talk about being ready for martyrdom?"

It really feels like the world is crazy at the moment. Everything upside down.

Between 2003 and 2005 Michael Schmelling photographed a number of residences in the accompaniment of Disaster Masters, a New York-based company that specializes in cleaning homes and counseling hoarders. Facing eviction, health hazards, and family interventions, the owners of these homes were unable or unwilling to get rid of the things they had accumulated. These people are often diagnosed clinically as having Obsessive Compulsive Hoarding Disorder (OCDHD). Through a process of salvaging and discarding, the contents of a home can be disposed of and rearranged within hours. The process can be both invasive and cathartic. Working through this chaos, Schmelling illuminates the random sentimentality that can infuse one’s belongings.

While hoarding may at first appear to be an aberration, looking through The Plan can inspire a sense of familiarity and empathy. Many of the things Schmelling photographed are the same things that pass through our homes every day: an old baseball, a weeks worth of junk mail, some spare change, a rotten piece of fruit, unread books. Schmelling documented these interiors, their contents, and the process of clearing, as a means to examine the nature of hoarding and its antecedents: compulsion, consumerism, and the human need to impart meaning to objects.

This looks like an interesting subject.