Short review of everything

Waiting for Godot

I´ll start this list of reviews of recent culture activities with one of my favourite plays! I went to see Samuel Beckett´s Waiting for Godot at the Kansallisteatteri (in Helsinki) and my expectations were pretty high. Fortunately this managed to satisfy me almost on every level! I was a little worried in advance since one of the main parts was played by Esko Salminen who, in my opinion, is one of the most over appreciated actors in Finland. He however fit quite well to his part and his, yet again in my opinion, mannerism worked ok as Vladimir´s role. What lifted the play to really excellent level was Hannu-Pekka Björkman who made astonshing job as Pozzo! Every single time he opened his mouth, everything flowed towards more coherent conclusion! The setup was very traditional and I remember seeing quite similar background use in one of the television versions shown in Teema few years ago. It´s good but I think there should have been some modifications for more intense experience, specially in parts when audience was supposed to feel the "boredom" of the cast waiting for something to happen. Over all, this version was very well made and hopefully we´ll see some more Beckett in the future!

Le Havre

Aki Kaurismäki´s latest film is called Le Havre and it is really nice one! Kaurismäki has done lot´s of good films but the quality has been swinging from excellent to annoying. This time he is presenting much more positive future visions! This movie is very much a triumph of humanism and trust and caring of other people. The charachters that are naturally in tight position (ie. the police officer) are shown as people with social consciousness, though there is a distinct line between generations (contemporary world is shown in a bit ugly light). Kaurismäki´s greatest ability is to show us very beautifull scenes of the cities he is using as background, he definitely is fond of urban atmosphere! All the actors do excellent job and the soundtrack suits well to the over all feel. The theme is obviously quite hot topic and his message is clear! I would love to see a little more surreal elements in his future films, since they were the reasons why some of his works are so good!

Crazy Clown Time

Now this was unexpected! Though I knew David Lynch has had his fingers involved in the music production earlier, it was still very odd to hear the first single Good Day Today earlier this autumn. Crazy Clown Time is the first real artist album Lynch has ever made and if you are fond of his soundtracks you will not be disappointed. Some of the songs are in more typical vein, dark rockish atmospheres, but others have strange space disco, or balearic feel to them. Lynch sings himself in most of the tracks, if you can call this kind of vocal performance singing. His voice is esoteric and haunting and it does give the important impact to the end product! The album is also very long, but I think it is essential to get the hypnotic feel he seems to be chasing! I feel that he does achieve the correct vibe and in the end I will give this solid *****! It´s also note worthy that Lynch has opened a club in Paris that is trying to simulate the effect of Club Silencio in his movie Mullholland Drive. Unfortunately you can visit the club only by becoming a member and since I´m not living in Paris it would be somewhat pointless effort.

Religion & Magic in ancient Egypt

Last august I visited the British Museum to see the Egyptian section. After checking all the mummies and hieroglyphs I bought a book from the shop called Religion and Magic in ancient Egypt by Rosalie David. There was plenty of other choices available but this felt most coherent but at the same time enjoiable enough to keep my interest up. Now that I have read it I must say that the amount of information is almost overwhelming. The book is trying to cover the whole spectrum of Egyptian culture from the earliest known examples (some 5000 bce) until the demise of the ancient culture around 500 ace. It´s exhausting task even for the 400 pages it has space to show it´s contents. The book has been critizised of being mixed and incoherent in places, and I must admit that in some cases this is true. But I still think that it gains advantage with sheer volume of knowledge it can offer. Troughout the book you can get yourself sucked into the ordinary life of egyptian inhabitant and lot´s of customs are written open very well. It also works really well as a source material! One point is that some conclusions are controversial and reader must bear in mind that researchers are trying to interpret scattered writings and sources from thousands of years ago. Therefore everything you read is, in the end, only speculation. Anyway, this book is very much worth to read!

Pyramid Scheme

I´ve been wondering what would it need to create a huge monument to celebrate your afterlife? I mean the way the ancient Egyptians did, the Pyramids! How, in a modern western society, you could make something like that?

First of all, I have always thought that it would be sweet to donate my body to science when I die. I always imagined my dead body hanging from the ceiling of some local university main entrance. But more recently, since I´ve been reading lot´s of books about the Egyptian culture, I have created a lust for something more spectacular. I want everyone to remember my contribution thousands of years later, the same way the Pharaoh Khufu is remembered!

Since I live in Finland, I have to consider this trought Finnish society and I have to obey Finnish legislation. I assume that some of these matters would be easier to handle in some other parts of the world.

Anyway, the first thing is the location of this forthcoming monument (I´ll speak later on about a Tomb and this means generally a Pyramid). Obviously it should be somewhere where it could be admired by the future generations. There is two problems: the prize of the site and the city planning. If I wanted to build the tomb into the center of a major city, for example Töölönlahti in Helsinki, it would cost insane amounts of money to get hold of the land. And since the city planning is often politically administered I would need to be inside of the ruling party to get proper license to use the site.

This would propably mean that I would have to make some compromise about the location. Easiest option would be to move the project into some municipal that is suffering a loss of jobs and inhabitants, ie. somewhere in the countryside. That´s not too bad a choice if you manage to find a site close to some highway that is not too far from the major cities. The prizes for this kind of land are often way smaller than in the big cities. However the planning might still be a problem. Obviously you should somehow convince the local administrators about the benefits of a massive pyramid. They may attack this plan by saying that enormous tomb would be useless structure and it woul prevent the future use of the said areas. You will have to provide them a larger perspective since the politicians usually care only about the coming two years, not several millennias further.

Tourism is very good argument! Tourism only gets better when time passes by! Employment is another good viewpoint and it is also related to tourism. But that is not all, the project itself would employ huge group of people for very long time. This is because the building of this kind of monument would take at least 20 years of time I assume.

But this brings in another problem: Ancient Egyptians used slavery as construct workers and the pesants during the Nile floods. This meant very small costs from the work force, though they did have to organize the catering and related stuff. When the Pharaoh was considered as a deity, it was much easier to get everyone on your side. These days we do have powertools and big machines to move the blocks, but still it would take fair amount of workers to get this done.

Materials is another concern. In Egypt they used limestone that is somewhat easy to shape. But in Finland there is not any limestone available. Therefore I should propably use granite. I´m not an expert but I assume it´s a little bit harder to work, but it´s widely available. You have to remember that this project differs from house building. There will be lots of savings when you don´t have to connect the tomb to pipelines or provide electricity to the whole building. You don´t need to care about insulation or air conditioning apart from the building phase. All you need is a good general plan and an artist to create the wall scripts!

For the wall scripts you will have to list all your accomplishments and exaggerate them! It´s the same procedure the Egyptians did. Also remember to leave all the negative things away and concentrate on the overall benefits your presence provided to the nation. You could also add some hints to divinity, but more efficient way is to be incoherent and generally silly. That way you can guarantee that the excavators in the future will definitely be confused about the meaning of your inscriptions. They tend to interpret these writings as riddles, hidden messages and occult secrets. When things seem like mystical events they create more efficient remembrance in the future populace.

Funding of this project is also a bit complicated, but not that hard in the end. Of course it will be a struggle when you go first time to the bank to ask for the mortgage to build a tomb. But when you reach the politicians and manage to convince them about previously mentioned benefits the ball starts to roll by itself.

The only thing I´m really worried here is the timespan. 20 years is actually quite optimistic schedule to get this done. It could actually take anything from 20-80 years to complete the task. Therefore you would need to get the main chamber ready when you eventually pass away and create a huge fanbase in the social media to support the project when your time on this planet is over.

Thankfully there is lots of architechtural pictures available for pyramids and the basic structure is really simple. And you don´t need to build treasure rooms or traps to secure the place since there will not be any treasure to store. Actually you could leave the front door open so that everyone could visit the tomb and seek for inspiration from the wall paintings and the mummified body (I suppose, effective mummification should be pretty easy with modern medical approach). Actually, now that I think, the local University might be interested about this project... Maybe I should contact them next!