Current location:	work
Current mood:	quixotic
Current music:	the crazy world of arthur brown, "fire"
Entry tags:	aeon flux, birmingham, burn culture, burning man, camus, death, kafka, metamorphosis, that thing in the desert

Camus & Kafka (or: Death & Metamorphosis)
after spending another night of lucid dreams hovering above the abyss,
and half the day hiding under the covers, and doing yoga...
i drove through a half-mile swarm of butterflies on the way to work
and whoa, would you believe we had a bomb threat at my work today?
i really have to keep a sense of humor about this sort of thing.
but, that's not all folks!
apparently, i really needed an additional reminder of my mortality today.
so, thanks to denshi for finding these photos online, from my near-death experience @ Burning Man, this year:


...that's me, about to be torched inside my infernal automobile
(you can barely see me behind the adorable N., from Reno)
& here's the photographer's description of the event:

DPW Beer Parade—Part Deux

The DPW Beer Parade culminated in a circling of the wagons near the Man for a bawdy festival of drunken revelry. A telephoto lens kept me out of hurled beer bottle range. One highlight involved this car, which could shoot flames from the trunk, and its wild-looking, bear-like driver, who would ignite his vessel, run around to the front, and make a running charge, over the hood, over the roof, and then leap through the flames.

But something went awry. When he tried to turn off the fire, it raged on. Soon someone was shouting over a megaphone, "Get away from this car, it's burning! This is no joke! Get away, you idiots! It's burning for real! Are you fucking retarded? I said get away!"

We photographers switched to even longer lenses.

click here to see the fire extinguishers

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Last week was all about insurance snafus & Kafka, but all I have left to describe it are these film reviews:

The original film adaptation of Franz Kafka's "The Trial," was directed by Orson Welles (and it really is quite an excellent movie). It stars Anthony Perkins as Josef K. Before starring in "The Trial," Perkins had played Norman Bates in "Psycho" (which was of course, directed by Hitchcock; but based on a Robert Bloch novel) & Perkins also continued to play Bates in "Psycho II," "...III" & "...IV"). That Perkins played the main character in both these films was perhaps an intentional irony, as Alfred Hitchcock had previously borrowed much from Orson Welles (Hitchcock's Psycho was obviously influenced by Welles' Flowers of Evil).

Let us also not be confused with the 1993 version of "The Trial," directed by David Hugh Jones, which starred Kyle MacLachlan as Josef K. and Anthony Hopkins as The Priest. This version was produced by the BBC, and although it is actually closer to the original story, it doesn't quite reach the epic proportions of Welles' classic.

And neither of these films should ever be mixed-up with the 1991 film titled " Kafka," that starred Jeremy Irons as Kafka, and which was such a bad movie ('fanfic' quality, at best) that it could not even be saved by co-stars the likes of Ian Holm & Alec Guinness...

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So... this week, i'm dealing with suicide attempts, bomb threats, & spectres of accidental self-immolation:

According to Albert Camus, "There is only one really serious philosophical question, and that is suicide. Deciding whether or not life is worth living is to answer the fundamental question in philosophy. All other questions follow from that."

Some time ago, I had posted about the irony of Camus' death in a car accident

` ` (Camus) was killed in an automobile accident in 1960 while riding as a passenger in a car ... Camus had once said he couldn't imagine a death more meaningless than dying in a car accident - a death perhaps ironically appropriate, or perhaps simply tragic, for a writer so keenly aware of the absurdity and meaninglessness of life. ' ' - from little blue light

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I have to admit, I feel fortunate to have avoided an absurdly poigniant accidental demise, myself.
But at least I have a new motto, now... "What does not kill me, makes me stranger!"

But for those of you out there who have ever, are now, or may ever consider the intentional act of suicide:

...Please stop long enough to read this. It will only take about five minutes...