PACHINKO

PACHINKO

Pachinko パチンコ is the name of something that is perhaps less understandable to Westerners, but only because we have other manifestations of alienation and ludopathy.

Pachinko パチンコcould be synonymous with mockery.

Verbal Kint taught us that the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he did not exist. And like that… he is gone. 

Even gambling in Japan “does not exist” because it is banned. And it disappears under the name “entertainment” definition by which Pachinko is classified.

Many of us have been through a Pachinko parlor running: along with Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson in the movie Lost in Translation. 

 

Pachinko is a hybrid game, we could say it is the representation of contamination: halfway between a pinball machine and a slot machine.

The trick is precisely the balls that from the game become the very object of winning but cannot be exchanged for money.

By playing Pachinko you can only get prizes of various kinds: chocoloate bars, pens, lighters, candy, T-shirts, cosmetics, bicycles, shopping vouchers, up to so-called “special” prizes i.e. silver or gold objects enclosed in plastic bags.

These special prizes can be exchanged at points outside but nearby Pachinko Parlours: the TUC Shops = Tokyo Union Circulation

I found precise regulations regarding the installation of these phantom vertical pinball machines, but the risk of addiction?

These Pachinko Parlors are places where people are subjected to extremely high noise levels and bright lights.

The players appear to be sitting helpless, completely estranged, as if without identity in the flow of these slow, mechanical movements that cancel out time.

I am very struck by the slogan of a company that runs Pachinko Parlors:

Joy in life

We resolve to bring joy to the lives of our staff, our customers, and society as a whole through our business.

I do not see joy.

 

 

I found a survey from which it mainly shows that the Pachinko Parlour is a place to go alone.

A ball weighs 5.4 gr. a one-dollar box contains two thousand balls, so the weight corresponds to kg. 10.8!

 

I was thinking … with ten kg. of coffee how many cups can we get?  🙂  😉

LOST

LOST

Lost is an entirely unreleased track that anticipates the planned April release of the 20th anniversary celebration edition of Meteora.

2003: after Hybrid Theory, Linkin Park unveils Meteora and still do not know that their work will not be a meteor and will consecrate them to music history.

On Linkin Park’s website you can find these words

congratulations on solving all our puzzles and welcome to our warehouse

 

As you know I love puzzles

I don’t know if in the days during which the countdown appeared before the release of Lost you also tried to solve: clicking on the CD case a word game to guess appeared.

Cute, right?

Overall Lost was really a surprise, and honestly hearing Chester Bennington‘s voice in a totally unreleased track triggered a number of seesaw thoughts for me.

Among other things, the lyrics are particularly striking:

a scar somewhere down inside of me
Something I can not repair ...

I’m trapped in yesterday
Where the pain is all I know

… I’m lost in these memories …

But then, considering the official tweet set on the profile, I agreed to consider Lost as a “time capsule.”

 

In a less metaphorical sense, now the term time capsule is used to refer to an external hard drive for wireless storage, but it also remains the classic “time capsule” we are used to seeing in American movies and beyond.

For example, there is a capsule in the Well Room of the Torre Ghirlandina at the Civic Museum of Modena, which in this video tells us various interesting facts about it

 

 

What would you like to put in a time capsule?

According to the International Time Capsule Society there would be more than 10 thousand time capsules in the world. Only one in a thousand is found.

On Focus you can see a gallery with the nine most wanted capsules in the world.

They are lost

Linkin Park, however, made us find their time, their sense, and they put Anime in it.

Anime アニメ as Kasabake explains on the blog As Circles in the Water comes from “animēshon,” Japanese transliteration of the English word “animation.”

Unfortunately I have huge gaps in the subject, although I find the word Anime poetic and intense, maybe you would like to add something about this wonderful subject?

In the meantime, enjoy your viewing and listening

In an interview Mike Shinoda stated that Lost was not included on the Meteora album because of the sound being too similar to Numb.

What do you think?

WEST SIDE STORY

WEST SIDE STORY

West Side Story is history, let me play on words.

History of cinema even for those who are not fond of musicals.

Do you like musicals?

They are perhaps the most controversial kind of movies: either you hate it, or you love it.

I love it.

In case you have any doubts, I suggest you to read this post on the blog Come cerchi sull’acqua

West Side Story was born as a play on Broadway and Jack Gottlieb tells us how it was conceived by drawing inspiration from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and how Jerome Robbins had initially imagined Juliet as a Jewish girl and Romeo as an Italian Catholic. The action, set during the Easter / Passover season, was supposed to take place on the Lower East Side of New York City. So the title could have been EAST Side Story or Gangway.

I find it totally understandable that Steven Spielberg said it was the toughest film of his career. 

I started looking at it together with all the positive assumptions, and with all the curiosity to find out how the arduous challenge had been solved.

The beginning shows the imminent demolition of the neighborhood and, personally, I interpreted it as the metaphor of a breaking wrecking ball but not about the past.

Time is to be demolished.

Because despite all the years that have passed, studded with dramatic events, it is as if history had been written today.

And Rita Moreno becomes like a fulcrum of human suffering, around which the repeated cyclically recurring pain manifests itself despite the passage of time.

In this video she receives the Oscar for the interpretation of the character of Anita in 1962

 

And following is the post with which she congratulates Ariana DeBose for the recent victory for having played the role of Anita, differently and yet with equal effectiveness.

For Rita Moreno in Spielberg’s film the role of Valentina was created: Doc’s widow, who helps and supports Tony after his misadventures with justice, but in various interviews she has been defined as the “mother” of West Side Story for how she advised, assisted, supervised tirelessly.

And obviously all of this entered my heart.

Not to mention her iconic joke for me: Tony asks her to translate “forever” because she wants to declare herself to Maria in Spanish and she, frightened by that tragically unreal idea of absolute, replies something like “why don’t I just say I’d like to have a coffee with you?”

Eh!

Undoubtedly, it is still an important statement, right!?

And while drinking your coffee, I once again recommend you the detailed and professional analysis of Matavitatau

Is there a particular song you prefer from the West Side Story soundtrack?

They are all songs destined to stay in your mind once you listen to them, but, just to name three sensationally super famous, are you more for Tonight, Maria, or America?

SAMANTHA BONANNO PAPER ART

SAMANTHA BONANNO PAPER ART

I have already written how enchanting I find the creations of Samantha Bonanno, but now that we met and that she explained her world a little I must absolutely reiterate: do not miss them!

The books, the paper, the words, take shape and magically transmit emotions in a new dimension, absolutely coherent but at a sensorially three-dimensional level that tangibly reveals the soul enclosed in meanings so far only thought and imagined.

Metaphors, impressions, sensations and feelings expressed in a visual, evocative, and at the same time real and engaging sense.

In particular, the Art exhibited at the Scuderia of Castello Visconteo Sforzesco in Vigevano on the occasion of the exhibition Con la natura e con le mani represent the myth of Persephone in sequence.

GeodeA stone, but also Earth from the root of the name: Geo.
A return to the origin to understand where we started and what we can discover in depth. Waves of matter as a flow of time.

Kore. Childhood, youth. The spring that Persephone herself brings to earth in this existence of hers divided halfway between her mother Demeter who opposes the abduction carried out by Hades, and the role of queen of the underworld.
Κόρη, literally: the daughter; another name, of which numerous variants are known, first of all, Persephone [Περσεϕόνη];
In the double life of Kore the very reality of nature is foreshadowed by which everything that has life is born from the bowels of the earth and – after having completed a certain cycle – returns to the earth.
CORE: In common parlance, by core we mean the “core of the body”.

HekateSisterhood, transformation, dreams and magic. The cycle of life but also the center.
In ancient Greek: Ἑκάτη, Hekátē: she was the goddess of magic and crossroads and was the powerful mistress of darkness, she ruled over the demons, over the night, the moon.
She possessed in herself both the principles of generation, the masculine and the feminine. For this reason it is defined as the source of life and is attributed the vital power over all elements.
This work was made with pages of books in all languages.

And finally Ade. Created with a book not so good, but also in this case a balance: between good and evil.
Basically Persephone does not hate him, not everything is negative, just as from a less pleasant book Art can be born in such a sublime way.

Then maybe Samantha will correct me if I am wrong or leave something out, but in the meantime I advise you to deepen her works because even the sculptures are an unmissable experience for me: from falling in love.

And I would say that Samantha Bonanno in her works contains the essence of …
“To give human life a lofty and enchanting meaning.”
Hermann Hesse.

THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT

THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT

“It is sometimes said that the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in one part of the world can cause a hurricane on the other side of the globe.”
This quote comes from the 2004 film The Butterfly Effect and is inspired by a theory taken up and debated in numerous areas.
Once again, as happened for the War of the Worlds: the inspiration comes from a science fiction novel, it is in fact Ray Bradbury who in his Sound of thunder attributes to the proper death of a butterfly during a journey through time, a variation of future events:

Eckels felt himself fall into a chair. He fumbled crazily at the thick slime on his boots. He held up a clod of dirt, trembling,
“No, it can’t be. Not a little thing like that. No!”
Embedded in the mud, glistening green and gold and black, was a butterfly, very beautiful and very dead.

Another coincidence, also in this case the story was broadcast by the BBC in 2011: here if you want to find the podcast (butterfly from about 35 minutes but I would advise you to listen to it all if you have time).
The butterfly symbol was taken up by Edward Lorenz, mathematician and meteorologist professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in his 1963 paper for the New York Academy of Science and later in a 1979 lecture that went down in history.
In general, the butterfly effect belongs to quantum physics and more precisely to the basis of chaos theory.
Chaos is the most congenial aspect to me, but actually I didn’t want to talk about this … not this time, at least.
Antonietta Gatti is perhaps known to most as “the wife of” despite her respectable curriculum. Her skills add up over time, and I would list, almost a bit to summarize, this recognition: she has been awarded the title of Fellow of the International Union of Societies for Biomaterials Science and Engineering for her contribution to the progress of science. The various national societies of biomaterials and bioengineering have tens of thousands of members worldwide and the union of the various companies has elected Dr. Gatti to be part of the elite of scientists that consists of 32 members, and she was part of a parliamentary commission of inquiry as a responsible consultant. I know, difficult to read, but I found her report very interesting, perhaps because I live in a highly polluted area: here the mortality rate from tumors is terrible:
She deals with nanopathology or pathologies induced by micro and nano-sized particulate exposures, i.e. powders with dimensions less than 100nm (0.1 microns) but her research has become difficult due to the reduced availability of a suitable microscope.
Her flapping wings has not changed the world yet, but she has been able to reach the hearts of people who have made it possible to buy a new electron microscope with their donations.
Let us not stop at the fact that individually we cannot make a difference, let us not stop flying lightly on the difficulties, each of us can be the butterfly of change, let’s believe it, and do not let ourselves be crushed in the mud.

Archives

Pin It on Pinterest