Sunday, April 5, 2020

Dialogic Cinephilia - April 5, 2020

Ali, Wajahat and Sarah Kureshi. "COVID-19 Q & A." In the Thick (March 25, 2020) ["Maria and Julio are joined by power couple husband and wife: ITT All-Star, Wajahat Ali, contributing Op-Ed writer with The New York Times and CNN commentator, and Dr. Sarah Kureshi, physician at Georgetown Family Medicine. They talk about the medical and economic impacts of COVID-19, how their family is approaching social distancing, and what we can do to play our part in containing this outbreak."]

Barme, Geremie, Zha Jianying and Eugene Wang. "A conversation about the 1980s in China, on the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests." Open Source (June 6, 2019) ["China in the 1980s can sound like a Paradise Lost—paradise crushed by tanks on Tiananmen Square 30 years ago, paradise erased by massacre and state propaganda ever since, an unmarked memory hole. Except that people remember: the freedom of Democracy Wall; longhair students steeped in Confucian classics but sampling Virginia Woolf and Nietzsche for the first time, and dancing to Bob Dylan. Cosmopolitanism was in: Mao was dead, and Time magazine made the new ginger man Deng Xiaoping its man-of-the-year. John Denver of Rocky Mountain High cheered China’s long march to modernization. Bob Hope cracked jokes and swung his golf club in an NBC special from Tiananmen Square—till, poof, everything changed. What we know of Tiananmen Square is mostly the tanks turned against plain people 30 years ago. What’s just as compelling in restored memory is the charged air of hope and possibility in Tiananmen, and in China of the 80s, until just days before the crackdown, the end of reform. Tiananmen Square had more and bigger Speakers’ Corners than Hyde Park in London: students, workers, artists plying agendas; musicians trying tunes, rehearsing democracy, you could have supposed. It was a romantic proving ground of blooming civic virtue and community spirit, and the American audience loved it, too."]

Boyle, T.C. "On Writing About LSD and Outside Looking In." Fiction/Non/Fiction (January 2, 2020) ["In this episode, taped live at the Miami Book Fair, writer T.C. Boyle talks to Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast co-hosts V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell about writing his latest novel, Outside Looking In. The novel looks at the history of LSD, and tracks the marriage of a Harvard graduate student who works with psychologist and LSD researcher Timothy Leary. Boyle offers candid insights into his research process, his own experiences with drugs, his relationship with nature, and how he writes and revises."]

Butler, Judith. "Capitalism Has Its Limits." Verso (March 20, 2020) ["One reason I voted for Sanders in the California primary along with a majority of registered Democrats is that he, along with Warren, opened up a way to re-imagine our world as if it were ordered by a collective desire for radical equality, a world in which we came together to insist that the materials that are required for life, including medical care, would be equally available no matter who we are or whether we have financial means. That policy would have established solidarity with other countries that are committed to universal health care, and so would have established a transnational health care policy committed to realizing the ideals of equality. The new polls emerge that narrow the national choice to Trump and Biden precisely as the pandemic shuts down everyday life, intensifying the precarity of the homeless, the uninsured, and the poor. The idea that we might become a people who wishes to see a world in which health policy is equally committed to all lives, to dismantling the market’s hold on health care that distinguishes among the worthy and those who can be easily abandoned to illness and death, was briefly alive. We came to understand ourselves differently as Sanders and Warren held out this other possibility. We understood that we might start to think and value outside the terms that capitalism sets for us. Even though Warren is no longer a candidate, and Sanders is unlikely to recover his momentum, we must still ask, especially now, why are we as a people still opposed to treating all lives as if they were of equal value? Why do some still thrill at the idea that Trump would seek to secure a vaccine that would safeguard American lives (as he defines them) before all others? The proposition of universal and public health reinvigorated a socialist imaginary in the US, one that must now wait to become realized as social policy and public commitment in this country. Unfortunately, in the time of the pandemic, none of us can wait. The ideal must now be kept alive in the social movements that are riveted less on the presidential campaign than the long term struggle that lies ahead of us. These courageous and compassionate visions mocked and rejected by capitalist “realists” had enough air time, compelled enough attention, to let increasing numbers – some for the first time – desire a changed world. Hopefully we can keep that desire alive, especially now when Trump proposes on Easter to lift constraints on public life and businesses and set the virus free. He wagers that the potential financial gains for the few will compensate for the increase in the number of deaths that are clearly predicted, which he accepts, and refuses to stop – in the name of national health. So now those with a social vision of universal health care have to struggle against both a moral and viral illness working in lethal tandem with one another."]
Colón-Ramos, Daniel. "This Is Nothing We’ve Ever Seen Before." Latino Rebels (March 22, 2020) ["The COVID-19 outbreak is unprecedented. How do we begin to process what we are all experiencing? On this episode of Latino Rebels Radio, we welcome Daniel Colón-Ramos, professor of cellular neuroscience at Yale and co-founder of Ciencia PR, to talk about what the science is saying and what we can learn about the pandemic."]

DuVernay, Ava. "When They See Us." Film at Lincoln Center Podcast (June 6, 2019)

Moulton, Jack. "Jungleland." Letterboxd News (September 26, 2019) ["'You’re in the most beautiful place you’ve ever seen, but it’s hell.' Colombian filmmaker Alejandro Landes takes us deep inside the extreme filming conditions of his acclaimed jungle thriller Monos, and the art of letting life come onto the page."]

Teutsch, Matthew. "The Problem with Confederate Monuments in Public Spaces." Black Perspectives (July 26, 2017)

Vint, Sherryl. "Don’t Let the Future Be Written For You: Sabrina Vourvoulias’s Ink." Los Angeles Review of Books (December 27, 2012) ["Set in a near future (one that perhaps seemed nearer still before the recent presidential election), the novel imagines a world in which immigration law has become overtly totalitarian, drawing an absolute line between the citizen and any “aliens” residing within the US. The title refers to a practice of border control in which one’s status is tattooed permanently onto one’s skin: naturally-born citizens are unmarked, but all others have tattoos whose distinctive colors make immediately visible their visa status, with black tattoos denoting the most despised immigrant class, temporary workers who are also fitted with GPS trackers. As the novel opens, we learn of the new legislation regarding tattoos, and it is soon revealed that an English-only ordinance has passed as well; as the plot unfolds, the legal repression of non-white subjects is further exacerbated by curfews (for those with tattoos only) and legislation regarding an infectious disease — which suspiciously seems only to target anyone with a tattoo — that is used as a pretext to strip such immigrants of their rights as legal residents, confine them to Inkatoriums for “treatment,” and eventually sterilize many without consent."]






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