Of all the pages here on Candlelight Stories, the page devoted to the tales of the Arabian Nights is the single most popular. I love to post about these fantastic and free-wheeling adventures. Here’s a wonderful BBC documentary that communicates not only the far-flung and enduring history of the tales, but also the wild sense of imagination allowed to roam freely. Reading the Arabian Nights gives one a sense of how brilliant, winding, layered and abandoned literature can be.
Here’s an excellent BBC documentary on the origins of punk, hip hop and disco in the New York City of the 1970s. It was a hard time in the city but it held a wild energy that kept pressing up and inventing new things. What hit me about this film is how good Patti Smith really is.
New York since then, however, seems to have signed an unlimited contract with the Gap as a retail outlet. I think anyone with a streak of punkishness in them moves out to Los Angeles.
I found this via the excellent curatorial efforts of Rob Smart on Facebook.
If this photo upsets you or offends you, then kiss my ass. Facebook appears to have deleted a page set up to organize a protest over two gay men who were thrown out of a British pub for kissing at their table. (Update: It turns out that the protest organizer made the page private. But it still looks as though Facebook removed some other posts and pics related to this issue.) Over the course of my life I have observed many men and women kissing in restaurants, bars, taxis, airplanes, streets, theaters, Ferris wheels, boats, beaches and on television. It’s a simple act of affection that is practiced by all cultures worldwide.
If a man and a woman feel something for one another, they kiss. If two men feel something for one another, they kiss. If two women feel something for one another, they kiss.
Facebook doesn’t seem to see it that way. They appear to consider it offensive. Objectionable. Perverse.
This is what’s wrong behind the scenes with corporate control of major communications tools. You get some unevolved, intellectually limited, vapid, sexually repressed jackasses running the show and suddenly no one is really allowed to communicate freely anymore. This is a sure indicator that we need to move off of services like Facebook and into fully open-source social networking tools.
Mark Zuckerberg may be one of these mental midgets (Don’t be fooled by the movie. It doesn’t take much to code Facebook really. It’s just MySpace with a white background.) with problems in the sexual arena. Those dull watery eyes might be a dead giveaway. At any rate, he presides over a company that is apparently banning photos of men kissing while fully clothed.
Candlelight Stories supports the rights of all gay, lesbian, transgender and bisexual persons. Those rights include the right to kiss and the right to marry and the right to carry on in any way they see fit.
It does not escape me that some of Candlelight’s slower readers will find this post surprising and perhaps offensive. To those readers I say, get the hell out of here, take your kids with you and don’t let the door hit your expanding ass on the way out. I don’t publish for you. Never have. Never will. I consider you monkey people. Unattractive, limp, unschooled, unappealing and quite frankly disgusting. If you were to read another word of my writing, I think I would vomit.
For those others of you who understand that we all have the same right to kiss, go onto Facebook and share this photo.
Mature Content and Language
This is another episode in the art documentary series, This is Modern Art, by Matthew Collings. In this episode, Collings explores the place of beauty in modern art. How does beauty fit into art that tries to shock? What is the purpose of beauty in art? Doesn’t most conceptual art try to dispense with beauty entirely? Is beauty something we need for comfort? Does it have something to say in art or is it just a distraction?
Part 2
Parts 3 – 5 after the jump
This is a five-part documentary by British filmmaker Adam Curtis about the rise of nuclear energy in the United States. These sections make up A is for Atom which is a 1-hour segment of a much longer science and politics television series called Pandora’s Box. It chronicles the development of the nuclear power industry and shows clearly how little was ever understood about what would happen or what should be done during a nuclear accident.
Parts 2 – 5 after the jump