A Sensitivity to Things

With their outrageous cuteness, Japanese doughnuts will fill the hole in your stomach and your heart. From Floresta Nature Doughnuts, Kyoto, Japan. Related Posts:I’ve Got Nothing

Article first published as Bullet-Train TV Commercial Lifts Spirits in Japan on Blogcritics. Initially withdrawn because of the March 11, 2011 earthquake and tsunami, a television commercial for a new bullet-train line helps a grieving nation dare to smile once more. mundaneusername: tearing up. Thank you. koy1: why did i cry when i saw this? [...]

Just a bubble. Floating out of a Norwegian fjord with the sunlight reflecting in it. Nothing unusual there… if your definition of “usual” denotates the otherworldly as commonplace. One half expects to see trolls and fairies dancing in the background, or perhaps the reflection of God—probably with a rather self-satisfied smile on His face. The [...]

Applause and awe-struck, gob-smacked smiles go to Barcelona based motion-graphics and visual effects studio Physalia, who created quite possibly the happiest entry in this year’s “Happy”-themed F5 Re:Play Film Festival—Inductance. One giant magnet and hundreds of colourful capacitor-filled plastic balls later, and you can’t help but smile. But is this superb creation from what is [...]

Football and the art of meditation, a photo sublime on more levels than playing fields, by sublime photographer Pavitrata Taylor. If you see art, try to see the Artist inside it. You will do this only by taking them as one. When you see art, you will feel that inside the art there is something [...]

Juvenile most of the time, reviled some of the time, but never banal, the Urban Dictionary provides an alternative take on the everyday, and the night-time in-between. It is dressed downwards of mature sometimes, maybe most of the time, but that is why it is the “urban” dictionary—just like a city, you do not visit [...]

“How oddly situated a man is apt to find himself at the age of thirty-eight! His youth belongs to the distant past. Yet the period of memory beginning with the end of youth and extending to the present has left him not a single vivid impression. And therefore he persists in feeling that nothing more [...]

Meaning literally “a sensitivity to things,” mono no aware is a concept coined by Japanese literary and linguistic scholar Motoori Norinaga in the eighteenth century to describe the essence of Japanese culture, and it remains the central artistic imperative in Japan to this day. The phrase is derived from the word aware, which in Heian [...]

More a tendency than a genre in its own right, Poetic Realism was a highly influential yet short-lived movement in French cinema of the 1930s, a brief outbreak of lyricism sandwiched between the bludgeoning horrors of two world wars. Unlike Soviet montage or French impressionism, poetic realism was never a unified movement or ideology, rather [...]

Dedication (2007) by Justin Theroux Rudy: That’s life Henry. Henry: Yep. Rudy: You know what life is? Henry: Life is a horrible little giggle in the midst of a forced death march towards hell. Rudy: No it isn’t. Henry: An interminable wail of grief… Rudy: No! Life is a single skip for joy. Henry: (sigh) [...]