Dustlife

Animations of Hayao Miyazaki

2007-01-27T13:47:00.000-08:00

Miyazaki is a very well known animator, but not to me till yesterday. I found his movie "Spirited Away" by pure coincidence to know later that I was familiar with his work long time ago when I was a child. A dubbed version to Arabic of his TV series "Conan, The Boy in Future".

The title in Arabic was "Adventures of Adnan", changing the name of the protagonist in the series from Conan to Adnan. The series were ahead of its time and had great art work and intelligent gestures.

It shows the world in 2028 when twenty years before that an UltraMagnatic war has changed the planet earth, and devastated all the nations that existed at that time. What was left of that war are rebels of advanced civilizations.

The buildings, the mobiles and the machines that appeared in this animated series were intelligently designed to reflect the theme of the story line. It was premiered across Japan in October of 1978.

Miyazaki continues to create interesting animation movies and the latest he did were "Spirited Away" in 2002 and "Howl's Moving Castle" in 2005 which I post their trailers below. What attracted me to them is the significant quality of the characters and the movement of each character in every frame, not mentioning the amusing imaginative worlds he creates.

Howl's Moving Castle

Spirited Away

LOG

2007-01-25T19:46:00.000-08:00

I came over a new publication that interested me. It was a new publication series by Cynthia Davidson in variety of architectural topics. It is an interesting contribution to the architectural writing and a great post-ANY books from Cynthia Davidson to explore more current topics. I particularly would be interested in the LOG-8 where she offers a critique of sustainability myths, clichs, and assumptions to sustain it. Link

Cartoons from Baghdad, Khudair Al-Hamiri

2007-01-22T20:59:00.000-08:00

Khudair Al-Hamiri is a cartoonist from Baghdad. He used to draw cartoons for a major news papers in the city since the eighties (as far as I can remember). He has a very vivid sense of hummer that is mixed with a dark twist. He is still posting cartoons for one of the many news papers in Baghdad till the moment of writing this post and I am glad he is doing so.
I will post some of his drawings and translate their comments.He is criticizing the current situation of Baghdad with the contributing parties to its chaos.

Upper Image:
Upper part: "Old Strategy"
Lower part: "New strategy"

Upper Image: The comment on the box of the speaker: "Sectarian speech"

Imperial Life in the Emerald City

2007-01-22T18:13:00.000-08:00

This is a book I am reading now. It was written by Rajiv Chandrasekaran who was/is a managing editor in the Washington Post. He served the post in Baghdad, Cairo, South Asia and Afghanistan.
The book is amusing and interesting to read though it is about real events happened and still happening in the Green Zone in Baghdad. The Green Zone is the "bubble", as the book would like to call it, where the American Army and Civil post war administration have placed themselves isolated from the dangerous daily life of the common citizen of Baghdad and Iraq. By doing so, they also isolated themselves from the reality of a city in distress.

The book shows the neglectfulness acts that caused Iraq too much. It shows fatal mistakes that caused many of the problems which came after.

Manhattan_KS_Airport

2007-01-21T13:18:00.000-08:00

I was sitting there, returning from Manhattan-Kansas.

Polarity request

2007-01-19T21:55:00.000-08:00

Hi, how are you doing....
This is my first blog. It is generated to underline some wanderings I do from time to time in different topics that interests me. They are divers and strange some times. In fact, the connections which urge me to look for them are impulsive and has no logical explanation.