The Man From Earth

Dünyanın üzerinde 14000 yıl boyunca gezmiş bir insanın 2000'li yıllarda profesor olduğu üniversitedeki meslektaşlarına yaptığı itirafı konu alan indie film. Çok başarılı.

Yapımcısı filmi internette yayınlayanlara teşekkür etmiş ben de nasibimi almak istedim teşekkürden.

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Mutluluk

Toplum, özellikle de bizim toplumumuz, bizim sürekli mutlu olmamız için sebepler koyar önümüze. Bebeklikten, yaşlılığa kadar hepimizin hayalleri vardır, birçoğuna ulaşır, bunun en az on katına ulaşamayız. Nitekim, toplum, bilerek ve isteyerek ulaşmamızı engeller hayallerimizin hepsine. Ortada kurulu bir düzen, evrensel bir komplo olduğunu farketmememiz için çabalayan insanlarla, tabularla doludur etrafımız.

 
Hayatı daha karmaşık hale getirmekten başka hiç bir şeye yaramayan bir çok konuda kusursuzluk ararken toplumlar, tek ve nihai amaç olması gereken “mutluluk” konusunda “birçok küçük mutluluğa sahip olmak, büyük mutluluğu bekleyerek ölmekten iyidir” yalanını döndürürler etrafımızda. 

Hayatta tam anlamıyla mutlu olan bir insan görmeniz çok zordur. Eğer bir kaç kişiyi görürseniz bile emin olun ki onların da içinde en az sizde olduğu kadar çok sıkıntı vardır. Ben tam anlamıyla mutluyum diyen tanıştığım bir insanı anlatayım size.Adı, John Purcell’di Alaska’da karşılaştım kendisiyle. Kendisini incile adamış 17 yaşında bir çocuktu. Ben onunla tanışmadan önce lise hayatını bir sene bekletip kendini incili anlamaya adamış, tevrat da dahil olmak üzere hemen hepsini ezberlemiş, tanrıdan uzaklaştığına bir an bile inanmamış, bütün bunların yanında son derece iyi yürekli ve yardımsever bir hayat süren bir çocuktu. Neredeyse fanatik hristiyan bir aileden geliyordu ve ailesiyle –elbette- çok iyi bir ilişkisi vardı. Işte bu arada, benim Oscar Wilde okuduğumu görüp yanıma geldi, felsefenin ölü olduğunu, tek mutluluğun tanrı olduğuna ant içerek, sıradan ve güzel bir nutuktan sonra kendisine bakmam ve örnek almam gerektiğini, isa’nın yolundan şaşmamış bir kul olarak mutlak beyazlığı yaşadığını, sonsuz rahatlık ve mutluluğu kalbinde (kalbine giren kutsal ruh sayesinde) taşıdığını açıkladı.
Bir kelimesine bile inanmadım.
Sonra bir gün okula gelmemeye başladı. 4,5 gün sonra sararmış bir suratla karşıma çıktığında sordum neden okula gelmediğini. Cevaplamadı. On kez zorladım, cevaplamadı. Ben de tahmin etmeye çalıştım. Kendisi, isa huzurunda asla yalan söyleyemediği için tahminlerim doğruysa cevaplamak zorunda kalıyordu neyse ki. En sonunda tamamıyla anlattırdım da olayı.
Okulda, cadılar bayramı dolayısı ile herkesin farklı kostüm giydiği bir gün, kızın biri –ki ben de hatırlıyorum, çok beğenmiştim, çok açık bir fantazi hemşiresi kıyafeti giymişti okula gelirken. John da dayanamamış ve eve gidip mastrubasyon yapmıştı. Sonra okula gelmediği süre içinde sadece su ve kuru ekmek yiyerek kendisini cezalandırmış, üstüne isa tarafından ziyaret edilmiş(!) ve henüz affedilmeyeceği haberini almış, allak bullak olmuştu.

John’un bir daha asla tam anlamıyla mutlu olabileceğine inanmıyorum. koşulsuz mutluluğa dinle ulaşamayacağını anlayan bir insanın dindar kalmaya devam etmesinin tek sebebi koşulsuz mutluluğu öldükten sonra yakalama umudunu da sadece dinin vermesidir.

Şunu anlatmaya çalışıyorum; koyunlar bir ömür boyu mutlu yaşasalar bile, kesilecekleri an tüm hayatları boyunca kandırıldıklarını farkederek ölürler. Ne düşündüğünüzü tahmin ediyorum: “böyle bir örnekle neyi ispatladığına inanıyorsun, gerçekten mutlu olduğuna benim de inandığım bir çok örnek verebilirim” diye düşünüyorsunuz. Öyleyse ben de size şunu söylüyorum.

Tüm hayatınız boyunca mutlu olmanın tek yolu; hayatla hiç bir bağınızın ve anlayışınızın kalmamasıdır. meczup olmakla mutlu olabilirsiniz mesela ama hayatta "en yüce" diye nitelendirilen "aşk", "sevgi", "sanat eserleriyle karşılaştığınızda hissettikleriniz" gibi duyguların hepsi sizi elinizdeki mutluluğu kaybettirecek bir sonraki düşünceye yöneltecektir.

Peki ne yapmalı?
Hiç bir şey yapamazsınız. Yalnızca neyi elde edemeyeceğinizden tam olarak emin olursanız, ona ulaşmak için çaba sarfetmekten vazgeçer, aslında peşinde olduğunuz şeyin anlık tatmin olduğunu anlarsınız. Hayatta olabileceğiniz en iyi şey, ne zengin olmak, ne iyi bir eşe sahip olmak ne de şan şöhrettir. Eğer hayatta tam anlamıyla gerçekçi olabilirseniz olabileceğiniz en iyi şeyi olmuşsunuzdur. Ondan hemen sonra da pragmatik olmak gelir –ki o da bonustur.

How to Save the World pt.2

We are now living in a world of inadequacies. If you are lucky enough to live in a first world country than you are able to have a decent life without trying too hard. Everything seems to get easier when you can earn enough money to support a family without working your ass off. I don't really want to sound too much like Zeitgeist or anything but that is a fact that it's almost we're living somebody else's lives. We are not really sure about what's happening in other continents, how people get by? Trying to make something for some profit either it's hard labor or something extra creative and sell it to some company for them to sell it to someone else for a much bigger profit. 

We seem to forget it's individuals creating to society, not the society creating the individuals.

But for the last 12 years, there is a major change in our lives, i know we all take it for granted now and don't understand how important it is, i happen to believe it's one of the only good things concerning the human development in the last century. It's internet. 

So now you are reading a totally random persons thoughts living a normal life in a very far away country. Something that was much harder to do 15 years ago. You can now connect to pretty much anyone on the planet within seconds now. More importantly, you can put your thoughts, ideas for anyone to see too. This would seem like sci-fi 50 years ago. And even more importantly, internet has come to be this huge database where you can educate yourself, grow ideas from, understand and archive anything you want.

Now let's step back a little and think about a little 8 years old kid, living in a small village in middle east or africa. All he knows about this world comes from his parents, his teachers, village elders, t.v that's showing lots of commercials very few educational programs. 

Much different than life of a kid in New York, U.S yet a lot more common in our world. This is not fair, it angers me even to think about the capacities that could make a change has to go to waste just because they are not given the chance to improve themselves.

There is a chance of fixing this though. I'm really enthuiastic about this, even it way too much optimistic, i do think it can happen. Now let me explain the 2 steps to this.

Step 1: There is a technology of distributing internet via electricity. You can check out about this here, here and here.

Step 2: You've probably heard about the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) campaign as it was all over the news for some time. This is a great project and I've following the results, and it does seriously work. You can checkout about this project on wikipedia or their homepage. Basically one laptop costs $199 which is very cheap and also you can get one and give one for $399. "One Laptop per Child is not about a machine it's about a movement" they say on their webpage and i think this could actually make a change in someone's life. 

I'm not going to go on and on about; if US spent %10 of what it spends on war everychild could have one of these laptops etc. What I 'll say is; it's one of the things that matters to someone. It's about evening the circumstances. 

Now, put these two steps together. We could have everyone can go online. Everyone could have a huge library in their rooms. When I talk about this; people usually tell me; "Well, if you give a laptop and an internet connection to a kid in Iraq, he would probably spend all his time looking up porn or sell the laptop for some money and forget about it." That response infuriates me actually. This is about giving a chance to an individual, not about trying to educate him yourself. It's up to them to make something out of the opportunity but it's a human right to "have" the opportunity.

Anyway, whatever anyone thinks, at least I have a plan, and I have contributed in it. That's what you should be doing too.

How to Save the World

With the popular problems of Global Warming and loss of naturel resources, humankind started to do some thinking recently. There are many approaches to how to solve the problems and i believe numerous scientists are working on raising the carrying capacity of earth for humans. Here is my tiny point of view about saving the world.

Well, if we observe an animal population on its own nature, the population is naturally decreased when it reaches the carrying capacity. For humans though, we raise the carrying capacity with agriculture, livestock production, poultry etc. We use up anything to feed the population thus destroying the nature, causing genetic hybridization, using way too much pesticides, cutting trees down, polluting fresh waters etc. 

As you have all heard it's said that drinkible water will be one of the biggest issues in middle east in the next 50 years. The diminishing of the ozone layer cancer will start to take many lives. The search for answers for these problems is nothing but trying to raise the carrying capacity of our humble population. They may or may not work, but there is an inevitable reality; "We will reach that point someday".

I don't find this sad or bad. It's the truth of nature and as much as i value an individuals life, i value the species more. You see, as these so called bad things happen, homo sapiens will not go extinct. There will be a big decreasing in the population but the remaining will be stronger and have better chance grow out of the ashes, so to say.

If we gain the consciousness of the inevitable, there is a whole new area to think about. Instead of trying to change the enviroment to feed more people, it's people we need to focus on changing. It's very important actually. If it's the exponential increase in the population that will harm the humankind most of all, how can you educate people to now have more than 2 babies? (Equals the number of adults in a family) Don't forget that if you are reading this, you are one of the lucky %10 percent of world population, how can everyone on the surface of earth get closer to having the same conditions? For this to get answered there are some concepts we should know about, and the technology of course. 

Consider this post an opening, i'll continue saving the world in the next post.

Perfect Playlists

Well, I've done some research and will try to guide you into finding your own music and suggest some of my own findings. This is a good exercise for me too, who knows I might end up finding some good songs too.

See, before i get involved with the internet, I used to go to stores to buy cassettes of bands, only which i could find. That was the only way to listen to them as long as i live in Turkey. Than the cd players came out, i started to carry my cheap cd player everywhere. I thought i had a great taste of music back than.

With the internet, for some years even it took me 20 minutes to download one mp3, I managed to create a very small archive that i was proud of. Listened the same songs over and over again, making mp3 cd's for my "fancier" mp3-cd player. 

Today, we can reach to any song we want anytime, we can make playlists online, we can carry gigabytes of music with us in ipods. Exchange terrabytes of archives with mass storage devices. Did you ever consider the impact of this advancement to the music in our lives? Hell, it even effected the music that is being created too.

We used to be huge fans for the bands or singers, now we tend to describe our music taste with the genre. Not even with the genre sometimes, we share profiles over last.fm, facebook or seeqpod. We have so much space and so much music, our archives don't describe what we actually like anymore. And it's ok. What we should also realize, playlists are now as important as songs. Because we have so many songs, we can't just put it all to shuffle and it takes way much time to organize all files to be able to play by genre. 

So this post is about playlists. Which playlist would you play if you are with your girlfriend in your house having dinner,  when you have friends over, when you are going on a long trip or just gonna take a walk around the park. I'll give links according to the situations that you might want the use the playlist or radio. Hope you'll like it.

First of all, This, this and this are some web pages you can find the songs and make your own playlists. It takes 3 minutes to create a profile and than you can make your own playlists easily just by dragging the file to the playlist. Don't neglect to create and save the playlists not only beacuse you will want to listen to them later, it's also a good way to remember what kind of music you listen at the time you made that playlist.

Situation #1: 

You want your music in the background when there is other stuff you're doing. You could play this playlist below a conversation with your friends, when you are painting, surfing, reading. Not catchy lyrics, overused instruments or extraordinary changes in the pace and mostly with female vocals.

• The genre you are looking for may be ambient, trip-hop, acid jazz, indie, reggae etc.
  
• These are some online radio's you can check out: Radio #1, Radio #2, Radio #3
• And this is a winamp playlist (lush.m3u) that i made as an example.

If you don't have winamp, you can download here.

Music Video Art

These are the Top 5 music videos that everybody should at least see once. They are not only perfect songs their directors actually created pieces of 7th art. They are most likely to take your breath away, give them a try.

#1

First one is the music video of UNKLE ft. Radiohead - Rabbit in Your Headlights. It's been selected 1st of the top 100 videos of all time by Stylus Magazine. It's a must watch directed by Jonathan Glazer, who also directed some other inspiring Radiohead videos. And the French actor Denis Lavant is in the clip.

#2

Although not really my music type when I'm not under the influence, this music video is absolutely a piece of art again. The song is Letfield ft. Africa Bambaataa - Africa Shox from the album Rhytm and Stealth. This is a soundtrack of the movie Vanilla Sky and directed by another enormously talented director Chris Cunningham.

#3

From the album The Bends, Radiohead managed to create another amazing work. The director Jamie Thraves was handpicked by the band after they saw severel of his experimental short films. The conversation between the man and the crowd is intelligently put and i guess we 'll never know what the man said to the them in the end, Thraves has said "to tell you would deaden the impact, and would probably make you want to lie down in the road too"

#4

The dancing of Christopher Walken is genius in the video of Fatboy Slim - Weapon of Choice. This is certainly one of the most creative works of the Academy award nominated director Spike Jonze. He actually made it to the top by making commercials and music videos, including works for various artists like: Radiohead, Björk, Beastie Boys.

And this video has won 6 MTV awards and selected the "Best Video of All Time" in 2002.

#5

I've listened Pink Floyd and watched The Wall over and over, never get tired of it. It's like they are of different species, talking to our subconscious. Pink Floyd - High Hopes has the exact same effect and brightens my day everytime I see it. There is no doubt this is a priceless piece of art.

Zeitgeist

This is probably on lots and lots of blogs as it's almost hypnotizing, beautiful to think about and does make more sense than most of the crap out there. A second movie Zeitgeist: Addendum came out at Octobar 2nd 2008, not long ago. 

Go to their website and read the forums. You may find this interesting too.