Death, with its undercurrents of farce, is brought to mind in Simon McBurney, Marcello Magni and Jozef Houben's A Minute Too Late. The production might be described as a kind of fantasia on the idea of dying. Simon, aptly characterised by the critic Michael Kustow as "a compendium of our clumsiness in the face of death", meets up with undertaker Jozef, is offered a lift and is borne away in a hearse, its back seat occupied by a splayed corpse. As in the Fawlty Towers episode where the dead guest that Basil is trying to smuggle out of the hotel becomes a stage prop, the corpse slumps over their shoulders as the vehicle gathers speed, and has to be shoved back.
Look at me - I'm dying!
Art of Living & Literature Across Frontiers: One Death, One Book, One Sandwich
One writer you should know before we are swallowed by the dark matter
Consider whether this is a man,
Who labours in the mud
Who knows no peace
Who fights for a crust of bread
Who dies at a yes or a no.
Consider whether this is a woman,
Without hair or name
With no more strength to remember
Eyes empty and womb cold
As a frog in winter.
• Is anything sadder than a train; [Primo Levi Primo ; Primo ]
• · Everything you thought you knew about the universe is wrong. It’s made of atoms, right? Wrong. Atoms only account for a measly 15% of everything that exists. The mass of the universe consists of something so mysterious and elusive that it has been dubbed ‘dark matter’ Dark Stories; [A Different Planet: Titan of Cold Rivers ]
• · · I'm a huge fan of the Soprano. One of my favorite exchanges: Meadow: “Are you in the Mafia?”; Tony: “I'm in the waste management business. Life is putting the Prozac to the test
• · · · Feel the ripple in the zeitgeist? Two new slogans are busily burrowing their way into popular cult. Steven P. Jobs introduced one last week: "Life is random." It's attached to the iPod Shuffle, Apple's teeny new music player. The second comes from Malcolm Gladwell, a writer known for seeing revolutions in small things. The slogan is "Blink, don't think. These two marketing aphorisms - ad-phorisms, if you will - pull so insistently at the brain that they feel more like an affirmation than a pitch, and bear a slight tang of wisdom. You couldn't control all the choices; you couldn't control all the noise: Life is a random blink
• · · · · One Book One Sandwich continues. All Sandwich residents are urged to read "In the Heart of the Sea" by Nathaniel Philbrick. As part of One Book One Sandwich, special events include. Massachusetts town is reading Nathaniel Philbrick's In the Heart of the Sea under the banner of, One Book, One Sandwich? ; [What is Bush Reading ; Kabbalah of Numbers ]
• · · · · · Cutural concepts go in and out of style, sometimes quite swiftly. It was fashionable a short while ago to proclaim we had entered an age where the old cultural certainties had been thrown into disarray; it has become just as fashionable now to dismiss the postmodern as yesterday's news Relativism is still relevant ; [Cat Lovers Collection :-) ]