We live in the best of times in which we are able to learn about the world and its incredible diversity of cultures/beings/places/perspectives in a way never historically possible. We live in the worst of times when we are able to isolate ourselves completely from anything different from our own narrow view/conception of the world/reality. The choice is yours!
Bursztynski, Maurice, et al. "All That Jazz."See Hear #19 (July 20, 2015) ["Bob Fosse’s incredible autobiographical 1979 film, All That Jazz. The film features Roy Scheider in a career best performance (go on – argue against that notion if you can) as Fosse’s proxy, Joe Gideon. Joe is a Broadway director and choreographer, and a film director. He is all consumingly devoted to his art, but is a poor husband, father, and companion. He’s not a great male figure, yet he’s not shown as a shallow character without dimension. We have a fascinating conversation about devotion to art over devotion to domesticity, manipulation, how the entertainment business spits out its own, death, the truth, and the Mile High Club."]
Evans, Guy. "Edward Bernays - Propaganda (1928)."Smells Like Human Spirit (2013) ["Edward Bernays, born in Vienna in 1891 and famously the nephew of Sigmund Freud, was perhaps the pioneer in the field of Public Relations, and highly influential in providing the framework for modern advertising. His work aimed to convince people to want things that they didn’t need, and in the process, link their unconscious desires to the consumption of mass produced goods. This in turn, it was theorized, could be used to control the masses, as by keeping them distracted on frivolous happenings and relatively unimportant wants, they wouldn’t interfere with the activities of what he called ‘the important few’. All the while, he was remarkably candid about his intent. In one of his first books, ‘Propaganda’ (1928), he coined the term ‘engineering of consent’ to describe his technique for controlling the masses. In this podcast series, Guy Evans examines just how influential these ideas were, and details the resulting impact in relation to public relations, advertising, celebrity culture, and democracy itself."]
Smith, Imogen Sara. "In a Lonely Place."The Cinephiliacs #28 (November 17, 2013) ["While it can be fun to talk to critics who spend their time keeping up with contemporary cinema, Peter is glad to bring on Imogen Sara Smith, who has always dived into cinema's past worlds. The author of Buster Keaton: The Persistence of Comedy and In Lonely Places: Film Noir Beyond the City talks about her initial love of film via the Great Stoneface, her desire to write long in order to thoroughly engage with a topic, and her love of Pre-Code's subversive pleasures. The two also dive deeply into the many ends and odds of the strange cycle of film noir, engaging with questions of genre, psychology, and some underrated hits, before ending with one of noir's canonical masterpieces: Nicholas Ray's In A Lonely Place, a film so brutal in its depiction of love by being at first so intoxicating."] Atkinson, Sarah, Dario Llinares and Neil Fox. "Goodbye Dragon Inn."The Cinematologists #6 (May 13, 2015) Llinares, Dario and Neil Fox. "The Thing; The Fly; Rollerball; (Sci-Fi Special Part 1)."The Cinematologists #7 (June 4, 2015) ["The Fly, Demon Seed, The Thing and Rollerball are all discussed in the context of what the science fiction as a key cinema genre. Neil and Dario touch upon the tropes of hard v soft sic-fi, artificial intelligence, the fear of technology, metaphors of alien invasion and control of reproduction, along with many other of the fundamental elements of the sic-fi genre."]
"The Power of Solidarity (Racial Justice)."The Best of the Left (November 20, 2015) ["Today we look at the University of Missouri protests that ousted the university president and look back at the anniversary of the Tamir Rice police killing."] "Minimum Wage Mythbusters."United States Department of Labor (No Date)
Matthews, Joseph. "The Boy Who Shot a Nazi Official."Against the Grain (November 10, 2015) ["Seventy-seven years ago, the Nazis unleashed a pogrom, known as Kristallnacht, against Jews living in Germany. They claimed that it was a response to the assassination a few days earlier of a German consular official in Paris by a Jewish teenager. Writer Joseph Matthews explores the intriguing life and times of Herschel Grynszpan, the 17-year-old assassin. He also discusses the plight of refugees in Europe, then and now."] Edlund, Richard, Matthew Leonetti, and Iain Stasukevich. "Poltergiest (1982)."American Cinematographer Podcasts #6 (No Date) Ransby, Barbara. "Chicago Police Officer Charged With Murder After Video Shows Him Shooting Laquan McDonald 16 Times."
Democracy Now (November 25, 2015) ["For the first time in three decades, a Chicago police officer faces charges of first-degree murder for an on-duty shooting. White police officer Jason Van Dyke was arrested on Tuesday and is being held without bail for the killing of African-American 17-year-old Laquan McDonald. It was more than a year ago, on October 20, 2014, when officer Van Dyke shot the teenager 16 times, including multiple times in the back. Police claimed McDonald lunged at the officer with a small knife. But newly released dashcam footage showed the teenager walking away from the police officers’ cars when another police car pulls up to the scene. The video, which has no sound, then appears to show Officer Jason Van Dyke jumping out of the car, pointing his gun at McDonald and opening fire. The teenager’s body spins as he is hit with the barrage of bullets and then falls to the pavement, where he continues to be struck by bullets. Officer Van Dyke remained on paid desk duty after the shooting until he was taken into custody on Tuesday. In addition to the fatal shooting last October, Officer Van Dyke had at least 18 civilian complaints against him, which included excessive use of force, illegal arrest and use of racial slurs. None of these complaints led to any disciplinary action. This week Chicago police announced they will also move to fire officer Dante Servin, who killed 22-year-old African-American woman Rekia Boyd in 2012. We discuss the developments in Chicago with Barbara Ransby, professor of African American Studies, Gender and Women’s Studies and History at the University of Illinois, Chicago."] Sigel, Newton Thomas and Jon Silberg. "Valkyrie." American Cinematographer Podcast #7 (No Date) Sinclair, Upton. Oil! libcom (1927 novel: "The loose source for the film There Will Be Blood, Oil! pits oil tycoon father against socialist sympathetic son in the midst of the Teapot Dome Scandal and unionising trouble on the fields."]
Taylor, Astra. "By Any Memes Necessary."Bookforum (December 2014) ["An inside look at the hacking group Anonymous reveals a boisterous culture of dissent and debate."]
Holloway, Jonathan. "AFAM 162 - African American History: From Emancipation to the Present."Open Yale Courses (Spring 2010) ["The purpose of this course is to examine the African American experience in the United States from 1863 to the present. Prominent themes include the end of the Civil War and the beginning of Reconstruction; African Americans’ urbanization experiences; the development of the modern civil rights movement and its aftermath; and the thought and leadership of Booker T. Washington, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X."]
Appen, Joe Von and Erik McClanahan. "A Thematic Pairing Of Inescapable Dread."Adjust Your Tracking #116 (September 23, 2015) ["... reviews of two dread-soaked, arthouse genre films opening slowly in theaters across the country. First is Austrian horror Goodnight Mommy then onto drug war thriller Sicario, each tension-filled and terrifying in their own way."] López, Cristina Álvarez and Adrian Martin. "Paratheatre: Plays Without Stages"Notebook (August 7, 2014) Bochenek, Annette. "The Criterion Blogathon: The Freshman (1925)."Hometowns to Hollywood (November 16, 2015) Appen, Joe von and Erik McClanahan. "Immersive Immersion."Adjust Your Tracking #117 (November 10, 2015) Appen, Joe von and Erik McClanahan. "Over the Borderline."Adjust Your Tracking #118 (November 13, 2015) [" Joe and Erik talk about James White, the latest indie feature from the borderline films collective. We’ve championed this group in the past, responsible for previous AYT favorites Martha Marcy May Marlene, Simon Killer and Southcliffe. It’s another small film that deserves a larger audience than the one it will get. Look out for it. Lastly, a chat about Joe’s latest pick for our favorite segment, HOLD UP: Pump Up the Volume."]
Federici, Sylvia and John Taylor Gatto. "Witch Hunters and True Believers (Ideology and Social Control)."Unwelcome Guests #327 (October 9, 2006) ["We hear in the first hour from Silvia Federici how the original witch hunts were based in struggles about power, profit and hierarchy as capitalism came into being. We'll follow that with another reading from chapter 5 of John Taylor Gatto's Underground History of American Education, and its development by what he calls true believers as a method of social engineering modeled on European systems designed to preserve class stratification."]
Katz, Alyssa. "The U.S. Chamber of Commerce."Against the Grain (November 16, 2015) ["Lobbying group, aggressive litigator, political power broker, and media campaigner: the US Chamber of Commerce is all that and more. Yet its tremendous influence does not get the attention it merits, promoting corporate interests on behalf of anonymous donor companies. Journalist Alyssa Katz reflects on the immense power of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce -- how it came to be what it is today, who it represents, and the human costs of its influence. Alyssa Katz, The Influence Machine: The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Corporate Capture of American Life Spiegel & Grau, 2015."]
Citizenfour (USA/Germany/UK: Laura Poitras, 2014: 114 mins) ["In January 2013, film-maker Laura Poitras received an encrypted e-mail from a stranger who called himself Citizen Four. In it, he offered her inside information about illegal wiretapping practices of the NSA and other intelligence agencies. Poitras had already been working for several years on a film about mass surveillance programs in the United States, and so in June 2013, she went to Hong Kong with her camera for the first meeting with the stranger, who identified himself as Edward Snowden. She was met there by investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald and The Guardian intelligence reporter Ewen MacAskill. Several other meetings followed. Citizenfour is based on the recordings from these meetings. What follows is the largest confirmations of mass surveillance using official documents themselves, the world has never seen…"]
Progressives for Immigration ReformSourcewatch (Archive: last modified on September 13, 2010) ["PFIR has been called 'the latest front group of the anti-immigrant John Tanton Network. Before assuming her present assignment, [PFIR Executive Director Leah] Durant was a staff attorney for the Tanton Network’s Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). In 2007 FAIR was listed alongside klan and neo-Nazi organizations as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.'"]
"Astroturf."Sourcewatch (Last modified May 26, 2012) ["Astroturf refers to apparently grassroots-based citizen groups or coalitions that are primarily conceived, created and/or funded by corporations, industry trade associations, political interests or public relations firms."]
Front GroupsSourcewatch (Ongoing Archive) ["A front group is an organization that purports to represent one agenda while in reality it serves some other interest whose sponsorship is hidden or rarely mentioned -- typically, a corporate or government sponsor. The tobacco industry is notorious for using front groups to create confusion about the health risks associated with smoking, but other industries use similar tactics as well. The pharmaceutical and healthcare industries use front groups disguised as "patients rights" advocates to market their products and to lobby against government policies that might affect their profits. Food companies, corporate polluters, politicians -- anyone who has a message that they are trying to sell to a skeptical audience is tempted to set up a front group to deliver messages that they know the public will reject if the identity of the sponsor is known."]
Ever since director George A. Romero released his 1968 shocker Night of the Living Dead—which reimagined zombies, the dark magic-entranced slaves of voodoo folklore, as shambling fiends that crave warm flesh and can only be offed with a head shot—the zombie genre has displaced the western as cinema’s most popular and durable morality play. As the video essay “Zombie 101” demonstrates, while the genre’s superficial appeal is the spectacle of torn and mangled flesh—living and dead—its deeper resonance lies in its portrait of ordinary people struggling to survive in extreme circumstances.
Ultimately zombie films aren’t about the zombies, which have no conscious mind and therefore no personality. They’re a collective menace—rotting emblems of plague, catastrophe, war, and other world-upending events. The films depict representative social types wandering amid the ruins of the civilization they once took for granted, trying to reconcile their pre-zombie moral code (do unto others as you would have them do unto you) with the harsh necessities of the present (“If you’ve got a gun, shoot ’em in the head,” a sheriff tells a TV reporter in Night of the Living Dead, adding, “If you don’t, get yourself a club or a torch. Beat ’em or burn ’em, they go down pretty easy”).
If there’s no military, no police force, no law, no justice, and no hope, what’s the point of being decent as opposed to selfish? Might it be possible that, under such unimaginably awful circumstances, selfishness is decency? And if your mom is bitten by a zombie, at what point is it all right to stop treating her like your mom and reach for the 12-gauge? Dear Abby never had to ponder such questions. To quote the alternative title of a 1974 Werner Herzog movie, in zombie films it’s every man for himself and God against all. And as survivors sift through the rubble, weighing selfish imperatives against kinder, gentler impulses that might get them and everyone around them killed, the genre pulls off a nifty bit of creative jujitsu, defining civilization, morality, stability, and decency by depicting their opposites. - Matt Zoller Seitz
The film that established the cinematic zombie as we still know it, George Romero‘s debut remains so rich in socio-political allegory, so fascinating in its discussions around race, gender and the fundamental impossibility of peaceful human coexistence, and so central in shaping the landscape of contemporary horror cinema, that one particular aspect of the film is often overlooked – just how damn beautiful it is. Shot on gorgeously grainy black and white, it blends vérité-like realism with bold cuts and exaggerated angles, crafting a monochromatic marvel that feels simultaneously retro and forward thinking. No matter which of Romero’s Dead films tops your own personal list, there’s no denying that the days to follow never looked as good as the night before. – Michael Blyth
Talking to Hillary Weston in 2019, Jim Jarmusch noted that “there’s a suspension of rationalism in Night of the Living Dead. The zombies are drifting away from any kind of identity or meaning. They’re not monsters that come from outside the social structure, like Godzilla or Frankenstein; they are the remnants of that broken social structure. They come from within; they are us.”
Woofter, Kristopher, et al. "'The Death of Death': A Memorial Retrospective on George A. Romero (1940-2017)."Monstrum 1.1 (April 2018) ["George Andrew Romero died on 16 July, 2017 at the age of 77. This retrospective treats all sixteen of the films Romero directed, with a mention of those he scripted. The critical perspectives here vary from the personal to the theoretical. Contributors were encouraged to respond in the way that they felt most appropriate to the film they chose, and to their experience with it. Some respondents are seasoned Romero scholars and addicts, some are coming to the material via Stephen King or literary antecedents such as Edgar A. Poe and E.C. Comics, and some are coming to Romero’s work absolutely fresh. This retrospective honors a visionary who changed the face of horror; but, perhaps more importantly, it hopes to encourage further interest in the diverse work of an important American filmmaker who never stopped seeking new ways to force his audience to experience their moment."]
Nicholls, Tracey. "Frantz Fanon (1925—1961)."Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (No Date) ["Frantz Fanon was one of a few extraordinary thinkers supporting the decolonization struggles occurring after World War II, and he remains among the most widely read and influential of these voices. His brief life was notable both for his whole-hearted engagement in the independence struggle the Algerian people waged against France and for his astute, passionate analyses of the human impulse towards freedom in the colonial context. ... Tracing the development of his writings helps explain how and why he has become an inspirational figure firing the moral imagination of people who continue to work for social justice for the marginalized and the oppressed. Fanon’s first work Peau Noire, Masques Blancs (Black Skin, White Masks) was his first effort to articulate a radical anti-racist humanism that adhered neither to assimilation to a white-supremacist mainstream nor to reactionary philosophies of black superiority. While the attention to oppression of colonized peoples that was to dominate his later works was present in this first book, its call for a new understanding of humanity was undertaken from the subject-position of a relatively privileged Martinican citizen of France, in search of his own place in the world as a black man from the French Caribbean, living in France. His later works, notably L’An Cinq, de la Révolution Algérienne (A Dying Colonialism) and the much more well-known Les Damnés de la Terre (The Wretched of the Earth), go beyond a preoccupation with Europe’s pretensions to being a universal standard of culture and civilization, in order to take on the struggles and take up the consciousness of the colonized “natives” as they rise up and reclaim simultaneously their lands and their human dignity. It is Fanon’s expansive conception of humanity and his decision to craft the moral core of decolonization theory as a commitment to the individual human dignity of each member of populations typically dismissed as “the masses” that stands as his enduring legacy."]
Berger, Dan. "The Struggle Within."Stand Up Fight Back (December 17, 2014) ["We talk with Dan Berger, author of two new books. The primary focus of this show is "The Struggle Within: Prisons, Political Prisoners, and Mass Movements in the United States", from PM Press. It is a look back at political prisoners and state repression from the last fifty years. ... his other book is "Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era", from UNC Press, he looks at the organizing by imprisoned black activists within and around prisons and the ways in which that struggle influenced and impacted generations of activists later."]
Tillman, Mary. "A Mother's Search for Truth."Word for Word (June 13, 2008) ["In 2004, NFL football star-turned-Army Ranger Pat Tillman was killed in Afghanistan. While the Pentagon initially said Pat Tillman died heroically in an enemy ambush, the military later disclosed what it knew all along: Pat Tillman was shot and killed by his fellow soldiers. Today, his mother Mary says she still doesn't have the full story of how her son died. She's written a new book about her search for answers, Boots on the Ground by Dusk: My Tribute to Pat Tillman ..."]
The Living Dead (BBC: Adam Curtis, 1995: three 60 minute episodes) ["The Living Dead: Three Films About the Power of the Past is a series of films that investigate the way that history and memory (both national and individual) have been manipulated and distorted by politicians and others for various means of control."]
Prashad, Vijay. "We are in Pitiless Times."Open Democracy (November 15, 2015) ["After Paris, macho language about “pitiless war” defines the contours of leadership. Little else is on offer. It is red meat to our emotions."]
Gharib, Ali. "Center for American Progress Hosts Netanyahu as Leaked Emails Show Group Censored Staff on Israel."Democracy Now (November 12, 2015) ["The Center for American Progress, a leading progressive group with close ties to both President Obama and Hillary Clinton, held an event this week hosting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Washington. That decision reportedly prompted a revolt from some staffers angered that a liberal group would give Netanyahu a platform. In his opening remarks at the event, Netanyahu told attendees he wanted to speak to "a progressive audience." Netanyahu’s appearance came just days after a new controversy over the group’s alleged censoring of writers critical of Israel. Newly leaked emails from 2011 and 2012 published by The Intercept show CAP made key editorial decisions—including editing articles, silencing writers and backing off criticism—at the behest of influential groups who backed Israeli government policies. We speak to Ali Gharib, a contributor to The Nation magazine and a former staffer at the Center for American Progress. Gharib says one of his articles for the Center was censored."]
Young, Bradford. "The Philosophy of Cinematography."The Film Stage (November 5, 2015) [Cinematographer for the films Selma (2014); A Most Violent Year (2014); A Pawn Sacrifice; Ain't Them Bodies Saints (2013); Vara a Blessing (2013); Middle of Nowhere (2012); Pariah (2011)]
Ness, Immanuel. "New Forms of Worker Organization."Stand Up Fight Back (December 1, 2014) ["We speak with Immanuel Ness, editor of "New Forms of Worker Organization: The Syndicalist and Autonomist Restoration of Class Struggle Unionism." We talk about broad working class movements and specific sites of organizing and conflict across the world. Manny's book is published by PM Press. ... We talk about the huge waves of organizing in China, about the strategies miners in South Africa used to organize massive waves of strikes, and how cleaners and fast food workers in the UK and the US came together for more."]
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