Tuesday, August 27, 2019

Saint Phanourios, Patron Saint of Karagiozis Puppeteers


Karagiozis is the main character of the tales narrated in the Turkish and Greek shadow-puppet theatre going back to at least the 19th century. Karagiozis is an anti-hero hunchbacked Greek, who is very clever and very poor, his right hand is always depicted long, his clothes are ragged and patched, and his feet are always bare. He lives in a poor cottage with his wife Aglaia and his three sons, during the times of the Ottoman Empire. The scene is occupied by his cottage in the left, and the Sultan's Palace on the far right. Because of his poverty, Karagiozis uses mischievous and crude ways to find money and feed his family, poking fun at himself, his friends, the Pasha, taxes and the audience in general. His shows usually tell comedic stories of his adventures.

Friday, August 23, 2019

The Drama Of My Life: Blogs, Cell Phones, and the End of Privacy


By Father Geoffrey Korz

"No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other." - Matthew 6:24

As much as our southern cousins like to take credit for him, the inventor of the telephone was Canadian. Although born and raised in Scotland, Alexander Graham Bell's best years were spent on his family homestead outside Brantford, Ontario, where his early experimentation with sound and language flowered into detailed studies of the Mohawk language on the nearby Six Nations Reserve. It was also here that Bell invented the telephone, the device that would transform modern communications, and which would later branch out into the Internet technologies we know today.

Tuesday, August 13, 2019

Marilyn Monroe and Dostoevsky


I wrote this on August 5th to commemorate the death of Marilyn Monroe, but had issues publishing anything to this site that needed to be resolved. So here it is, albeit late.

On my last night in Los Angeles in March of 2018, I decided to take a self-guided tour to about a dozen locations associated with the dark side of Hollywood, basically where famous murders or deaths took place. One of the locations I visited was where Marilyn Monroe died of a drug overdose on August 5, 1962 at the age of 35. It was her house at the time, in Brentwood.

I visited the location because I always had a great admiration for Marilyn Monroe, and have read a lot about her, and seen pretty much all her films. One thing most people don't know about her is how she was admired as somewhat of an intellectual and voracious reader by her peers, despite the media pushing her image as a dumb blonde and sex goddess, to her dismay, and to which she responded: "Maybe I’m a sexless sex goddess."

Friday, August 2, 2019

Byzanfest 2019: An Orthodox Christian Online Short Film Festival


Established in 2014, Byzanfest is the world’s first and only online festival that screens short-films made by Eastern Orthodox Christian filmmakers. The Festival will go live from Sunday 21st July until 4th August 2019, running concurrently with live venue screenings which are hosted by Global Screening Partners.

As the world’s media and entertainment have become increasingly on-demand and interwoven with social media, Byzanfest saw the opportunity to venture into an emerging concept: the online festival. New and innovative, such an event is not limited by the physical constraints of traditional venue-based festivals. Byzanfest looked ahead towards the future of entertainment and wanted to engage globally with both Orthodox and non-Orthodox audiences. The Festival encourages interactivity where viewers can share through all social media platforms. The Festival showcases films which reflect Orthodox Christian themes, beliefs, culture and values, as well as being artistically creative. It is worth mentioning all funds raised from this Festival will go towards funding small individual Orthodox film and art projects.