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Notes from Underground

  And, indeed, I will ask on my own account here, an idle question: which is better—cheap happiness or exalted sufferings? Well, which is better?---Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Even now, so many years later, all this is somehow a very evil memory. I have many evil memories now, but ... hadn’t I better end my “Notes” here? I believe I made a mistake in beginning to write them, anyway I have felt ashamed all the time I’ve been writing this story; so it’s hardly literature so much as a corrective punishment.  Why, to tell long stories, showing how I have spoiled my life through morally rotting in my corner, through lack of fitting environment, through divorce from real life, and rankling spite in my underground world, would certainly not be interesting; a novel needs a hero, and all the traits for an anti-hero are expressly gathered together here, and what matters most, it all produces an unpleasant impression, for we are...
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Hope

To be human is to be a miracle of evolution conscious of its own miraculousness — a consciousness beautiful and bittersweet, for we have paid for it with a parallel awareness not only of our fundamental improbability but of our staggering fragility, of how physiologically precarious our survival is and how psychologically vulnerable our sanity. To make that awareness bearable, we have evolved a singular faculty that might just be the crowning miracle of our consciousness: hope.-- Erich Fromm


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LAST TRUE PUNK BAND Pertti Kurikan Nimipäivät


The Punk Syndrome (Documentary)

Never mind the mall punks, here’s Pertti Kurikan Nimipäivät!
A mentally challenged punk band is the unusual subject of the unusually thoughtful "The Punk Syndrome." Focusing on the handicapped head-bangers who make up the Finnish band Pertti Kurikka's Name Day, this thin-ice-treading docu opensa window onto alternative culture, human nature and the very narrow line between so-called normal people and those on the fringe.

Proper marketing could take Jukka Karkkainen and J-P Passi's funny, edgy and very human feature into cult-hit territory, although the subject and subtitles will provide built-in limitations for this low-budget, rock-fueled verite movie.

The band's chief songwriter, guitarist and namesake, Kurikka, is a sensitive obsessive who has a fixation with seams (as in clothing). He's also a grizzled rocker who weeps easily and pours his heart, soul and problems into his lyrics
 ("Pertti has a speech defect/He can't throw a disco party/Pertti has cerebral palsy/He can't throw a disco party"). His bandmates make up one of the strangest punk groups in Finland, or anywhere. 
Drummer Toni Valitalo and bassist Sami Helle have Down syndrome; vocalist Kari Aalto is also mentally disabled and has ferocious rage issues, most of them directed at Helle, a politically conservative NGO activist who in one sequence puts a good-looking Finnish pol on the spot (she acquits herself gracefully)
The film gives us a peek into the lives of four men with developmental disabilities who also happen to be in a punk band. They are Pertti, the band’s guitarist; Kari, the band’s singer; Sami, the band’s bassist; and Toni, the band’s drummer. And they are wonderful, complex people with a deep desire to be taken seriously and treated like they matter.


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