Sunday, August 9, 2020

Dialogic Cinephilia - August 10, 2020

Engley, Ryan and Todd McGowan. "Blade Runner 2049." Why Theory (October 23, 2017) ["In this episode, Todd and Ryan discuss Denis Villeneuve's Blade Runner 2049. The conversation centers around how the film depicts ideology and what we mean when we say "ideology"; how the film conceives of desire ensuring subjectivity; and how the relationship between police and capital in the film exposes a link to how the two function in everyday life."]

Ford, Phil and J.F. Martel. "Weird Music, Part One." Weird Studies #27 (September 26, 2018) ["In this first of two episodes devoted to the music of the weird, Phil and JF discuss two works that have bowled them over: the second movement of Ligeti's Musica Ricercata, used to powerful effect in Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, and the opening music to Cronenberg's film Naked Lunch, composed by Howard Shore and featuring the inimitable stylings of Ornette Coleman. After teasing out the intrinsic weirdness of music in general, the dialogue soars over a strange country rife with shadows, mad geniuses, and skittering insects. And to top it all off, Phil breaks out the grand piano."]

Gessen, Masha, Gary Hart and Martha Minnow. "American Autocracy." Open Source (August 6, 2020) ["What we know about our presidential race 90 days from the finish, perhaps all anyone knows, is that a wounded Donald Trump will not go quietly, if he goes at all, if he does not invoke emergency powers to cancel the election. The thought this hour was—and still is—to draw out the astute Russian-and-American diagnostician Masha Gessen, a resistance figure in two countries and author of a new book titled Surviving Autocracy. But then the plot thickened, particularly around the mayhem in Oregon after federal shock-troops had landed, over the objections of state governor, city mayor, and a militant wall of moms. A grave but lonely warning turned up in a New York Times guest-opinion piece. It was written by the sometime Colorado senator and presidential candidate Gary Hart, who joined this week’s conversation from his cabin a few mountains away from Denver."]

Heller-Nicholas, Alexandra. "Furious and Furiosa." Overland (May 15, 2019)

Lennard, Natasha. "Ted Cruz’s Hearing on Anarchist Protest Violence Was a Total Farce." The Intercept (August 5, 2020) ["Cruz kept mentioning Democrats’ failure to condemn a murder that was actually carried out by the far right — and refused to be corrected."]

Liu, Rebecca. "A Hellish Commons: Bong Joon-Ho's Parasite." Another Gaze (February 13, 2020)

Scott, James. "Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States." Slavery and Its Legacies (April 13, 2017) ["James Scott is the Sterling Professor of Political Science and Professor of Anthropology and is Director of the Agrarian Studies Program. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, has held grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Guggenheim Foundation, and has been a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Science, Science, Technology and Society Program at M.I.T., and the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. His research concerns political economy, comparative agrarian societies, theories of hegemony and resistance, peasant politics, revolution, Southeast Asia, theories of class relations and anarchism. He is currently teaching Agrarian Studies and Rebellion, Resistance and Repression. Recent publications include Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, Yale University Press, 1997; “Geographies of Trust: Geographies of Hierarchy,” in Democracy and Trust, 1998; “State Simplifications and Practical Knowledge,” in People’s Economy, People’s Ecology, 1998; and The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (Yale Press, 2009)."]

Zoller, Matt. "Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy." World in Time (November 22, 2019) ["'There are many arguments for what is at the root cause of our current social dysfunction,' journalist Matt Stoller writes at the beginning of his book Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy. 'Various explanations include the prevalence of racism, automation, the rise of China, inadequate education or training, the spread of the internet, Donald Trump, the collapse of political norms, or globalization. Many of these explanations have merit. But there’s another much simpler explanation of what is going on. Our systems are operating the way that they were designed to. In the 1970s, we decided as a society that it would be a good idea to allow private financiers and monopolists to organize our world. As a result, what is around us is a matrix of monopolies, controlling our lives and manipulating our communities and our politics. This is not just happenstance. It was created. The constructs shaping our world were formed as ideas, put into law, and now they are our economic and social reality. Our reality is formed not just of monopolized supply chains and brands, but an entire language that precludes us from even noticing, from discussing the concentrated power all around us.'"]







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