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Wednesday, December 16, 2015

Reading Trumbo/Trump Through Hitler's Fascist Empire

Trumbo the man and the movie
This is a film well worth seeing. It is not great although it has great performances. It is a bio but not the typical Hollywood kind, so give it a pass on that. It is really about clarifying what happens when people get inflamed about persecuting others for not holding the same opinions and beliefs. Just a substitute for age old religious wars that nowadays are not so age old anymore.

The persecution of the Muslims - by those who know not the difference between Muslims and Islamists - is reminiscent of the early days of Hitler's storm troopers known as the Brownshirts who began by trashing the property of the Jews building up into Kristallnacht

Only it was Trumbo's swimming pool that got trashed by his next door neighbor
We have here Foucault's GRID of power/knowledge/capital/normality: how normality is enforced locally in the smallest of ways, tightening the grid, leaving less and less wiggle room every day. This is fascism at work, observing and surveilling you, making sure you conform and present the image of normality.

But it is the same mentality, the same cultural attributes of both fascist Germany and fascist US that leads to this persecution that intensifies into cold blooded killing. Trump is a "brownshirt leader" drumming up business for persecution the way Hitler did to get even more control of the government and the German people. Easy as pie. The same thing works over and over and over again because people never change within a system that promotes competition. That is, the now insidious DETERRITORIALIZED CORPORATE CAPITALISTIC SYSTEM.


A truly beautiful work of art.

Today Muslim stores are having their windows smashed and their stores trashed. Are we still calling the US the land of the FREE! Nietzsche has told us to beware of whom we choose as enemies for we will become like them. We have. We are now full fledged fascists and Hitler has won his war.

This is the message of Trumbo. His treatment at the hands of the justice system was so much more benign in the 1950's than it would or is the rule today. So sad. Fascism becomes institutionalized as it becomes natural. That's the way it works. That is its danger. Our world is stolen from us in homeopathic doses. THE PERFECT CRIME. No body, no criminal, no crime scene, no justice, no punishment, nada.


Very short and readable

Wednesday, November 11, 2015

READING EVEREST THROUGH JEAN BAUDRILLARD

Climbing Everest Porn or Hero Porn
This is a good bio movie with fine performances. So let's get that out of the way. It has just the right number of good cliche scenes for the chicks who stay at home while hubbies buy their way into hero porn for 65 THOUSAND DOLLARS Or lead the expedition for 65 thousand a pop. It's true. And many died on this trip, and still freeze away on the mountain.

What is of importance though is watching the moving image of assembly line manufactured capitalistic romantic climbing of the highest mountain PORN! All the romance is gone however as the leader leads his merry band of bonding men who have no more wars to fight as tek does all that now, in a line worthy of a sargent into battle. Follow me! And they follow holding a rope as they go to keep them together, just like kindergarten plus kids out on a school trip.

They are cattle plodding along to maybe their death as they clump their way through the snow, avalanches to the heights of the top - or death. Imagine the first ones to do this. The long years of preparation, the solitary partnerships your life depended upon, the exaltation of achieving it, the risk of death. All taking place in the Symbolic Order of the Sacred:risk, reversibility, event, sacred, life, living, passion and then compare that with this film so wonderfully showing you this supposed event turned into the Order of Production:irreversibility, survival, continuity, accumulation, capital, fascination - in fact into the Production of Porn mountain climbing where if you pay enough you will do it and be guided back to safety. How's that!

The bonding of the men to each other in some drinking, buddying, back slapping, encouragement, out for a trek in the wilderness to show our stuff. No more wars to die for. No Christendom to spread, Nazis to kill, fascism to destroy before it destroys our freedom. Nope. So the successful ones who have the money or who scrape it together to LIVE THEIR DREAM! BECAUSE IT'S THERE!To fulfill the ideology they still believe. Wonderful!

We see our entire western world of DETERRITORIALIZED CORPORATE CAPITALISM monetizing an EVENT by replicating it with cell phones, high tech weather reports, group tourists going mountain climbing, the new eco type tourism. To see the hoards of people at the base camps, all the leaders of tourist groups squeezing in that window of opportune time for climbing to the peak.

This is not exploring how to get to the top. This is replicating the map of how to get to the top. Desiring to reach the top of Everest by being led there by a more experienced person. A teacher, one who leads. And they blindly follow.


Passion of Exploring the South Pole,Northwest Passage
In these essays Connell has recounted the extreme passion, desire,preparation and gamble these men went through to go there first without a map, just raw courage and dedication. The incredible hardships, the incredible death experiences are riveting. This is no account of a tourist guided trip but a REAL experience, felt with all their soul. Their exploration is not a COMMODITY to buy and do. NOT a trophy to tell about.

This is akin to Dr. Walter Palmer's killing of the great too domesticated sanctuary lion, Cecil. 
Cecil was not a wild lion but one used to being fed by humans from time to time I guess. He was lured with a bloody kill to be killed.
A Canned Hunt - A Trophy Killing without Risk

Another assembly line manufactured trophy porn SPECTACLE. Maybe they will want to climb Everest next. Would that be too dangerous for them? With a very experienced guide? 
All this is HERO PORN manufactured like Warhol's Campbell Soup Cans. The hero and his ordeal have been monetized by DETERRITORIALIZED CORPORATE CAPITALISM.
HOW DO YOU ALL LIKE YOUR WORLD?
How do you like your world?








Monday, November 2, 2015

Laurie Anderson's Heart of a Dog Interview/Review by Gary Kramer

Laurie Anderson's Heart of a Dog

Laurie Anderson’s wistful, elegiac film, Heart of a Dog, uses animation, video, home movie clips, and dream sequences to chronicle not just her life with Lolabelle, her rat terrier, but more generally how humans and animals communicate, their shared sense of companionship, and our processes of death, grief, and coping with trauma.


A Clip from Youtube of Heart of a Dog





GMK You once described language as a virus from outer space. You get political in Heart of a Dog when you discuss the homeland security advisement, “If you see something, say something. Hopefully, it’s nothing.” You also talk about Lolabelle understanding 500 words and the speech a vet gives when he suggests putting an animal down. Then there’s mention of Wittgenstein’s notion that “language has the power to create the world.” What are your thoughts on the power of language, which has been such an important theme in your work and in this film?

LA I think it’s never very satisfying to share your dreams with someone else. In fact, when somebody goes, “I had this dream…” I go, “Oh please, don’t tell me your dream, please!” No! It’s not a film you saw! It’s something like a hallucination that only you have a code for. Now that is a wonderful thing—stories only you appreciate, only you value, and only you understand. That is a really underrated thing in our culture. You have this wonderful dream world that’s only for you. Let’s keep it that way. Don’t try to tell other people what’s going on. It’s like when only you think something is funny. That’s really great. But why do we share stories? Because otherwise, life is too lonely, you know? 

GMK I interpret it such that you are telling these things to me. It’s episodic, and therefore it doesn’t feel like a monologue. As a viewer, you get into some stories, and sometimes you just watch, but I made all these connections and took it all in. I could see the film again and have a totally different response.

LA I think I was exploring this idea: Does language help you in a situation like that? The Tibetans would say it does, because they wrote a whole book about it. They are expressions of grief. The no crying thing is about trying to understand what is going on not with your own emotions, but to pay attention to what’s going on with the drama of the person who is dying and dead. Their idea is to focus on their transition, which will also be used when you die. But it’s to focus on their death, not your reaction to it.

GMK You mention in the film about your mother loving you unconditionally. When did you love Lolabelle unconditionally?
LA It’s different with a dog or an animal. They don’t have the same conditions that humans do. They have a default mode of unconditional love. I don’t know why they love us—we are sources of food, and we are alphas, and to some extent we protect them and give them rides in cars. Cats do not want rides in cars. That’s a really fundamental difference! I think that using an animal to talk about love is a different kind of relationship. For me, dogs represent a kind of purity that isn’t often found in human relationship, which are more complicated. Very few people will have the joy that dogs do when running to the door to say hello. They’re very openhearted.
Heart of a Dog is currently playing at Film Forum in New York through November 3, 2015.
Gary M. Kramer is the author of Independent Queer Cinema: Reviews and Interviews and the co-editor of Directory of World Cinema: Argentina.
Excerpts from Gary Kramer's Interview/Review of Heart of a Dog. I know I shall love it.



Thursday, October 15, 2015

Goodnight Mommy Review by Molly Laich

I hope I don't go to prison for reposting this but Molly Laich is just so good a reviewer I have to risk it. TPP is going to try to do this to people like me.

http://missoulanews.bigskypress.com/missoula/have-a-look/Content?oid=2506290

Monday, January 12, 2015

Reading Neil Burger's Divergent Through Deep Green Resistance

Reading Neil Burger's Divergent Through 
Deep Green Resistance


First Scene in Divergent Displaying Acting Credits
This is Lake Michigan in the future all dried up.Rotting, rusty hulks of huge ships are stranded on what was once a 
mighty lake.
There is no voice over telling us what happened only the beginning music of Philip Glass I think, as the shot goes over the fence and floats towards Chicago's buildings, people walking in their different color faction clothes as Beatrice tells us there has been a war and their city is divided into separate factions.
For anyone who has seen Lake Michigan this is imagining the future time in the novel/movie to us.

But it is also revealing the recent past to us.
THE ARAL SEA
A sea once so huge all of Ireland could have fit into it.
A Sea of 1000 islands.
Beautiful, rich with fish and sea animals
Ruined by USSR dams blocking the water for industrial use.
1000 Islands between New York and Ontario - Resorts and homes for wild animals and people
A Comparable body of water.
The ARAL Sea
In 44 years less than 10% is left.It is saline.All life is gone or dying



Aral Sea with crumbling buildings looking like Chicago in
Divergent 


Around the Aral Sea now is a Desert.The camels like it.


See it to the East of the Caspian Sea

Chicago in Divergent
Crumbling buildings in disrepair


I would say that this is one of the most profound scenes in any film in decades.Time is twisted so that the future is past and the past is future. Time as a continuum, conceptualized as linear, progressive has been spiraled into a
 Mobius Strip destroying all conventions of 

TIME. 
 Reality has been confabulated by the Imaginary.
Simulated Reality is Reality and Reality is Simulated.
The REAL is coming from the future and the past.

This is the message of the book Deep Green Resistance. We are all fixated on our favorite tragedies, fragmented, divided by our emotions, our ideologies, our political beliefs.
This is the way they want it so they can continue to plunder the planet until ...

!THERE IS NOTHING LEFT!

This is VIOLENCE and it will not be stopped without force.It never has and it never will - Frederick Douglass

Our worst enemy is our neo-liberal ideology