Communication is communion. When we communicate with others, we take something from them into ourselves, and give them something of ours.
Perhaps it is this thought that makes us so nervous about the idea of encountering cultures outside the human. The thought that what it means to be human will shift - and we will lose our footing.
Or that we will finally have to take responsibility for our actions in this world. - Dr. Ha Nguyen (Nayler, Ray. The Mountain in the Sea. Picador, 2022: 301)
Orinoco, Achelous, Mississippi, Nile ... Ganges, Hudson, Danube ... Styx and Lethe ... Namings of moving waters flowing between two banks, waters rolling as Time itself, as if veins of Great Mother Earth. River is vital fluidity; the rivers move through both the upper world and the lower world, over ground and underground, inside and outside: rivers of fertility and prosperity, rivers of forgetting, rivers of binding oath, rivers of commerce, rivers of blood and rivers of water, rivers of rebirth, rivers of death, rivers of sorrow, all presided over in our mythic history by beneficent deities, dreadful nixes or changeable river spirits, offering fresh or freshening water, living fish, clay, fertile soil, flood cycles and waterways as famously along the Nile, Tigris and Euphrates. The rivers have been the abode of immortals who have offered these many gifts of purity, cleansing, grace and a mythic passage to the "other shore." Nefarious river spirits can just as easily take life, claiming the bodies of those who drown in swift and unpredictable currents. The river speaks of life a s flow, freedom, movement, dangerous currents, drowning, running ever along, running its course, flooding, also as confinement, direction, holding, channeling. The river reminds us that we can never rise above our source; all rivers flow downhill from their source, finally terminating in a sea or confluence. Creatures can be driven to swim upstream, like the salmon, and others just go with the flow; rivers carry things and are transporting in ways both literal and metaphorical. And rivers can run dry, their beds worn and empty, signs of a changing course or season, nature living in time. Language is a river of words ... a river of poetry and music transporting the head of Orpheus; rivers are weary, strong, flowing, sparkling, gushing, falling, rapid, smooth, heavy, bright. Everything that lives partakes of the quality of riverness (40). -- The Book of Symbols: Reflections on Archetypal Images (Taschen, 2010)
Yet how could so many good, committed liberals - philosophers and statesman who were otherwise so dedicated to the ideals of human freedom and self-governance - allow chattel slavery to flourish in America. ...
The answer to that question can tell us something not only about slavery in America but also about the shadow side of American vision of self-making as a whole, an insidious undercurrent that will continue to run throughout the narrative of American self-creation. ...
Liberal language about human rights was in this regard often contradictory - insisting on equality and yet locating human dignity in highly specific conceptions of what (some) people were capable of doing. Those who did not fit the paradigm of what human beings should be, conversely, were understood as moral children, still needing the authoritative guidance of those civilizations that had already come of age. Thus, for example, does the English philosopher and statesman John Stuart Mill, a major proponent of the ideal of personal liberty who was nevertheless employed the the colonial East India Company, insist in 1874 that so-called barbarians are too intellectually immature to observe a social contract. "They cannot be depended on for observing any rules," he announced, and therefore "nations which are still barbarous have not gone beyond the period during which it is likely be for their benefit that they should be conquered and held in subjection by foreigners. (76-78) Burton, Tara Isabella. Self Made: Creating Our Identities from DaVinci to the Kardashians. Hachette Book Group, 2023.
In the old days, when you couldn't show sex on film, directors like Hitchcock had metaphors for sex (trains going into tunnels, etc). When you can show more realistic sex, the sex itself can be a metaphor for other parts of the character's lives. The way people express themselves sexually can tell you a lot about who they are. Some people ask me, 'Couldn't you have told the same story without the explicitness?'. They don't ask whether I could've done Hedwig without the songs. Why not be allowed to use every paint in the paintbox? --John Cameron Mitchell, "How to Shoot Sex: A Docu-Primer" (2007): Shortbus Region 1 DVD release (Th!nk Film)
Because we are ostensibly a democracy, whose citizens potentially have the world’s information at their fingertips, powerful interests work to ensure that we are the most propagandized society. Propaganda can work to purposely distort reality through targeted misinformation, but it also operates to distract through endless entertainments and disillusion through aggressively disruptive white noise chatter. It doesn’t matter how much knowledge is available to us if we remain blind to the possibilities of critical thinking and active resistance. This is not a hyperbolic conspiracy theory; it is just common sense that those who benefit the most from the current socio-political structure will work to reproduce the status quo and keep those who are not benefiting, who are even suffering, from recognizing their predicament. One important way in which propaganda works in a democratic society is to keep us blissfully entertained and distracted while indoctrinating us into an official narrative. This can be most clearly seen in the Pentagon and CIA directed support, funding and vetting of a range of TV Shows and films that follow a narrow and manipulative action entertainment narrative about American wars abroad while conditioning Americans to accept abhorrent and anti-democratic practices, such as torture. Three prominent examples are the TV show 24 (2001 - 2010) and the films Zero Dark Thirty (2012) and American Sniper (2014), all of which turned torture and assassinations into entertainments designed to reinforce a complacent American public's belief in the necessity of these acts of state terror. - Michael Benton, "Ideological Becoming" (September 30, 2022)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Eig, Jonathan. "King: A Life - New Bio Details Extensive FBI Spying & How MLK’s Criticism of Malcolm X Was Fabricated." Democracy Now (May 30, 2023) ["We speak in depth with journalist Jonathan Eig about his new book, King: A Life, the first major biography of the civil rights leader in more than 35 years, which draws on unredacted FBI files, as well as the files of the personal aide to President Lyndon Baines Johnson, to show how Johnson and others partnered in the FBI’s surveillance of King and efforts to destroy him, led by director J. Edgar Hoover. Eig also interviewed more than 200 people, including many who knew King closely, like the singer, actor and activist Harry Belafonte. The book has also drawn attention for its revelation that King was less critical of Malcolm X than previously thought."]
Flight, Thomas. "Why Do Movies Feel So Different Now?" (Posted on Youtube: May 23, 2023) ["In this video I dive into what Metamodernism is and what it looks like in film, and chart how the movies have evolved since their modernist origins."]
Galeotti, Mark. "Putin's Wars: From Chechnya to Ukraine (Bloomsbury, 2022)." New Books in Military History (May 5, 2023) ["Mark Galeotti's book Putin's Wars: From Chechnya to Ukraine (Bloomsbury, 2022) is a timely overview of the conflicts in which Russia has been involved since Vladimir Putin became prime minister and then president of Russia, from the First Chechen War to the two military incursions into Georgia, the annexation of Crimea and the eventual invasion of Ukraine itself. But it also looks more broadly at Putin's recreation of Russian military power and its expansion to include a range of new capabilities, from mercenaries to operatives in a relentless information war against Western powers. This is an engrossing strategic overview of a rejuvenated Russian military and the successes and failures on the battlefield. Thanks to Dr Galeotti's wide-ranging contacts throughout Russia, it is also peppered with anecdotes of military life, personal snapshots of conflicts, and an extraordinary collection of first-hand accounts from serving and retired Russian officers. Russia continues to dominate the news cycle throughout the Western world. There is no better time to understand how and why Putin has involved his armed forces in a variety of conflicts for over two decades. There is no author better placed to demystify the capabilities of the Russian military and give a glimpse into what the future may hold. Putin's Wars is an engaging and important history of a reawakened Russian bear and how it currently operates both at home and abroad to ensure Russia is front and centre on the world stage."]
Habib, Connor. "The Archangel Michael and the Challenges of Our Time." Against Everyone #275 (September 29, 2024) ["Michaelmas is the esoteric christian celebration of the Archangel Michael. How can connecting with the impulses of the holiday show us how to co-share their burden of those who are suffering; strengthen love through our will; and leave the path of empowering violence?"]
Hertag, Julia. "Timekeeping." Sidecar (May 19, 2023) ["Unrueh – ‘unrest’ – the title of Swiss director Cyril Schäublin’s latest film, set in 1877 among anarchist watchmakers in Saint-Imier, a remote village in Switzerland’s Jura mountains, is the term for the wheel in the centre of a mechanical watch that ensures its continuous and even ticking. The unrest wheel inside a pocket watch is so tiny and the act of adjusting it so meticulous that, despite the film’s extended close-ups on the mechanism, its workings remain mysterious. Even the detailed explanations given by a young factory worker, Josephine Gräbli (Clara Gostynski), to her fellow anarchist, Pyotr Kropotkin (Alexei Evstratov), who happens to be visiting the village, don’t entirely clarify it. When Josephine asks if he understands her, Kropotkin replies: ‘I think so’. If the functioning of the unrest wheel is largely impenetrable, Unrueh suggests, so are the forces revolutionizing production in Kropotkin’s time (as well as those that keep our own economic system running)."]
Hoag-Fordjour, Alexis and Sara Mayeux. "We the People: Legal Representation." Throughline (August 8, 2024) ["The Sixth Amendment. Most of us take it for granted that if we're ever in court and we can't afford a lawyer, the court will provide one for us. And in fact, the right to an attorney is written into the Constitution's sixth amendment. But for most of U.S. history, it was more of a nice-to-have — something you got if you could, but that many people went without. Today, though, public defenders represent up to 80% of people charged with crimes. So what changed? Today on Throughline's We the People: How public defenders became the backbone of our criminal legal system, and what might need to change for them to truly serve everyone."]
Kelsey, Janice and Paul Kix. "60 Years Ago Today: Police Attack Children’s Crusade with Dogs & Water Cannons in Birmingham, Alabama." Democracy Now (May 2, 2023) ["Sixty years ago today is known as “D-Day” in Birmingham, Alabama, when thousands of children began a 10-week-long series of protests against segregation that became known as the Children’s Crusade. Hundreds were arrested. The next day, “Double D-Day,” the local head of the police, Bull Connor, ordered his white police force to begin using high-pressure fire hoses and dogs to attack the children. One photograph captured the moment when a white police officer allowed a large German shepherd dog to attack a young Black boy. Four months after the protests began, the Ku Klux Klan bombed a Black Birmingham church, killing four young girls — Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley and Denise McNair. We revisit the history of the Children’s Crusade with two guests: civil rights activist Janice Kelsey, who joined the Children’s Crusade as a 16-year-old in 1963, and author Paul Kix."]
Li, James. "America's New Caste System Exposed." 51/49 (Posted on Youtube: June 11, 2023) ["James breaks down two new laws, HF 68, known as the “The Students First Act”, which approves the use of taxpayer money to fund private schools, and SF 542—“An Act Relating to Youth Employment”, which allows 14 year olds to work 6 hour night shifts, allows 15 year olds to work on assembly lines moving items up to 50 pounds, and also allows 16 and 17 year olds to serve alcohol. Are these new laws meant to provide more opportunity to ordinary Americans, or are the rich passing laws to codify a modern day caste system?"]
Like Stories of Old. "Escaping Our Mental Prisons: What Psychedelic Movies Are Really About." (Posted on Youtube: May 31, 2023) ["An analysis of psychedelia in cinema, and of the philosophical and neurological insights it provides."]
Lombardo, Paul A. "Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell (John Hopkins University Press, 2022)." New Books in Political Science (April 24, 2023) ["“Three generations of imbeciles are enough” were the infamous words U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote in 1927. In Buck v. Bell, an almost unanimous Court upheld a Virginia law allowing the sterilization of people the state found to be “socially inadequate” and “feebleminded.” This landmark decision allowed the eugenics movement to take full effect, with multiple states passing similar laws. In Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell (Johns Hopkins UP, 2022), Dr. Paul Lombardo unpacks the case of an individual – Carrie Buck – to argue that the case not only represents the collective power of the eugenics movement in the early 20th century but an individual miscarriage of justice. Using extensive archival sources, Dr. Lombardo demonstrates that Carrie Buck was neither a “moral degenerate” or “feeble-minded.” She was a rape victim of sound mind. Her sterilization was based on fraudulent evidence. The powerful eugenics lobby manufactured a case – and a sympathetic court gave them a precedent that justified Carrie Buck’s sterilization – and over 60,000 sterilizations in the following decades. Three Generations, No Imbeciles frames the history of sterilization as essential to understanding contemporary legal fights over birth control and abortion. Does the constitution’s promise of “liberty” include the right to become pregnant or end a pregnancy? Dr. Lombardo’s epilogue and afterward outlines the connections between Buck and modern cases involving abortion, disability rights, and reparations for those sterilized. Originally published in 2008, the book has been updated in 2022 with a terrific epilogue and afterward with an eye towards contemporary events in reproductive politics. Dr. Paul A. Lombardo is Regents’ Professor and Bobby Lee Cook Professor of Law at the Center for Law, Health & Society at Georgia State University. He has published extensively on topics in health law, medico-legal history, and bioethics and is best known for his work on the legal history of the American eugenics movement. His website houses the images and all documents discussed in the podcast including the petition for rehearing created by the National Council of Catholic Men."]
Longworth, Karina. "Thelma & Louise (Erotic 90S, Part 4) ." You Must Remember This! (April 17, 2023) ["One of the most controversial movies of the 1990s, Thelma & Louise pushed every hot button of the new decade: date rape, sexual harassment, the failure of the feminist movement to create real change for the working class, and how pissed off women were, or were not, entitled to be about all of the above. Though it made more noise as a media phenomenon than at the box office, Thelma & Louise made so many people so mad that it had the feeling of a turning point. We’ll talk about the anger the movie communicated, the anger it inspired, and debate its lasting legacy."]
Remnick, David. "Israel vs. Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran — and Itself." The Ezra Klein Show (September 20, 2024) ["It’s been almost a year since Oct. 7. More than 40,000 Palestinians in Gaza are dead. The hostages are not all home, and it doesn’t look like there will be a cease-fire deal that brings them home anytime soon. Israeli politics is deeply divided, and the country’s international reputation is in tatters. The Palestinian Authority is weak. A war may break out in Lebanon soon. There is no vision for the day after and no theory of what comes next. So I wanted to talk to David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker. Remnick has been reporting from Israel for decades and has a deep familiarity and history with both the region and the politics and the people who are driving it. He first profiled Benjamin Netanyahu back in 1998. In 2013, he profiled Naftali Bennett, the politician leading Netanyahu in polls of who Israelis think is best suited to be prime minister. And he recently profiled Yahya Sinwar, the head of Hamas in Gaza. In this conversation, we talk about what Remnick learned profiling Netanyahu, Bennett and Sinwar, as well as where Israel’s overlapping conflicts with Hamas, the Palestinian Authority, Hezbollah and Iran sit after nearly a year of war. Remnick and I were both recently in Israel and the West Bank, as well as near Israel’s border with Lebanon, and we discuss our impressions from those trips."]
"Tested: Questions of a Physical Nature." Throughline (August 6, 2024) ["In 1966, the governing body of the Olympic track and field event started mandatory examinations of all women athletes. These inspections would come to be known as "nude parades," and if you were a woman who refused the test, you couldn't compete. We're going back almost a century to the first time women were allowed to compete in Olympic track and field games, and to a time when a committee of entirely men decided who was a female and who wasn't."]
No comments:
Post a Comment