Euphoria

Facebook has an interesting trailer of Euphoria (WARNING: FACEBOOK TRACKS VISITORS) , which was just shown at The Senator Theater in Baltimore:

“Euphoria,” a science-based, self-help art film about the authentic pursuit of happiness, is presented by Creative Alliance and Senator Theatre. The film begins by asking “are you happy?” and takes off on a journey through the American landscape—the one that surrounds us and the one inside us. Synchronized swimmers inhabit an underwater jungle of neurons; Teddy Bears hover in arcs of electricity, and real people share how their lives have been transformed by pursuing what is meaningful and engaging to them.

The Baltimore Sun also reports:

A montage of visual metaphors, profiles and scientific fact, feature-length Euphoria is not a documentary in the truest sense, and its narrative arc is as loose and loopy as can be.

Nor does Euphoria attempt to terrify viewers in the tradition of the 1936 cult film Reefer Madness and other memorable media scare tactics.

Instead, Euphoria, through scientific, historical and cultural inquiry, makes the point that the “pursuit of meaning and engagement looks like a good idea,” says Boot, the film’s director and screenwriter. Its message, though, is not revealed in any one scene or sentence. It arrives by way of a non-stop accrual of symbols, questions and thoughts over the course of the 80-minute film.

More euphoria = less need for security…unless of course pursuit of euphoria is incompatible with concepts such as common law, which just brings us back to the need for those who get euphoria from designing security controls.

Tickle Me Pink

by Johnny Flynn

Tickle me pink
I’m rosy as a flushed red apple skin
except I’ve never been as sweet
I’ve rolled around the orchard
and found myself too awkward
and tickle me green I’m too naive

Pray for the people inside your head
for they won’t be there when you’re dead
muffled out and pushed back down
pushed back through the leafy ground

Time is too early
my hair isn’t curly
I wish I was home and tucked away
when nothing goes right
and the future’s dark as night
what you need is a sunny sunny day

Pray for the people inside your head
for they won’t be there when you’re dead
muffled out and pushed back down
pushed back through the leafy ground

Don’t know where I can find myself a brand new pair of ears
don’t know where I can buy a heart
The one I’ve got is shoddy
I need a brand new body
and then I can have a brand new start

Pray for the people inside your head
for they won’t be there when you’re dead
muffled out and pushed back down
pushed back through the leafy ground

Monsters in the valley
and shootings in the alley
and people fall flat at every turn
there is no straight and narrow
offload your wheelbarrow
and pick up your sticks and twigs to burn

Pray for the people inside your head
for they won’t be there when you’re dead
muffled out and pushed back down
pushed back through the leafy ground

Pray for the people inside your head
for they won’t be there when you’re dead
when you’re dead
when you’re dead…

'Tickle Me Pink' – New Version

The melody of this song is familiar to me. Chris Sidorfsky wrote and performed something very, very similar in 1989 at a talent show. I played the drums with/for him and at that talent show I used an old wooden trash can for the beat. I don’t remember the exact lyrics by Chris but it had something to do with a frog caught in a web.

Beijing Underground

Dancing pandas grace the stage for Chinese punk (pop) bands:

Why don’t American pop bands have giant bald eagles dancing around, or at least brown bears and beavers?

I think Caffe-In’s best song is “Mario and Peaches”. An arguably better band, with an awesome name to boot, is Carsick Cars. Their “Zhong nan hai” is catchy but they also play a song called…”Panda”. Could the image of a panda be so ubiquitous in China that it also provides a form of shelter for commentary and dissent? On the other hand, maybe the pandas are state spies observing the crowd.

Knut’s keeper found dead

Some speculate that separating the polar bear and his keeper led to a decline in both their health:

The celebrity polar bear was pictured walking morosely around his enclosure and staring at the ground, a far cry from the happy images of him with ‘surrogate father’ Thomas Doeflein as a young bear.

Mr Doerflein, 44, was found dead amid fears that he became depressed after he was told to stay away from Knut because they were too close.

Doerflien had to give up playing with the bear due to Zoo administration fear for his safety. It would seem the separation was more dangerous.