TianGong

As a document of the postwar GDR, this film has special appeal -- the aesthetics, music, and the depiction of the youth culture are all masterfully executed.

From the page: "The dreams he [Myoe] scrupulously recorded in his dairy
constitute a crucial part of his inner life, and
together with his waking life, form a single tapestry
of brilliant colors and scenes."

From the page: "They take some hemp seed, creep into the tent, and throw the seed on to the hot stones. At once it begins to smoke, giving off a vapor unsurpassed by any vapor-bath one could find in Greece. The Scythians enjoy it so much that they howl with pleasure."

From the page: "We got to face some facts. That the masses are poor, that the masses belong to what you call the lower class, and when I talk about the masses, I'm talking about the white masses, I'm talking about the black masses, and the brown masses, and the yellow masses, too. We've got to face the fact that some people say you fight fire best with fire, but we say you put fire out best with water. We say you donâ€t fight racism with racism. We're gonna fight racism with solidarity. We say you don't fight capitalism with no black capitalism; you fight capitalism with socialism. "

From the page: "We are about to embark on a conceptual journey through Johann Sebastian Bach's creative mind. The Musical Offering, and the even greater Art of the Fugue, were consciously written as musical pedagogical workshops, to educate Bach's students, and generations of future musicians, in the art of polyphonic (many-voiced) contrapuntal composition.

In the Musical Offering, Bach uses King Frederick's "Royal theme," to create a series of ten canons. But the fun part is that they are puzzle canons -- he does not write out all of the voices."

From the page: "In this jodo Dogen describes a dream-like fantasy in which he accidentally steps on a piece of shit, and in accord with Yun-men's utterance often cited by Dogen, it jumps up and declares itself to be Shakyamuni. This vision increases the apparent disrespect for Buddha in Yun-men's utterance, as Dogen again steps on his back (albeit again accidentally), even after the dried shit identifies himself as Shakyamuni. But Dogen uses this scatological vision not to degrade, but rather to further celebrate Buddha, by declaring that upon being stepped on, "He went and sat on the vajra seat, saw the morning star, bit through the traps and snares of conditioned birth, and cast away his old nest from the past."

Here Dogen skillfully proclaims and celebrates, non-explicitly, one of the major revelations of the Lotus Sutra, that of the Buddha's life-span enduring over inconceivable ages..."

From the page: "This article focuses on the inter-religious communication part of the utsav, an area that poses immense problems in our troubled world today, and one that deeply concerned Tagore throughout his lifetime. In particular, Rabindranath's perspective and insights on what he has called "spiritual culture" and how religion should and should not be taught within the Santiniketan setting will be examined through some of his comments regarding the teaching of religion and the cultivation of the human spirit."

From the lyrics: "I paraphrase historian Ishakamusa Barashango
'Understand that regardless of the lofty ideas ingraved on paper
in such documents as the Constitution or Declaration
the basic nature.. of the European American white man
remains virtually unchanged'.. so check..
This is the nature of the threat."