Kalle Lasn - Books and Films

Books and Films

See also: Culture jamming

In his first book, Culture Jam, Lasn portrays consumerism as the fundamental evil of the modern era. He calls for a "meme war": a battle of ideas to shift Western society away from consumer capitalism. His second book, Design Anarchy, calls on graphic designers, illustrators and others to turn from working in service to corporate and political pollution of both the planet and "the mental environment", and to embrace a radical new aesthetic devoted to social and environmental responsibility. His third book, Occupy Econ 101 (Seven Stories Press, Fall 2012), will include contributions from Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz, Paul Samuelson, George Akerlof, Lourdes Benería, Julie Matthaei, Manfred Max-Neef, David Orrell, Paul Gilding, Mathis Wackernagel and Herman Daly, among others.

Lasn made documentary films for 20 years beginning in 1970 - many of them to do with Japan, the homeland of his wife, Masako Tominaga. His award-winning films include:

  • Japan Inc: Lessons for North America?
  • Japanese Woman
  • Satori in the Right Cortex
  • The Rise and Fall of American Business Culture
  • The Autumn Rain: Crime in Japan

Read more about this topic:  Kalle Lasn

Famous quotes containing the words books and, books and/or films:

    “Books and marriage go ill together.”
    —Molière [Jean Baptiste Poquelin] (1622–1673)

    “Americans will listen, but they do not care to read. War and Peace must wait for the leisure of retirement, which never really comes: meanwhile it helps to furnish the living room. Blockbusting fiction is bought as furniture. Unread, it maintains its value. Read, it looks like money wasted. Cunningly, Americans know that books contain a person, and they want the person, not the book.”
    —Anthony Burgess (b. 1917)

    “The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life. Unlike painting and literature, the cinema both gives to life and takes from it, and I try to render this concept in my films. Literature and painting both exist as art from the very start; the cinema doesn’t.”
    —Jean-Luc Godard (b. 1930)