Woo-hoo! Legendary got Akira Takarada to do a cameo for the upcoming Godzilla film! Fabulous!
Special photo from the Godzilla set. Thanks to all the Godzilla fans for your support.
The Film Canon: The Host (2006)
The Host
directed by Bong Joon-ho
I decided to shake things up once again by not only introducing a new foreign film (South Korea in this case) and by going back into sci-fi, horror, comedy, and a genre I happen to enjoy quite a bit, the giant monster genre. “The Host” is a special…
Great stuff here!
80 Years on: A Retrospective on King Kong (by Jase Short)
Every civilization produces mythologies suited to its particular historical situation for various purposes, whether it be for entertainment of the lowest common denominator of interests within the broadest population or some specific striving of an artist or group of artists for excellence. King Kong will forever stand out as the progenitor of an entire genre of myth making unique to the historical situation of global capitalism, the mythology of the giant monster.
Of course various and sundry giants populate more ancient mythic annals, from Cyclopes (whose very name has taken an adjectival form to describe massive architecture) to dragons and giants. Yet, the proliferation of these creatures in contemporary mythology surpasses previous incarnations of the gigantic if for no other reason than changes in the modes of artistic production have created great opportunities for the contrasting of scale, most notably in cinema.
The Weekly Ansible: Futurism and Ecology (by Jase Short)
A must read!!!
It is unfortunate that for many the global ecological crisis (global warming, toxicity of our environments, food crises, and so on) represents an inevitable consequence of human technical development and population growth. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is not the existence of…
The Film Canon: American Psycho (2000)
Excellent overview by a fellow Ansiblean at his own tumblr. Don’t just read this one, scroll down and read some more!
American Psycho
directed by Mary Harron
I was recently reflecting on this movie, and it only made sense that I should eventually consider canonizing this film. I’ve always found this to be a fascinating movie, because for the longest time I felt that it wasn’t filmed right. I think,…
Why We Mourn the Death of Hugo Chavez
It is necessary I think, given the deluge of posts about the death of Hugo Chavez to step back a moment and take account of why some mourn and others celebrate, while still others remain entirely indifferent.
As for the indifferent, either they 1) have next to nothing invested in political developments among Latin American and Southern hemisphere nations or 2) they are generally indifferent to politics or 3) they hold to some strict moralistic principle about the symbolism of leadership.
As for the hostile, they are either amongst the variety of right wingers who despise the self-determination of nations, or they are deeply misinformed about Chavez’s political project or they are “anti-authoritarians” who believe that any manifestation of leadership or public personality is a degeneration of the struggle for democracy.
To these “anti-authoritarians” I would retort: all movements, all revolutions, all struggles of great masses of people produce public personas; symbolic subjectivities tend to embody the hopes and dreams of the oppressed as a kind of short hand expression for their hopes, desires and their struggle against oppressive forces.
Whether it be Cesar Chavez or Malcolm X, whether it be Harvey Milk or “Che” Guevara, movements produce these persons, not the other way around. The role of charismatic leaders in movements has always been central, whether in benign forms or in malignant forms.
To identify all expressions of such persons as always-already authoritarian personality cults is to distort the specificity of situations with a generalizing rule that obscures more than it reveals.
It is true, in the case of Chavez, that in the end there emerged the trappings of a bureaucratic wing of the Chavista establishment. It was, after all, a government that lived within the confines of the capitalist system, it did not have a decisive break with private property, nor the authoritarian structures of the capitalist state.
But it was a project constructed collectively. For every speech Chavez gave that was highlighted in the Western media as an example of his “dictatorship,” there were a dozen projects focused on empowering the masses of people through popular literacy drives, public healthcare, popular education, public assemblies, public media projects in which state funding allowed people to form their own participatory media collectives, take back the land initiatives and so much more.
Many were and remain critical of the person of Chavez within the Bolivarian movement. The masses of social struggles even include some sections (rather small but no less important) who are outright opposed to the person of Chavez, and yet they still were able to see why it was important that he be elected and not representatives of the old regime.
Nobody has argued that we’ve seen an example of accomplished democractic socialism throughout Venezuela, we’ve instead said that the project in Venezuela has reinvigorated the global socialist project and given it new life.
There were of course struggles which, ultimately, the legacy of Chavez runs up against: workers’ democracy, ecology, etc. Though even in those cases, the record is contradictory. There were times he made terrible moves, and it is a good thing that many people used the avenues made possible by the Bolivarian struggle to stand up against these moves.
But to argue that Chavez, continually under siege in spite of widespread popularity, subject to a military coup and multiple recall elections all of which dissolved in the face of mass popular support, under constant attack from the vast majority of the media for everything from his identification with the poor to the color of his skin, was somehow authoritarian in the sense that, say, Saddam Hussein or Kim Il Sung were authoritarians is to participate in a bald faced lie, pure and simple. This is simply not the case. Would it have been the case had he lived to see 2023? Perhaps, but in none of the other cases has popular democracy and movement activity reached such a deep level in a society.
We are critical of leaders and leadership, but we are not so naive or utopian or dogmatic as to believe that such a thing as leadership can somehow be eliminated within the circumstances of our current world order with all of its vast, anonymity-imposing constraints.
Today, to refuse to mourn, at least for a moment, with the people of Venezuela shows that you simply have no heart. A great fighter for justice, for popular democracy, for the self-determination of the Third World, for the renewal of socialism, for Latin American solidarity, for the idea of a united Latin America, for Afro-Caribbean self-determination, and for world peace had just died, and the vultures of the empire are circling, waiting to strike at the carcass and unleash a wave of attacks against all the people have gained in these 15 long years.
But this is not 1989. No Caracazo will silence the masses today. They are too organized, too motivated, too experienced to give up the fight now. Now we will see the struggle fragment, but there will be a core of people who will continue the Bolivarian project. They are where we should look to today.
Ray Bradbury being a racist, sexist ass:
About two years ago, a letter arrived from a solemn young Vassar lady telling me how much she enjoyed reading my experiment in space mythology, The Martian Chronicles.
But, she added, wouldn’t it be a good idea, this late in time, to rewrite the book inserting more women’s characters and roles?
A few years before that I got a certain amount of mail concerning the same Martian book complaining that the blacks in the book were Uncle Toms and why didn’t I “do them over”?
Along about then came a note from a Southern white suggesting that I was prejudiced in favor of the blacks and the entire story should be dropped.
Two weeks ago my mountain of mail delivered forth a pipsqueak mouse of a letter from a well-known publishing house that wanted to reprint my story “The Fog Horn” in a high school reader.
In my story, I had described a lighthouse as having, late at night, an illumination coming from it that was a “God-Light.” Looking up at it from the view-point of any sea-creature one would have felt that one was in “the Presence.”
The editors had deleted “God-Light” and “in the Presence.”
Some five years back, the editors of yet another anthology for school readers put together a volume with some 400 (count ‘em) short stories in it. How do you cram 400 short stories by Twain, Irving, Poe, Maupassant and Bierce into one book?
Simplicity itself. Skin, debone, demarrow, scarify, melt, render down and destroy. Every adjective that counted, every verb that moved, every metaphor that weighed more than a mosquito—out! Every simile that would have made a sub-moron’s mouth twitch—gone! Any aside that explained the two-bit philosophy of a first-rate writer—lost!
Every story, slenderized, starved, bluepenciled, leeched and bled white, resembled every other story. Twain read like Poe read like Shakespeare read like Dostoevsky read like—in the finale—Edgar Guest. Every word of more than three syllables had been razored. Every image that demanded so much as one instant’s attention—shot dead.
Do you begin to get the damned and incredible picture?
How did I react to all of the above?
By “firing” the whole lot.
By sending rejection slips to each and every one. By ticketing the assembly of idiots to the far reaches of hell.
The point is obvious. There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. Every minority, be it Baptist / Unitarian, Irish / Italian / Octogenarian / Zen Buddhist, Zionist/Seventh-day Adventist, Women’s Lib/ Republican, Mattachine/ Four Square Gospel feels it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse. Every dimwit editor who sees himself as the source of all dreary blanc-mange plain porridge unleavened literature, licks his guillotine and eyes the neck of any author who dares to speak above a whisper or write above a nursery rhyme.
Fire-Captain Beatty, in my novel Fahrenheit 451, described how the books were burned first by minorities, each ripping a page or a paragraph from this book, then that, until the day came when the books were empty and the minds shut and the libraries closed forever.
“Shut the door, they’re coming through the window, shut the window, they’re coming through the door,” are the words to an old song. They fit my life-style with newly arriving butcher/censors every month. Only six weeks ago, I discovered that, over the years, some cubby-hole editors at Ballantine Books, fearful of contaminating the young, had, bit by bit, censored some 75 separate sections from the novel. Students, reading the novel which, after all, deals with censorship and book-burning in the future, wrote to tell me of this exquisite irony. Judy-Lynn Del Rey, one of the new Ballantine editors, is having the entire book reset and republished this summer with all the damns and hells back in place.
A final test for old Job II here: I sent a play, Leviathan 99, off to a university theater a month ago. My play is based on the “Moby Dick” mythology, dedicated to Melville, and concerns a rocket crew and a blind space captain who venture forth to encounter a Great White Comet and destroy the destroyer. My drama premieres as an opera in Paris this autumn.
But, for now, the university wrote back that they hardly dared do my play—it had no women in it! And the ERA ladies on campus would descend with ball-bats if the drama department even tried!
Grinding my bicuspids into powder, I suggested that would mean, from now on, no more productions of Boys in the Band (no women), or The Women (no men). Or, counting heads, male and female, a good lot of Shakespeare that would never be seen again, especially if you count lines and find that all the good stuff went to the males!
I wrote back maybe they should do my play one week, and The Women the next. They probably thought I was joking, and I’m not sure that I wasn’t.
For it is a mad world and it will get madder if we allow the minorities, be they dwarf or giant, orangutan or dolphin, nuclear-head or water-conversationist, pro-computerologist or Neo-Luddite, simpleton or sage, to interfere with aesthetics. The real world is the playing ground for each and every group, to make or unmake laws. But the tip of the nose of my book or stories or poems is where their rights end and my territorial imperatives begin, run and rule. If Mormons do not like my plays, let them write their own. If the Irish hate my Dublin stories, let them rent type-writers. If teachers and grammar school editors find my jawbreaker sentences shatter their mushmilk teeth, let them eat stale cake dunked in weak tea of their own ungodly manufacture. If the Chicano intellectuals wish to re-cut my “Wonderful Ice Cream Suit” so it shapes “Zoot,” may the belt unravel and the pants fall.
For, let’s face it, digression is the soul of wit. Take philosophic asides away from Dante, Milton or Hamlet’s father’s ghost and what stays is dry bones. Laurence Sterne said it once: Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine, the life, the soul of reading! Take them out and one cold eternal winter would reign in every page. Restore them to the writer—he steps forth like a bridegroom, bids them all-hail, brings in variety and forbids the appetite to fail.
In sum, do not insult me with the beheadings, finger-choppings or the lung-defiations you plan for my works. I need my head to shake or nod, my hand to wave or make into a fist, my lungs to shout or whisper with. I will not go gently onto a shelf, degutted, to become a non-book.
All you umpires, back to the bleachers. Referees, hit the showers. It’s my game. I pitch, I hit, I catch. I run the bases. At sunset I’ve won or lost. At sunrise, I’m out again, giving it the old try.
And no one can help me. Not even you.
—
“There is more than one way to burn a book.”, Foreword to Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury. (via wyoh)
AHAHAHAHA WOW FUCK YOU BRADBURY
(via descartesthinksnot)
also, i am just now realising that he wrote the minorities chipping away at accuraate reliable and relevant information, censoring this that and the other until we were all stripped of any purpose or meaning….as if we are pro-erasing motherfucking history rather than pro-LET’S MAKE SURE WE NEVER FORGET OUR HISTORIES BECAUSE IMPORTANT.
(via green-street-politics)
(via green-street-politics)
Dany has Yoshi!
The sad truth.
