Rambo2100 has added a photo to the pool:

I thought this year's best at Vivid was NeonDynamo’s TIME:WARPED, with its fast-moving, colourful images and super soundtrack.

Projection, laser and sound come together in the convict-cut tunnel a bit like a 2000's nightclub.

Its creators have stellar experience. NeonDynamo's festival work includes Glastonbury and Splendour in the Grass. ER Productions has a Guinness World Record for the largest laser show and have worked with the Chemical Brothers, Katy Perry and Dua Lipa. Heckler Sound seems best known for commercials, although they've been involved with Vivid before.

wing of kaz has added a photo to the pool:

宮崎県串間市、串間神社 / Kushima Shrine, Kushima City, Miyazaki Prefecture

Twee tieners van 13 en 14 jaar oud zijn opgepakt aan de Koolmees in Ridderkerk voor het voorbereiden van een explosie. Een oplettende bewoner zag de twee 's nachts in de straat, vertrouwde het niet en schakelde de politie in.

Officials said they set up an “industry-wide task force” meant to ensure the “stable and efficient operation” of Russia’s energy sector.

Long sentences can digress, meander, sing; the effect is a headlong immersion. Books with never-ending sentences are difficult to put down: Since there is no natural place to pause, halting anywhere feels like an interruption.

​Donald Trump is niet blij met de nieuwe aanvallen tussen Israël en Iran. Dat liet hij weten in een lang bericht op zijn eigen social media-kanaal Truth Social. De Amerikaanse president zei hierin: ‘Als Israël en Iran zo doorgaan, breekt er nog eens oorlog uit.’

De president is heel duidelijk: de strijdende partijen moeten per direct de wapens neerleggen. ‘Als ze nu niet stoppen met schieten, zou het zomaar eens kunnen leiden tot een conflict. En voor je het weet gaan allerlei andere landen zich ermee bemoeien en loopt zoiets gruwelijk uit de hand’, waarschuwt Trump. ‘Dat wil je niet.’

‘Ik weet echt wel hoe dat werkt. Ik heb als vredepresident, de beste vredespresident die ooit geleefd heeft, veel conflicten beëindigd. Die conflicten beginnen met landen die het heft in eigen handen gaan nemen. Die zichzelf het recht toeëigenen om staatshoofden te ontvoeren, andere landen staatsvormen op te leggen waar het volk helemaal niet achter staat en financieel gewin boven veiligheid van onschuldige burgers stellen.’

De timing van de schermutselingen komt de president heel slecht uit: ‘Binnenkort begint een prachtig WK in ons grootse land. Dat is iets om te vieren, over de hele wereld. Dan kunnen we gewoonweg niet hebben dat er landen in deze wereld zijn die elkaar bestoken met wapens en bommen. Trump roept Israël en Iran dan ook op tot een staakt-het-vuren tot en met de finale van het WK’.

Trump sluit af op verzoenende toon: ‘Wij Amerikanen zijn niet van het toekijken hoe al die ellende zich voltrekt. Als het echt nodig is zijn het Amerikaanse leger en ik bereid om alsnog vrede te brengen in het Midden-Oosten.’

​

&''

What does it mean to push the boat out, and can peacocking be more than just a beautiful gesture?

A friend’s mother once told me that for a couple of years in the 1980s – as the Conservatives were waging war on the miners and she spent late nights at Marxist-feminist reading groups – she wore an almost daily uniform of jeans and a white T-shirt. On her wedding day she broke with habit and put on a dress she had bought, at great expense to her, that was fun, sexy and, although she didn’t use this word, flamboyant. The next week at the school she taught in she saw a colleague wearing it. “Nice dress,” she said. “It’s OK for work,” her colleague replied, “but I wouldn’t wear it out.”

I found myself recalling this anecdote as I read Jack Parlett’s memoir-cum-cultural history of our attempts to push the boat out. To make any effort is to risk embarrassment, to be seen either as ridiculous or hopelessly naive. One way to avoid those charges is to use playful or cynical irony. Parlett finds examples of this in Oscar Wilde and what the cultural critic Susan Sontag once described as camp, a worldview obsessed with artifice and performance. Although Flamboyance is not a polemic, it’s clear that its author sees something lacking in these efforts at self-fashioning. The book is couched as an alternative; Parlett presents flamboyance as a model for how to live a life that not only “burns with a resistant energy” but “puts politics back into the picture”. In practice, this means that he has little patience for the notion of art for art’s sake; he insists, for example, that there is no making sense of flamenco without understanding the history of fascism in Spain.

Continue reading...

James Bidgood’s experimental DIY movie, first released in 1971, starred Bobby Kendall and was shot mostly in Bidgood’s own apartment

James Bidgood’s experimental homoerotic reverie is now reissued in restored form. The film was shot mostly in Bidgood’s own New York apartment throughout the 1960s; it was finally released in 1971 with Bidgood’s name removed from the credits after an opaque dispute with his backers and his authorship only revealed 20 years later.

Pink Narcissus is a movie of garish colour, mute melodrama and dreamlike imagery which mimics early cinema, perhaps simply because the resources for recording lip-sync dialogue were not available. (The director says that Powell and Pressburger’s Red Shoes was an inspiration although the title alludes more to their nun melodrama Black Narcissus.) It interestingly merges its rather pastoral fantasies with the urban circumstances where these would be consumed – the city’s movie theatres, outside which poverty and alienation were commonplace. Some of the most interesting and successful parts of the piece are the radio soundscapes and the modelled neon skylines.

Continue reading...

Nigeria has struggled to contain bandit groups who kidnap and kill but some communities are finding their own solutions

In the 1980s, Dayyabu Abba-Kurfi’s striking prowess for his high school football club in north-west Nigeria earned him the unlikely nickname Doncaster, after the English third-tier side more than 3,800 miles away. More than four decades later, in August last year, he scored perhaps his most important goal, brokering a peace pact between his neighbours in Kurfi, in Katsina state, and the bandit gangs terrorising communities there.

“For months now, we have experienced relative calm … our people are rebuilding their livelihoods,” the 60-year-old civil servant and local politician said.

Continue reading...

JPMorgan Chase leads 65 banks making decisions incompatible with restraining rising temperatures, researchers say

The world’s largest banks committed $906bn in financing to the fossil fuel industry last year, an “unfathomable” increase in investment locking in years more of coal, oil and gas production as the world continues to overheat, a new report has found.

The surge in new fossil fuel lending, up $64bn or nearly 8% on 2024, shows that the world’s largest 65 banks are making decisions incompatible with international agreements to restrain rising global temperatures, according to the coalition of environmental groups behind the new analysis.

Continue reading...