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My daughter is doing a school project on Peter Jackson the famous New Zealand filmmaker responsible for the Lord of the Rings movies, so this is my little contribution.
From my perspective the great thing about the man is not that he has that wonderful capacity to visualize and convey words into images but the drive and determination to bring them into reality.
Jackson quotes…
“New Zealand is not a small country but a large village.”
“I think I first saw the original King Kong when I was 9, and it had such a profound effect on me as a 9-year-old. It made me want to make films. It affected me in a way that I can remember today the night that I saw it. The very next day I got my parents’ Super 8 movie camera and started to do stop-motion animation with a clay dinosaur, a clay brontosaurus, actually, that I made when I started to do clay animation. And I’ve always wanted to remake Kong, because it’s my favorite film and it’s a wonderful story… I actually tried to make it when I was 12 on Super 8. So it’s a long ambition of mine.”
“What we were trying to do was to analyze what was important to Tolkien and to try to honor that. In a way, we were trying to make these films for him, not for ourselves.”
“The ‘Lord of the Rings’ films are not made for Oscars, they are made for the audience.”
“Pain is temporary, film is forever!”
Wikipedia on Peter Jackson…
Jackson is known for his attention to detail, a habit of shooting scenes from many angles, a macabre sense of humour, and a general playfulness—the latter to the point where The Lord of the Rings conceptual designer Alan Lee jokingly remarked “the film is almost incidental really.”
Jackson was a noted perfectionist on the Lord of the Rings shoot where he demanded numerous takes of scenes, requesting additional takes by repeatedly saying, “one more for luck.”
One of his most common visual trademarks is shooting close-ups of actors with wide-angle lenses.
Unlike some other film directors, Jackson has remained in his native country to make films.
During filming of The Lord of the Rings, Jackson was (in)famous for wearing short pants and going barefoot under most circumstances, especially during film shoots.
The Bastards Have Landed! | The Official Peter Jackson Fanclub
Peter Jackson | The Internet Movie Database
I had long heard of Albert Hoffman but surprisingly this researcher Alexander Shulgin is new to me. Certainly a prolific guy…
At the turn of the last century, there were only two psychedelic compounds known to man: cannabis and mescaline (which is what makes peyote so popular with shamans and hippies). By the 1950s, scientists had developed or uncovered LSD, psilocybin (the active ingredient in “magic mushrooms”) and about 15 more compounds you’ve probably never heard of. These days, we’re well into the hundreds, thanks in large part to the work of an organic chemist named Dr. Alexander Shulgin.
From the New York Times Magazine: [Shulgin discovered] ‘stimulants, depressants, aphrodisiacs, empathogens, convulsants, drugs that alter hearing, drugs that slow one’s sense of time, drugs that speed it up, drugs that trigger violent outbursts, drugs that deaden emotion — in short, a veritable lexicon of tactile and emotional experience. …. A compound he dubbed Aleph-1 gave him ‘’one of the most delicious blends of inflation, paranoia and selfishness that I have ever experienced.’
Why did Shulgin choose such an unorthodox field of research? He describes a revelatory experience with mescaline in 1960, after which he realized that everything he saw and thought ‘had been brought about by a fraction of a gram of a white solid, but that in no way whatsoever could it be argued that these memories had been contained within the white solid. . . . I understood that our entire universe is contained in the mind and the spirit. We may choose not to find access to it, we may even deny its existence, but it is indeed there inside us, and there are chemicals that can catalyze its availability.
[ Via Mental Floss | Continue Reading]
[Be sure to follow the New York Times Magazine link as well, for a more extensive article]
No end to the things you can learn on the interwebs | eHow.com
“Unprovided with original learning, unformed in the habits of thinking, unskilled in the arts of composition, I resolved to write a blog.”
Paraphrasing Edward Gibbon
I always enjoy considering this conundrum, is the basic material of the universe made out of information? Gets you all kinda meta-meta-metaphysical…
All this work stems from the growing realisation that it is not the laws of physics that determine how information behaves in our Universe, but the other way round. The implication is extraordinary: that somehow, information is the ghostly bedrock of our Universe and from it, all else is derived.
[Continue reading]
People are strange when you are a stranger—Jim Morrison
Freaks Survive Because They Are Strange | LiveScience
Both the strokers and strokees insist that all this OMing is really about the “hydration” of the self, the human connection, not sex.
Dedicated to Female Sexuality | NYTimes.com
From the tools I would love to have dept… ILoveSketch
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Hello If you like all kinds of random ideas, quotes, questions and miscellaneous links you're in luck because this is where I tend to stash them.
Enjoy.
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