You all know this site, right? "Real Clear Politics." Along with Fox's claim of being "Fair and Balanced," we get another blatantly false claim. Both of these news sources are quite clearly biased, Real Clear Politics being owned by two admitted conservatives, John McIntyre and Tim Bevan, and Fox News being owned and directed by Rupert Murdoch.
I suppose that most news media leans to the left, in the sense that it reflects the majority opinion on the environment, a woman's right to choose, and other issues, such as concern for your fellow man, etc. I'm not denying that there are certain contradictions here; with a government such as the one we have in the United States, it's going to be a bit difficult to really show concern for your fellow man when we have a ridiculously low tax rate ((See here, and here, and here) please try and refute my data, I dare you) and we're told to go it alone by mother culture. The problem with the American Dream, of course, is that it certainly acknowledges the narcissism inherent in any individual divorced from a REAL concept of community, while ignoring the idea that perhaps we need these very COMMUNITIES to survive. We're a very group-based animal. Another simple way to put this, so that you understand: Jesus Christ dictates that we should treat one another better than ourselves. Turn the cheek, make peace, be meek.
The truth of the matter is that we're a bunch of selfish, whiny bitches. And when we think we're going to change the way abortions are done (consider before it was legal, when it went down in back-alleys, like in countries where it's not legal now), or that we're getting stepped on a little more than we should, its probably because all those rich Republocrats are able to bury their tax burdens in their LLC's and elsewhere, while the poor and middle classes don't realize that it's the nasty, two-party corporate system to blame.
People in Europe pay $8 for a gallon of gas and way more per pound of meat. We're spoiled, insufferable, misled whelps, and the "American Way" is a stupid farce. It's never been realistic and it will continue to grow more and more difficult until the average American realizes its not realistic, stands up, and decides that those on top shouldn't have this "Dream" anymore than we should - IT'S A LIE.
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Friday, April 25, 2008
Most people live in China.. at least on this Friday they do
Argh. It's 730am and I haven't begun my paper on the Norwegian film "Most People Live in China," or in Norwegian, "Folk flest bor i Kina." The Norwegian Film Institute has the best review of it that I've found. Essentially, as we were told in class, it is a "portmanteau" film, which is a word for a bag that opens to several compartments, or in Lewis Carroll's verbiage, a combination of two words to form a new word, like "smoke" and "fog" to make "smog", or "breakfast" and "lunch" to make "brunch." Urban Dictionary also says that it can also be a "cliche and uncreative way" to create new words, or even a word used only by Wikipedia that is essentially meaningless. The latter seems an unpopular interpretation (see definition #4).
None of these really seem to fit the film, as the film certainly seems anything but cliche, and I don't see how it is captured by the combination of several semiotic parts to create a new whole, in which both original parts create the new whole. Instead, there is a common link between all of the wholly separate stories, as in Four Rooms (with Tim Roth the bellhop).
My conclusion:
A critically thinking American watching the pawky Folk flest bor i Kina feels an acute sense of powerlessness: The rich octet of stories presented here shows a multi-faceted, complex people and their political counterparts or representations; Our own polity rings hollow in comparison and makes us feel more than a bit ashamed. Imagine for a second the American equivalent. We get two stories, one with a bright, kitschy blue, and the second a bright, mammon red. By laying the original two film stocks, both blue and red, upon one another, we see a busy, confused story in which we really can't make out a decent narrative, plot, or dramatic shape. The two stories, which really aren't that different at heart, have become some sort of avant-garde garble, much more Brakhage and Fischinger than Bunuel. The key here though is that when we lay the two on top of one another, the film stock has become somehow unerringly green. This may seem coincidental, but its not; our political story is all about an unintelligible narrative and script, and becomes a thickly obfuscated mess, the directors here simply concerned that they have enough mesmeric, blue and red mute print to keep their green-hued answer print as interminable as possible. At least this movie has a solution in Lasse. Even if we're blind and otherwise mundane, our dreams can ultimately save us.
None of these really seem to fit the film, as the film certainly seems anything but cliche, and I don't see how it is captured by the combination of several semiotic parts to create a new whole, in which both original parts create the new whole. Instead, there is a common link between all of the wholly separate stories, as in Four Rooms (with Tim Roth the bellhop).
My conclusion:
A critically thinking American watching the pawky Folk flest bor i Kina feels an acute sense of powerlessness: The rich octet of stories presented here shows a multi-faceted, complex people and their political counterparts or representations; Our own polity rings hollow in comparison and makes us feel more than a bit ashamed. Imagine for a second the American equivalent. We get two stories, one with a bright, kitschy blue, and the second a bright, mammon red. By laying the original two film stocks, both blue and red, upon one another, we see a busy, confused story in which we really can't make out a decent narrative, plot, or dramatic shape. The two stories, which really aren't that different at heart, have become some sort of avant-garde garble, much more Brakhage and Fischinger than Bunuel. The key here though is that when we lay the two on top of one another, the film stock has become somehow unerringly green. This may seem coincidental, but its not; our political story is all about an unintelligible narrative and script, and becomes a thickly obfuscated mess, the directors here simply concerned that they have enough mesmeric, blue and red mute print to keep their green-hued answer print as interminable as possible. At least this movie has a solution in Lasse. Even if we're blind and otherwise mundane, our dreams can ultimately save us.
Thursday, April 24, 2008
Thursday
I have a reflection paper to write for Nordic Film that I have yet to start. The movie was Most People Live in China, which is an interesting title for an equally interesting movie. Not sure exactly what to think, to be honest. It was a portmanteau film, apparently.
Well g'luck to me, anyway.
Well g'luck to me, anyway.
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Wednesday / What is art? / The strange case of Guillermo Vargas Habacuc
When visiting my friend Jason in Portland recently, he informed me about Snopes, which seemed quite interesting. Admittedly, I've never seen the show Mythbusters, but it sounds like something that would interest me immensely.
I get a group invitation on Facebook, a chain email from a concerned friend, or at least hear about some grave cause day-to-day. Being an overly concerned citizen, one with direct ties to, say, Human Rights Watch, Save Darfur, and even groups like the ACLU and Planned Parenthood, with much smaller, more ephemeral, and partisan goals, I start to wonder at which point I should consider sleep, after a full day of rocking chair-internet-hucksterism and American-intention-divorced-from-action-but-
fulfilled-through-donation/charity activism...
Today, I awoke, unable to sleep, and logged into facebook, only to find a petition to sign about Guillermo Vargas Habacuc, an artist who supposedly chained a starving dog to a tether, and starved it to death in the name of art. I'm all for avant-garde art, as long as it makes entrenched Republicans and other idiots uneasy, don't get me wrong, but I'm also a vegetarian, and despite being so mainly for social reasons (horrible US slaughterhouses, their shitty correlate laws -how grossly meat is subsidized in the US, how eat too much meat is linked to health problems, and how taxpayers are ultimately being fucked for it - and the gross amount we, as Americans, eat), I would like to consider myself a fairly aware citizen. I think fur is disgusting, and I frown upon undue pain, from prisoners in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, down to assisted suicide and medical marijuana.
So, who is Habacuc, what's the deal, and does this petition really mean anything? Let's start here. Undetermined, says Snopes. Nobody seems to know if the dog really died, it is undetermined whether it was mistreated while it was an exhibit, and esssentially, the facts seem blurred on both sides.
Truthorfiction.com has this to say:
"There is also no dispute that the reports about the exhibition have sparked international outrage. Websites, blogs, and petitions were devoted to protesting the exhibit and calling for the artist to be uninvited from the Central American Biennial event in 2008.
There is not agreement, however, about whether the dog was mistreated and died as a result of Vargas exhibit."
The argument doesn't seem over. Did the dog actually die of starvation? Did it escape after a day and its three hours of being tethered to the exhibit, and find a similar or even worse fate in the streets of Nicaragua? Was it fed well while being used by the artist as an example of the horrible conditions of stray dogs?
I'm a little confused, because the artist also exhibited a sign above the dog, saying "Eres lo que lees": You are what you read, while also burning 175 crack rocks in a nearby censer. Were they all part of the same artistic installment? What is the combined aesthetic here? Does it make sense, and is it even the artist's job to make sense?
This blog is setup to monitor the artist, and continue circulating a sort of e-novena with the purpose of remembering Natividad, the dog that the artist used for his exhibit. Here is a tacky youtube video, replete with terribly sentimental (read: pointlessly emotional) music, which doesn't get any closer to the issue at hand.
This blog says x and y about this artist, yet doesn't provide great sources. It states that his myspace has him admitting he killed the dog, but doesn't provide a link to his myspace. So where is the proof? It says that its sole purpose is to act against further disinformation, but at what point does it become anything other than that simply because it won't credit its source.
Leave it to deviantart to provide some interesting thought on the matter.
My thoughts on the matter are as follows. Aesthetically, artists should be free to do whatever they want, just like other humans, as long as they aren't harming someone. I guess I call this the John Stuart Mill aesthetic, getting the idea directly from his "On Liberty," my personally favorite work on political philosophy. In this case, how do you define that? Say the dog was fed well, or escaped, and the artist didn't kill it. It's still.. retarded. Do you really need to show the dog starving below a sign saying, "you are what you read"? You are what you read? Hmm. You're also what you exhibit, which in this case is effete schlock which isn't really going to change anybody's callous heart anytime soon. Can people change, sure, but should something innocent suffer, even for three hours, to affect that change? No. It's just dumb and brutal, and essentially shows that the artist is no better than the dregs of society that he's supposed to be changing. It's sophomoric, aesthetically displeasing, and vacuous. Again, I'm about as liberal as they come. I don't care if people piss or shit on religious icons, let alone use manure to show how fertile the blessed virgin is. At the end of the day, whether through religion or science, we're all related. An icon is just an icon, but flesh and blood are flesh and blood. Shock my senses, break up my mouldered and staid worldview, but don't hurt something to make me more sensitive; it's pointless.
I get a group invitation on Facebook, a chain email from a concerned friend, or at least hear about some grave cause day-to-day. Being an overly concerned citizen, one with direct ties to, say, Human Rights Watch, Save Darfur, and even groups like the ACLU and Planned Parenthood, with much smaller, more ephemeral, and partisan goals, I start to wonder at which point I should consider sleep, after a full day of rocking chair-internet-hucksterism and American-intention-divorced-from-action-but-
fulfilled-through-donation/charity activism...
Today, I awoke, unable to sleep, and logged into facebook, only to find a petition to sign about Guillermo Vargas Habacuc, an artist who supposedly chained a starving dog to a tether, and starved it to death in the name of art. I'm all for avant-garde art, as long as it makes entrenched Republicans and other idiots uneasy, don't get me wrong, but I'm also a vegetarian, and despite being so mainly for social reasons (horrible US slaughterhouses, their shitty correlate laws -how grossly meat is subsidized in the US, how eat too much meat is linked to health problems, and how taxpayers are ultimately being fucked for it - and the gross amount we, as Americans, eat), I would like to consider myself a fairly aware citizen. I think fur is disgusting, and I frown upon undue pain, from prisoners in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, down to assisted suicide and medical marijuana.
So, who is Habacuc, what's the deal, and does this petition really mean anything? Let's start here. Undetermined, says Snopes. Nobody seems to know if the dog really died, it is undetermined whether it was mistreated while it was an exhibit, and esssentially, the facts seem blurred on both sides.
Truthorfiction.com has this to say:
"There is also no dispute that the reports about the exhibition have sparked international outrage. Websites, blogs, and petitions were devoted to protesting the exhibit and calling for the artist to be uninvited from the Central American Biennial event in 2008.
There is not agreement, however, about whether the dog was mistreated and died as a result of Vargas exhibit."
The argument doesn't seem over. Did the dog actually die of starvation? Did it escape after a day and its three hours of being tethered to the exhibit, and find a similar or even worse fate in the streets of Nicaragua? Was it fed well while being used by the artist as an example of the horrible conditions of stray dogs?
I'm a little confused, because the artist also exhibited a sign above the dog, saying "Eres lo que lees": You are what you read, while also burning 175 crack rocks in a nearby censer. Were they all part of the same artistic installment? What is the combined aesthetic here? Does it make sense, and is it even the artist's job to make sense?
This blog is setup to monitor the artist, and continue circulating a sort of e-novena with the purpose of remembering Natividad, the dog that the artist used for his exhibit. Here is a tacky youtube video, replete with terribly sentimental (read: pointlessly emotional) music, which doesn't get any closer to the issue at hand.
This blog says x and y about this artist, yet doesn't provide great sources. It states that his myspace has him admitting he killed the dog, but doesn't provide a link to his myspace. So where is the proof? It says that its sole purpose is to act against further disinformation, but at what point does it become anything other than that simply because it won't credit its source.
Leave it to deviantart to provide some interesting thought on the matter.
My thoughts on the matter are as follows. Aesthetically, artists should be free to do whatever they want, just like other humans, as long as they aren't harming someone. I guess I call this the John Stuart Mill aesthetic, getting the idea directly from his "On Liberty," my personally favorite work on political philosophy. In this case, how do you define that? Say the dog was fed well, or escaped, and the artist didn't kill it. It's still.. retarded. Do you really need to show the dog starving below a sign saying, "you are what you read"? You are what you read? Hmm. You're also what you exhibit, which in this case is effete schlock which isn't really going to change anybody's callous heart anytime soon. Can people change, sure, but should something innocent suffer, even for three hours, to affect that change? No. It's just dumb and brutal, and essentially shows that the artist is no better than the dregs of society that he's supposed to be changing. It's sophomoric, aesthetically displeasing, and vacuous. Again, I'm about as liberal as they come. I don't care if people piss or shit on religious icons, let alone use manure to show how fertile the blessed virgin is. At the end of the day, whether through religion or science, we're all related. An icon is just an icon, but flesh and blood are flesh and blood. Shock my senses, break up my mouldered and staid worldview, but don't hurt something to make me more sensitive; it's pointless.
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
Tuesday
Book club at Bel Ami. Apparently the birthplace of the Richmond Gimlet, created by this guy, drink of the month dude in Playboy. That's kinda cool, no?
Meeting a friend for coffee first, at the Marines-denying Starbucks. Bull + Shit.
Happens a lot though, of course, so why should we expect anything different?
And yes, I have officially been hired by Albertson's pharmacy and do my drug test tomorrow. Frickin' rad. Money will be a welcome sign.
Meeting a friend for coffee first, at the Marines-denying Starbucks. Bull + Shit.
Happens a lot though, of course, so why should we expect anything different?
And yes, I have officially been hired by Albertson's pharmacy and do my drug test tomorrow. Frickin' rad. Money will be a welcome sign.
Monday, April 21, 2008
Monday Monday Monday
So I got my Macbook Thursday. I'm on binder E-L of music, as far as transferring everything to my itunes. What a pain in the rear.
Class today at 3. My head seems pretty good thus far. I'm laying here in bed with a binder of cds. My date didn't work out. I'm trying to get a damn job, but nobody will call me back, and I'm three days late on a simple reflection paper for a movie that I've only partially watched.
Yay me.
I forgot to do a look at the week ahead too. Sucktastic.
Class today at 3. My head seems pretty good thus far. I'm laying here in bed with a binder of cds. My date didn't work out. I'm trying to get a damn job, but nobody will call me back, and I'm three days late on a simple reflection paper for a movie that I've only partially watched.
Yay me.
I forgot to do a look at the week ahead too. Sucktastic.
Friday, April 18, 2008
Weekend here/Week recap
I'm sick. It's bullshit. But, on a positive note, Death Cab is in town and I have tickets. I can't wait. It should be completely rad. I'm hoping for a cool shirt or hoodie.
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