[a pleasurable headache] a particularly cruel knife
Reading/Watching/Listening
-
I am currently reading The Five, which unearths the lives of the five (canonical) victims of Jack the Ripper. It swims against the usual ‘true crime’ tide of concentrating on the killer. Instead, the book looks at the victim’s lives, treating each of them as a human being with all of the intricacies and contradictions that entails. Its portrait of life for working class women of the Victorian era is very bleak but is also punctuated with moments of poignancy.
-
I recently finished the second series of The Patriot, an Amazon Original from 2015. It has such a wholly specific voice and tone, a kind of existential riff on the spy genre with Coen-esque characters and scenarios. Highly, highly recommended and the kind of TV that looks to disappear in the current spate of cost cutting. Weep that this show never got a third season. Count your lucky stars it managed two.
-
I also just started listening to Shelved By Genre from the guys at Ranged Touch which bills itself as a media criticism podcast. The first ‘season’ will be covering Gene Wolfe’s ‘The Shadow of the Torturer’. I’ve never ready any Wolfe at all so diving right into his intricate and dense prose has been quite a ride.
Links
Attack of the zeros and ones
This article by Sam Wigley at the BFI website is from November 2022 but I somehow missed it when originally published. The article covers the birth of shooting on digital in the early 2000s covering the Dogme movement, Soderbergh and, of course, Michael Mann.
“It’s with Collateral that digital came into its fullest expression for me, because the movie was happening all in one night in Los Angeles. And I wanted to see LA at night the way you could see it with the naked eye. During the winter, there’s a marine layer that comes in around 10, 11 at night. The yellow sodium vapour street lamps reflect off the bottom of those clouds and it becomes a soft illumination. You couldn’t possibly capture that with film and that became its own aesthetic.”
<3
===
Creatures of the Id: Celebrating Ishirō Honda’s 1968 Masterpiece, Destroy All Monsters
https://www.rogerebert.com/features/destroy-all-monsters-tribeca-film-festival-2023
Walter Chaw writes about the movie that got me hooked on Godzilla movies, Ishiro Honda’s Destroy All Monsters.
“I love this movie for its brightly-colored palette and its similarly-dazzling web of intricate socio-political signs and signifiers. With verve and invention, it says a great deal about the Japanese national character: how it sees itself on the world stage as it enters the 1970s, a sleeping giant that should be praised for its industry and restraint. The Showa Era Godzillas are each cathartic, a series of films seen as camp in the West, but greeted with sobriety and tears upon the 1954 Japanese debut of the first picture. Not helping its perception on these shores is the “American cut” of “Godzilla” that inserted Raymond Burr in a framing story to recenter the West as protagonists in a film about a trauma of America’s specific making. This diminishment of Godzilla is a particularly cruel knife, an American re-colonization of a quintessentially Japanese story about their colonization by the Americans.”
As a bit of supplemental material to the above link I also recommend the recent(ish) Video Archives podcast episode that covered Honda’s excellent Rodan.
===
The Black action star pantheon
https://www.polygon.com/23729939/greatest-black-action-stars
A bunch of writers at Polygon have assembled a pretty great list of the all-time best black action stars. There are some super deep cuts on this list that I am eager to dig into (Robert Hooks’ Trouble Man sounds right up my street).
===
What Board Games Can Teach Us About Politics and Power
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2023/06/what-board-games-can-teach-us-about-politics-and-power
A great article at Current Affairs on how board games can break down complex political ideas and systems to get their core tenets across to players. The article starts with the evergreen anecdote regarding Monopoly originally being designed to show the pitfalls of capitalism:
“Monopoly, and the Landlord’s Game before it, show the instability and ever-increasing unfairness of a capitalist economy, whereby those who gain control over what everyone else needs in order to survive eventually develop an almost complete ability to extract wealth from others and further enrich themselves. Magie’s critique of a free market economy with privately owned land, articulated through the game, is a powerful one.”
===
On Leaving Social Media
https://litreactor.com/columns/leaving-social-media
Cina Pelayo at LitReactor gauges the opinion of several authors on their decision to leave social media. Always food for thought.
===
The Western Media Is Whitewashing the Azov Battalion
https://www.thenation.com/article/world/azov-battalion-neo-nazi/
Yep, it’s still happening.
“By 2021, the Azov Movement’s position as a premier hub of transnational white supremacy was firmly established. It was tracked by researchers; its fighters were banned from receiving military aid by Congress; and it was kicked off Facebook. The State Department declared its political wing a “nationalist hate group.” Journalists exposed its enlistment of fighters from Sweden to Australia.
Then came Russia’s invasion. Within months, many of these same institutions had plunged into an Orwellian stampede to persuade the West that Ukraine’s neo-Nazi regiment was suddenly not a problem.”
===
Parents Are Having to Steal Formula Milk. Make It Free Again
https://novaramedia.com/2023/06/21/parents-are-having-to-steal-formula-milk-make-it-free-again/
A scam in all but name. Nationalise milk.
===
Dead Cats and Transphobic Lies
https://bylinetimes.com/2023/06/22/dead-cats-and-transphobic-lies/
Just in case anyone was gullible/right wing enough to fall for the absolute pack of lies that has been circulating in the last week in the British media. It’s absolutely fine here on TERF island.
===
I’m off to watch the rest of Glastonbury. See you in two!