Martin Scorsese's latest film is wonderful entertainment for all ages, with everything a great family film should have: a warmhearted story with drama and suspense, a cartoonish villain who turns out to be human after all, appealing characters played with just the right balance between simplicity and psychological realism, even scene-stealing dogs and a happy ending. It is also visually spectacular, even without 3D (i haven't seen this film in a theatre). The period detail is impeccable, yet with a strong sense throughout that magic is afoot. Right from the opening shot, the special effects are state-of-the-art and always integral to the story.

Yet this is more than a family film. For one thing, it is rich in details that only sophisticated viewers will notice, such as the fleeting apparitions of James Joyce and Salvador Dali. (Unlike Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris, which is set in the same city and period, this film does not focus on the now-famous artists and writers who gathered there in the 1920s.) But above all, it's a direct celebration of the magic of movies -- specifically of Georges Méliès, who began as a 19th-century stage magician with a brilliant mechanical sense, and went on to discover new ways of using machines to create illusions.

This is of course an homage to a film pioneer, paid by a director with an encyclopedic knowledge of (and respect for) the cinematic art and its history. But it's also a strikingly original take on machines, a counterpoint to classics like Chaplin's Modern Times or Fritz Lang's Metropolis, where giant machines represent everything that stifles creativity and life. Ever since William Blake, the vision of the universe as a vast machine has only seemed vastly evil, or at least depressing, to most of us. That feeling also comes across in Hugo, but only briefly, as a fleeting nightmare. Hugo himself is driven by the opposite feeling. As he says in the middle of the film, he is deeply attracted to the idea of the universe as a machine, because machines come without any useless parts, and that means that every life -- including his own -- must have a purpose. His immediate purpose is to fix the mysterious automaton his father has left him -- but that only leads him to a deeper purpose (which of course i won't reveal to those who haven't seen the film.)

Entertaining as it is, this film too leads us deeper into the paradoxes involved in human relations with technology. The many extras included on the blu-ray in this combo package offer plenty of insight into the history, artistry and technology behind the film. Viewers who are philosophically inclined will find further entertainment in pondering the paradoxes involved in the meshing of machinery and creativity, perhaps also of illusion and reality. In short, there's plenty here for everyone who likes movies.

The works of Mexican electronica master Murcof are intriguing partly because they are difficult to classify. Some have more or less danceable rhythms, and that applies to one track on this album, but the rest are more dronelike, building up and then dying away very gradually. Yet other tracks feature some grand orchestral gestures without the orchestra, i.e. apparently achieved by purely electronic means. Like many previous Murcof albums, this one has a semiclassical feel, but without the classical instruments or quasi-operatic vocals which graced earlier works like The Versailles Sessions -- except for a sinuously non-tonal cello run which adds to the complex texture to the final track here. The overall effect is expansive and vaguely vertiginous, but the constant subtle shifting of sound is elusive and fascinating. Some of it is similar to Murcof's earlier Remembranza, but he keeps taking the genre (whatever it is!) into new spaces. Different listeners will probably hear different things in this one ... but i for one will just keep on listening.

Dogen's Genjo Koan is only a few pages long (in English translation) but contains the heart of Buddhism as expressed by the 13th century founder of Soto Zen; it's also a philosophical classic. In this book, some of the leading figures of contemporary American Zen provide translated commentaries on Genjo Koan by Japanese masters in their tradition. The first and longest is by Nishiari Bokusan, written around the end of the 19th century and translated here by Sojun Mel Weitsman and Kazuaki Tanahashi. The translation of Genjo Koan itself by Tanahashi and Robert Aitken is also included. Nishiari's style is very accessible and unravels some of the difficulties resulting from Dogen's highly elliptical style.

Shunryu Suzuki, who needs no introduction to American students of Zen, provides the second commentary, which was edited (by Dairyu Michael Wenger and Weitsman assisted by Jeffrey Schneider) from talks given at various times by Suzuki; it is therefore not as complete as the other two commentaries.

The third section of the book is translated and introduced by Shohaku Okumura (his translation of Genjo Koan is also included). It's a commentary by Okumura's teacher Kosho Uchiyama, written in the postwar period in Japan, and relates Dogen's teaching to what was happening there at that time.

Every student of Dogen has to grapple with Genjo Koan in terms of his or her own experience, but all three of these commentaries are very helpful for English-speaking Zen practitioners who are not conversant with Dogen's medieval Japanese or the culture in which he worked. Even philosophically minded Westerners with no background in Zen might find this a good informal introduction to it.

The title of this Chrome Dreams documentary invites the question: Who are these "lonesome heroes"? My guess is that the title comes from the opening of his early song which begins, "A bunch of lonesome and very quarrelsome heroes/ Were smoking out along the open road ..." but if the irony of that song is present at all in this film, it's very well hidden. It's mostly about the "culture heroes" who have inspired Cohen in his long and unique career as poet, songwriter and singer. While these heroes aren't exactly quarrelsome, they are certainly varied, ranging from Garcia Lorca to Allen Ginsberg (that other Jewish Buddhist) and of course Hank Williams. All of them were "lonesome" in one way or another, and Cohen has carried this broad tradition forward with his own very personal touch.

This does a lot to explain the uniqueness of Cohen as a cultural phenomenon, but the Cohenologists who do most of the talking here show much more than an academic interest in Leonard the man behind the songs, poems and novels. The result is definitely for those who are already interested in Cohen, but it's much more entertaining than you might think from a description of its content, and it offers some genuine insights into the work of an immortal Canadian artist. The DVD is also enhanced by an extra interview with Judy Collins, whose classic album "In My Life" put Cohen the songwriter on the mainstream cultural map and opened the door to his own career as a singer. In its own way, this film is as good as the NFB classic from the other end of his career, "Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Leonard Cohen" -- which it recognizes by drawing quite a lot of footage from it.

Leonard Cohen has been old for a long time, yet it seems that something even older has been speaking through his voice for even longer. "I know my days are few", says the voice in one of these new songs, and those of us past 60 will perhaps best appreciate that feeling. But a deeper and far more universal feeling has come across in Cohen's music ever since his first album, and it's never been more authentic than it is in "Old Ideas".

What's old about this record, and yet again renewed, is "the penitential hymn" and the plea for mercy from an unbending Law and a Lord whose grace is given but rarely. Cohen's persona is at once the victim, the perpetrator and the observer, but never the innocent bystander, of life in this world -- rather a withstander, who stands with the rest of us even when we stand against each other. His time-ravaged voice, his words polished as rocks left behind by a glacier long ago, "gather up the brokenness" of all our hearts.

This time around we have ten songs of three to five minutes each, and every one is deeply resonant. As usual with Cohen, but more than ever here, the boundary line between speaking and singing, between poem and song, almost disappears. Yet this album is surprisingly tuneful -- not upbeat of course, but achingly melodic, and the arrangements bring this out with a variety of contributions from solo violin, cornet and other instruments. Indeed this is more varied musically than many of Cohen's records, each song having its own sound, and as we learn from the liner notes, its own set of producers, arrangers, engineers and musicians collaborating with Cohen. The women's voices (including those of Dana Glover, Sharon Robinson, the Webb Sisters, and Jennifer Warnes) are especially and variously wonderful here. (The liner notes also show us, by including scanned pages of Cohen's notebooks, the seemingly endless revision process of the poet -- and though all the lyrics are printed here, they don't always match the words you hear.)

In the one song which most resembles `the blues', the singer has "caught the darkness" like a contagious disease from the lover he's singing to, almost grimly proud that he's "got it worse than you." Yet in other songs we see "the darkness yielding," even if it yields only to the irony of being "saved by a blessed fatigue". But for me, the most intriguing of these "old ideas" is the intense dialogue between two sides of Leonard Cohen which we hear in the first and last song ("Going Home" and "Different Sides"). Here again is the old Cohen who is most universal when most personal, whose songs somehow let us hear something new just when we thought we'd plumbed the depth of their mystery. Old ideas? As old as "the wind in the trees talking in tongues."

This is an intensely personal work by a filmmaker best known for documentaries about politics. It begins with shots of a telescope dating back to the origins of astronomy in Chile; then, after the credits, the camera dwells lovingly on a series of images which (as the voice-over lets us know) represent Guzman's childhood, or rather the time and place of that childhood. For Guzman, that period in Chilean history is associated with astronomy, and that connects his nostalgic feelings with Chile's Atacama desert, a prime location for telescopes because the air is so dry and clear there. This location in turn connects with the great loss of innocence in Chilean history, the coup of 1973, because the military government built a concentration camp in this desert -- or rather adapted a mining camp to the new purpose, which was easy, since the early miners were housed very much like prisoners.

We hear some testimony from survivors of the military government period, and from relatives of the disappeared, whose quest for their remains both compares and contrasts with the quest of the astronomers who work in the same desert. We also see interviews with an astronomer and an archeologist (who points out some of the rock paintings in this desert which date back many thousands of years.) All of it becomes a complex metaphor for the Chilean character, and beyond that, for the tensions and ambiguities involved in the universal human relationship with time and history. Some of the comments, both from Guzman and from his interviewees, and some of the images as well, are so striking that you're grateful for the contemplative pace of the film, which gives you time to take in what you've just seen or heard. (Fortunately the English subtitles are very well done.)

If you're looking for a film that will encourage you to stop and ponder the presence of the past (instead of drawing you into the forward motion of a mystery or adventure story), this is a good choice. The 5 "bonus" films on the DVD are also substantial. One, about half an hour long, deals in depth with how and why the Chileans have avoided coming to terms with the horrors of the Pinochet period: some of those involved in the military government are still in positions of power and have not taken responsibility for what they did, leaving unresoved conflicts in the Chilean psyche. (This is referred to in the main film but not dealt with as deeply as in the bonus film.) The other four short films, totalling about 45 minutes, deal with some of the Chileans involved in astronomy. All the bonus films show the same high production values as Nostalgia for the Light itself; you could think of the whole thing as a single film with one feature-length chapter and several shorter ones.

If you have a deep desire to understand how life emerged from a nonliving material universe, and how sentience emerged from life, and human-style consciousness from sentience, then this book is for you. Deacon deploys the full range of concepts which have already been developed by writers such as Charles S. Peirce, Gregory Bateson, Maturana and Varela, Ilya Prigogine, and Stuart Kauffman to explain how physical principles can lead to biological principles and thence to the realm of psychology and even spirituality. But rather than merely summarize these contributions and add his own, Deacon builds his account of emergence from the ground up, beginning with the basic question: How is it that we find ourselves in a universe where things and actions have meaning and value for us, where intentions can make a physical difference? In the course of rethinking this kind of question, he fills in many of the gaps left open by previous accounts, and thus tells us a more complete and lucid story of emergence than anyone has done before -- which is ironic in a way, in view of his conclusion that living beings are radically incomplete, and consciousness emerges from this incompleteness.

Some of us are content to fend off this kind of question with the belief that the Creator's purposes preceded the creation, and now pervade it in some mysterious way. But taking purposefulness for granted prevents us from getting to the bottom of it. Deacon appeals to perfectly ordinary experiences, informed by the purely physical concepts of energy and work, to explain how purpose could arise unintentionally -- spontaneously, but not instantaneously. He does find it necessary to introduce some new conceptual tools along the way. The most basic and essential, i think, are the concepts of "orthograde" and "contragrade" change; based on the relations between these, Deacon identifies several clearly differentiated stages of emergence, the most crucial being "morphodynamics" (which emerges from thermodynamic or "homeodynamic" processes) and "teleodynamics" (emergent from morphodynamic processes). There is no room here to define these terms (though Deacon provides a very helpful glossary). However, i can testify that one doesn't need to be a specialist or a scientist to follow Deacon's argument from step to step. And if we do, we have a much more lucid comprehension of where life and mind are coming from.

On the other hand, even though i have been following the literature on emergence for a couple of decades now (including all the writers mentioned above and many more), i did find that from Chapter 5 (out of 17) onward, following Deacon's argument required some intense concentration. I'm sure that anyone who hasn't made that kind of effort would find the last few chapters full of impenetrable jargon; but Deacon has not introduced all these new terms just for the sake of being original or esoteric. My guess is that many of them are going to spread through the scientific community engaged with these questions, just as terms like "autocatalysis" and "autopoiesis" have spread, simply because they make sense of what has not been clear before. (At least i'm sure that Deacon's new conceptual tools will find uses in my own work in progress, which deals with a closely related inquiry.)

Deacon's account is not an easy read, whether the reader is acquainted with the prior literature on emergence or not; it's more difficult than his 1997 classic, The Symbolic Species. But its scope is much broader, and i can testify that it succeeds in its ultimate aim, as expressed in Deacon's Epilogue. He points out there that the progress of science has given us mastery over "much of the physical world around and within us," but at the same time "alienated us from these same realms" (with devastating consequences). If we can learn something, through Deacon's book, from the community of philosophically and scientifically reflective inquiry, we can reverse this trend, just as life itself manages to reverse the thermodynamic trend toward equilibrium. We can outgrow our history of alienation and find ourselves "at home in the universe".

This bilingual edition of Incendies was worth waiting for. Lubna Azabal is marvellous, but the rest of the acting in this film is remarkable. The English subtitles are well done, not only for the film itself but also for the lengthy and fascinating making-of documentary by Anais Barbeau-Lavalette. Most of Incendies was shot in Jordan, and the documentary ("Remembering the Ashes") gives the local extras and actors a chance to share their own feelings about the events portrayed in the film, and their memories of similar events in their own lives.

The story is superb, rivetting and surprising, mostly because of the original play it is based on (by Wadji Mouawad). But it's the authenticity of the location, and the local actors and extras, that really makes this film stand out, and the making-of shows exactly where that authenticity comes from. Many of those who appear in it are still living under the spell of hatred which motivates the characters in the fictional story. Of course it takes a great director like Villeneuve to transform this kind of atmosphere into a work of art like this film, but hearing the unvarnished testimony of those who live in this war-torn region is a real bonus. This is a great DVD in both respects.

Anyone who considers buying this book will be already aware of Dogen and the importance of the Shobo Genzo (or Shobogenzo), both for Zen practitioners and for students of Buddhism and/or philosophy. Here i'll compare this edition with previous English translations of Dogen, including the two other translations of the complete Shobogenzo with which i am familiar, those by Nearman (Shasta Abbey) and Nishijima and Cross (Dogen Sangha).

In this edition, each fascicle (chapter, or essay) has been translated by Kazuaki Tanahashi, who is expert in the medieval Japanese (and Chinese) of Dogen's original text, in collaboration with another Zen practitioner whose first language is English. This parallels the translation of Nishijima and Cross, except that Tanahashi's own command of English is considerably better than Nishijima's, and some of his 30 collaborators are more familiar with Dogen's Japanese than Chodo Cross was at the time of his collaboration with Nishijima. Hubert Nearman has considerable experience both as translator from old Japanese and Zen practitioner, but didn't have the benefit of collaboration with others on his translations of Dogen; the language of his translations is somewhat verbose compared with that of Tanahashi et al., whose work reaps the harvest of many years' striving to render Dogen's intentions into clear contemporary English. The result makes this edition an obvious first choice for a complete Shobogenzo, though other translations are still useful, because no single English version can capture all the possible nuances of the original texts.

Roughly two thirds of the Shobogenzo fascicles have been included in English translations of selections from Dogen, including some by Tanahashi and his collaborators; but that leaves about a third that are only available in a complete Shobogenzo, and most of them are no less important than the other chapters for a deep comprehension of Dogen.

As in the earlier books of selections published by Tanahashi, annotation and commentary are kept to a minimum. This edition does not use footnotes as the Nishijima/Cross Shobogenzo and the Leighton/Okumura edition of Dogen's Extensive Record do. Instead, its main supplementary and explanatory additions are placed in the glossary at the end of Volume 2, which is over 200 pages long. This gives the Japanese characters and transliteration for each key term (including many proper names), concise definitions, and a selective list of page numbers where the term appears in the text. Tanahashi also gives a very concise "Editor's Introduction" (which does have footnotes, or rather endnotes). This is followed by a 45-page section which gives a timeline of Dogen's career and places an abstract of each fascicle in that context (and gives translation credits). The translators also include some explanatory phrases [bracketed] in the main text itself, but use this device very sparingly, so the text is very clean, leaving nothing to distract the reader. (There are no asterisks marking terms that have been included in the glossary.)

The fundamental point of reading a writer like Dogen is to connect your own experience with your own practice on the way to realization. Dogen's way of showing how this is done - much of it by way of commentary or instruction on how to study specific Zen koans and Buddhist sutras - is uniquely valuable. By keeping the text clean, concise and cogent, Tanahashi and his collaborators have given readers an inestimable gift. Those who wish to pursue a more scholarly study of Dogen can turn to the selected bibliography at the back, but will also find this edition the best place to start.

This book claims to be "a complete step-by-step guide for beginners", but surely would be of little or no use to absolute beginners who have never done any drawing. The 2nd exercise in the book, for example, is to draw a dancer with charcoal and chalk. But without any prior knowledge of anatomy or drawing, it would be impossible to draw from the photograph supplied, because is only 1.5 inches square. So the "beginner" using this book is expected to find a model to pose, and to already have the basic skills required to draw the model. The book includes a gallery of finished drawings, but the instruction given is mostly limited to rather vague advice about choosing subjects and tools. Any beginner who tried to learn from this would most likely give up drawing.

However, there are some useful projects here for those who are past the beginner stage. The sections on anatomy and use of pastels on colored paper, for instance, give some good suggestions.