Entries by petronius

The original post, with original comments, can be found here: Dissent Poetry Corner: Whitey on the Moon

A rat done bit my sister Nell.
(with Whitey on the moon)
Her face and arms began to swell.
(and Whitey's on the moon)
I can't pay no doctor bill.
(but Whitey's on the moon)
Ten years from now I'll be payin' still.
(while Whitey's on the moon)
The man jus' upped my rent las' night.
('cause Whitey's on the moon)
No hot water, no toilets, no lights.
(but Whitey's on the moon)
I wonder why he's uppi' me?
('cause Whitey's on the moon?)
I wuz already payin' 'im fifty a week.
(with Whitey on the moon)
Taxes takin' my whole damn check,
Junkies makin' me a nervous wreck,
The price of food is goin' up,
An' as if all that shit wuzn't enough:
A rat done bit my sister Nell.
(with Whitey on the moon)
Her face an' arm began to swell.
(but Whitey's on the moon)
Was all that money I made las' year
(for Whitey on the moon?)
How come there ain't no money here?
(Hmm! Whitey's on the moon)
Y'know I jus' 'bout had my fill
(of Whitey on the moon)
I think I'll sen' these doctor bills,
Airmail special
(to Whitey on the moon)

—Gil Scott Heron

Restoration Of 'Star Spangled Banner' Uncovers Horrifying New Verses

Cross posted to the hipster twitter:


"Login is (not) a verb"

Idiocy angers me. The only thing that angers me more is idiocy dressed up as self-righteous pseudo-intellectualism written by people with poor language skills.

To wit: ‘login’ is a verb. In fact, I would go so far as to argue that following the Germanic tradition (English being a Germanic languge) of that (super annoying, but quite useful) thing known as a ‘seperable prefix’ verb, ‘login’ is used much the same way. The author of this little piece tries to prove their point by attempting to conjugate the whole word, rather than the root. ‘Log’ is a verb, and conjugates perfectly. Adding the suffix ‘-in’ (derived from the preposition, no longer needing an object and now a part of the compound word) we get forms like ‘I login’ (or ‘I log in’). Also, ‘I logged in’, ‘I was logged in,’ etc. Much the same way modern German describes phone calls with the verb anrufen: ‘Ich rufe an,’ ‘ihr ruft an,’ etc., with the infinitive form always being ‘anrufen.’ Same with ‘to login.’

The same goes for all the other ‘non-verbs’ that get called out (http://notaverb.com/). ‘I checked out,’ ‘I was cut off,’ ‘we picked up,’ ‘the whole place was locked down,’ etc., etc. If the nerdrage here is against common verb-proposition pairings being combined into compound words (or seperable-affix verbs), then that’s moronic prescriptivism, and ignores one of the nicer features of Germanic languages as a whole (also, cf. ‘nevertheless,’ ‘inasmuch’).

I would have e-mail the fellow directly, but neither the website nor the whois lookup gave me an email address.

The Road was hella depressing (book and film), and I'll only fault the film for being maybe overly faithful to the book. I don't know about the comparison to Children of Men (entertaining, book and film, though I wasn't entirely sold on either), but a film version of Never Let Me Go is in the works, and if its at least as decent as The Road adaptation, it'll be something to look forward to.

Trailer linky.

If you need to wash the taste of crap films out of your mouth, I suggest the Royal Shakespeare Company/BBC production of Hamlet.

It's a tad uneven in places, but David Tennant and Patrick Stewart play well off of each other. Stewart in particular does a great Claudius-as-gigantic-asshole. Tennant (of recent Dr Who fame) plays the Hamlet insanity in terribly unsubtle ways, but that's obviously a directoral decision to go for the standard. The art direction is typical medieval/modern fusion, though good, suffers a bit from copying moments of the Ethan Hawke variation (what's up with Hamlet, security cameras, and giving the whiny prince a video recorder?).

Worryingly, Tennant sometimes seems to veer into Hipster Whiner Hamlet (the costume director's interpretation of what the With-It Young People These Days wear casually doesn't help), but it's hard not to with that character, I suppose. I do like that they seem to go for the Horatio-as-Hamlet's-imaginary-friend angle, though one of these days it would be interesting to see a production of the play that emphasized the notion that Hamlet isn't crazy from the start, and carried it through to the end.

IMDB link

dissent rating: 0/10

Oho, you say? What's that? A Worst Film Ever Made whose rating doesn't even dip into the negatives? Step right up, it's time for another movie review. It's time for a look at Daybreakers. Spoilers abound, like you were gonna watch it anyway.

Let me get my praise out of the way first: with production design the original Batman cartoon would be proud of, this is definitely a film that hits all of the stylistic marks. If only the script weren't something out of one of Quentin Tarantino's erotic fantasies, we'd have been in business. But fear not, gentle readers! This film isn't all unnecessary violence and unexplanable plot points — this one has politics. Ham fisted metaphors for everyone!

The year is 2019. Everyone is a vampire. Humans are on the run, what few aren't hooked up to blood farms like something ripped straight out of the Matrix. Ethan Hawke plays a broody scientist-vampire tasked with synthesizing oil blood we can run our cars with vampires can live on since there's an energy crisis blood shortage. With the looming scarcity of resources, governments and citizens alike have thrown their old human morals to the wind in the quest to fight over the last supplies of fresh water..er, crude oil, I mean blood. I think. But Ethan still has his morals! He only drinks pig's blood. Damn hippy vegan vampires. Go play with the Cullens. At least we don't have to watch Ethan Hawke sparkle. But his brother, good military boy, is having none of it. Real men drink human blood!

The last supplies of oil human blood are in the hands of the private mega-corporations, natch, and Ethan's big scary boss, played by Sam Neill (it was all downhill after Event Horizon, buddy) whose own daughter is a fugitive human, is the boss of that company. And really, he's just a paper-thin stand-in villain. After driving home from his job at Evil, Inc. one night Ethan almost gets into a wreck with another car. Full of humans! Who he decides to help. Hey, why is everyone driving big Cadillacs, SUV's, and vintage sports cars, don't they know there's a oil blood shortage on?

So Ol' Ethan gets mixed up with the humans, and meets once-vamp now-human Willem Defoe (that's when I knew things had gotten bad — one day you'll get your own WFEM post all to yourself, Willem). Turns out, there's a cure to being dependent on foreign oil a vampire. Also turns out, Evil Inc. wants none of this renewable energy vampire cure! They're just greedy money grubbers, same as when they were human (maybe their didn't lose their sense of morality). All of this proceeds forward in the inevitable action-adventure pacing, leaving behind the only good part, namely the sexy vintage suits and eerily lit conurbations of Nameless American City Number Eight-Twenty-Two. The dialogue is bad, the plot twists predictable, (though the vampires exploding when staked is neat, but for the low-budget FX) and generally it lives up to its b-movie hype (did I mention that the gubbamint institutes death panels executing the oil blood-starved mutant vampires? Like a prescient forecast of Obamacare! Or a crude Afganistan/Iraq jab, somehow, with soldiers standing around cheering as all the poor people die, dragged out into sunlight — silly grunts, don't they know that they most likely come from underprivleged backgrounds, too?).

Oh, and they trot out the gore at every moment in this thing. Vamps feeding is a bloody affair, and they spare no expense. When Evil Inc. boss Sam Neill sends Good Military Boy to torture interrogate rape? 'turn' his human daughter, things start to get really messy (it's okay, Good Military Boy is redeemed at the end; after all, he was just following orders what's a vampire to do?). The cure to the energy crisis vampirism, it turns out, is the blood of a once-vampire cured human (don't think about that too hard, or your head will explode, like the vampires do, quite bloodily, in the film — think gerbil in a microwave). This is all set up as some big twist, even though you've already figured it out. So when our boy Ethan tricks evil boss Sam Neill into biting him, Ethan sends the now-human bad guy down an elevator to a bunch of waiting american vampire soldiers. In a frenzy worthy of DADT supporters' worst nightmares of hungry feeding on his human blood, evil Sam Neill is violently and viscerally torn to pieces (this being the part where Tarantino goes to full mast). Oh! but it gets better. In the final climactic scene, Good Military Boy sacrifices himself to the horny gay american hungry vampire soldiers to save his brother's life. And as soon as the first few have had their fill of Good Military Boy (the double entendre in that clause makes me queasy), the rest of the massed deeply closeted american hungry vampire soldiers pounce on the fresh converted? cured humans. Until it spirals out into a big chair reaction. Cue slow mo soldiers grabbing each other and wrestling to the ground as bodily fliud ejecta and bits of internal organs bounce off the camera lens. I am not making this up. Honestly, I thought I was being clever reading in some homosexual subtext into the bloodthirsty soldiers until this moment. Nope. Can't just be me. Definitely this supremely fucked up film.

All in all, it gets a zero, because the first fifteen minutes looked promising, and because when I wasn't supressing my vomit reflex there were some moments almost cheesy enough to earn a giggle. And because, you know what? It wasn't Banjamin Button.

UK Meteorological Office 6-hourly ash dispersal forecasts.
Most recent Met advisory (20.00 17/4)
Forecaster's blog
Icelandic radar telemetry showing ash plume height (updated every five minutes)

Watch live air traffic over europe and marvel at how empty it is.

The Boston Globe's Big Picture series of Eyjafjallajökull photos.

The best part? Rekjavik airport isn't closed.

I demand to be excommunicated because your church has become a hate group as virulent as any this world has ever seen, one that is unnaturally obsessed with the sex lives of good men and women across the planet.

Paul Constant writes his Bishop.

Also, for James and all his anti-hip-hop sentiment, did you know that there's sci-fi hiphop?

EDIT: Oh, let's just make this a link dump post

Toward an index of the 9-11 Comission Report

I don't know how many of you have played it (hella good, hella complex), but in honor of the latest version, I give you this:

A rat done bit my sister Nell.
(with Whitey on the moon)
Her face and arms began to swell.
(and Whitey's on the moon)
I can't pay no doctor bill.
(but Whitey's on the moon)
Ten years from now I'll be payin' still.
(while Whitey's on the moon)
The man jus' upped my rent las' night.
('cause Whitey's on the moon)
No hot water, no toilets, no lights.
(but Whitey's on the moon)
I wonder why he's uppi' me?
('cause Whitey's on the moon?)
I wuz already payin' 'im fifty a week.
(with Whitey on the moon)
Taxes takin' my whole damn check,
Junkies makin' me a nervous wreck,
The price of food is goin' up,
An' as if all that shit wuzn't enough:
A rat done bit my sister Nell.
(with Whitey on the moon)
Her face an' arm began to swell.
(but Whitey's on the moon)
Was all that money I made las' year
(for Whitey on the moon?)
How come there ain't no money here?
(Hmm! Whitey's on the moon)
Y'know I jus' 'bout had my fill
(of Whitey on the moon)
I think I'll sen' these doctor bills,
Airmail special
(to Whitey on the moon)

—Gil Scott-Heron

Can we rant and rave about how good the new Joanna Newsom album is?

Point the first: it's got all of her signature epic-ness paired with writing (both musical and lyrical) that is more accessible (a neutral point) and still incredibly compelling and listenable.

Point the second: there's a bunch of songs — long ones and shorter pieces — arranged very well.

Point the third: I'm still obessing over the first 'disc', after a few full-album listens. Plans to move on to the second and third are slowly coming to fruition.

Point the fourth: 'No Provenance' was a bit boring, but I think I can forgive it.

Some initial reactions:

• SIT THE FUCK DOWN. Every other sentence does not deserve a standing ovation.
  
• Props for the (all too gentle) chiding of Congress regarding shrinking away from and general pansiness with regards to healthcare reform (though there are some basic tenants of that I don't agree with—like the assumption that healthcare must be a capitalist endeavour—in general it's an improvement).
  
• USA #1! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! I mean, what?
  
• Anyone else think that the remark about 'she gets embarrassed' was incredibly patronizing? Still, guess it wouldn't be American politics without at least one shot of blatant sexism.
  
• All that talk about tuition prices and college loans sounded real nice, let's see if it goes anywhere.
  
• Sooooo tired of 'Wall Street/Main Street.' Can we not communicate in something other than buzzwords in American politics? Or have we really lost that much of our capacity for language?
  
• I like how every point gets made with at least two examples of 'x, from Smalltown, Somestate'. It's like listening to an MBA theme read aloud.
  
• Props for telling the Democrats to grow a pair, and the Republicans to quit being obstructionist asshats.
  
• A 9/11 reference? Way it make it feel really 2006, Barry.
  
• Linguistic query: does one 'prosecute' a war? Also, is 'prosecute' related to 'persectue'?
  
• I'm so glad your administration has a civil rights division — was it one of those lawyers you sent to defend the Defense of Marriage Act?
  
• Upon further consideration, that every major speech in American politics ends with 'God bless the Unites States of America,' especially when he's already standing under a big 'IN GOD WE TRUST', really lends a level of religious zealotry to the proceedings that makes me uncomfortable.
  
• YouTube comments, my Facebook news feed still full of stupid drivel. Time to go unfriend some people.
  

Re: the iPad— give me a tablet computer with a full version of OSX and full functionality, please, not this outsized iPhone (but with fewer features) crap. You want $600 and it doesn't even run programs in the background? What the fuck?

We, being (I hope) all politically concious folk, need no reminding that matters of politics are ones which can and do affect us in very real ways — certainly those of us who travel by air quite a bit often see immediate effects of one kind or another that foreign policy and current events have us. This past week drove that point home particularly well for me, most recently this morning when, in the usual weekly meeting of Slade media students, the head of the undergraduate department cautioned us to make use of the studio especially well in the coming weeks: faced with financial shortfalls and with massive higer education cuts in the pipeline, UCL is auditing departmental use of every space and building in the university (failure to demonstrate effective use of space might result in losing it, a pretty dire concept in an already somewhat crowded art school environment). With an election in this country fast approaching (and all predictions being that a conservative Tory government will replace the current moderate Labour one) those threatened budget cuts could be even worse. Makes me glad I'm finishing when I am.

More interesting (to me because it landed in my inbox) is the e-mail I recieved three days ago. While containing no new informational content, really, it's a bit world-warping to see current events (that have a direct link on political policy) linked back to things so close to home. The e-mail, via one of the administrative officers of the UCL student union, came with the subject line 'UCLU response to suspected act of terrorism' and was addressed to all post- and undergraduate students. It read as following:

Attempted Act of Terrorism
The following is an extract from a press release issued by UCLU yesterday.
The full statement is online at www.uclu.org.

"Following the arrest of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab on suspicion of
attempting to detonate an explosive device on 25th December 2009, UCLU can
confirm that he was President of the Islamic Society in 2006-07. Since the
incident, UCLU has been co-operating with the authorities in all
investigations.
UCLU is disturbed by press reports claiming that UCL and the UCLU Islamic
Society were 'complicit' in the radicalisation of this individual and would
urge our members, the public and the press to refrain from being suspicious
of the Muslim community.
Extremist and violent behaviour has no place in UCLU activities, and we are
committed to ensuring that there is no platform for the radicalisation of
our student members UCLU is committed to encouraging free speech and
thought-provoking debate. We currently support nine different faith groups
and are dedicated to allowing them all to express their opinions and
practise their religion in a safe and non-discriminatory environment. We are
proud of the fact that our societies provide opportunities for our students
to openly debate a broad range of philosophical, moral and global topics;
this sort of vigorous debate should be encouraged, not restricted."

We want to remind students that Islamophobic harassment and bullying will
not be tolerated on campus or amongst UCL students. We would urge all
students to report any incidents to their tutors, to Dr Ruth Siddall, Dean
of Students (Welfare) on dean.of.students@ucl.ac.uk or Nicki Challinger, UCL
Union Welfare Officer on w.officer@ucl.ac.uk. Below is also the contact
phone number of the London Metropolitan Police should there be any further
assistance required and experiences of prejudicial behaviour encountered on
part of students following the recent events or in case any student has
relevant information; please note UCL Union will consider all matters very
seriously and support appropriate action to safeguard the welfare of each
and every student at the University.
London Metropolitan Police hotline: 0800 789 321

Again, nothing new. But interesting in that it is evidence of UCLU feeling the need to respond, and interesting in that it serves as evidence that not all responses to attempted acts of terrorism need by wild arm-waving, fear-mongering, and stance-taking.

dissent rating: -2.99/10

Spoilers abound, be warned!

I have posted here previously about what I thought of the film that, to date, I consider the worst ever (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button). And as much as I like Brad Pitt as an actor, another one of his films clocks in at a very, very close second. I speak, of course, of Quentin Tarantio's latest piece of sensless violence pornography, Inglorious Basterds.

Recently a recipient of a quite presitgious award, there's no denying that Tarantino is an influential filmmaker. And as someone who saw and sort of enjoyed the Kill Bill diptych, I will readily admit he has talent. In the proper context, I think he deploys that talent well. His half of Grindhouse satisfyingly subverts the helpless-girl-in-a-horror-movie trope, and Kill Bill, though at turns overly violent, is its own kind of subversion of the exploitation tastes of the Charlie's Angels franchise. Certainly Pulp Fiction is a solid film, and probably the one that best displays his talents (and doesn't, as so much of his work does, rely so heavily on violence in lie of story or characters). But two of his most influential films — Resevoir Dogs and now Inglorious Basterds are of a different sort. Sure, Resevoir Dogs sucks. And it isn't just because its most iconic scene is one of torture, glorified, heroic, hell even meant to be ironically funny in a pre-indie way (what with the retro soundtrack and all); it's also because the movie is plotless, meaningless, and while heavily stylized, ultimately ends up being more of an empty design template than an actual movie. Don't get me wrong, not all movies have to have substance, and everyone loves a good action flick. But the Bond films don't obsess and fetishize violence the way Tarantino does, and Basterds is the ultimate case in point.

When I first saw Saving Private Ryan, a good number of years ago now, the level of gore present shocked me. Not only was it the first somewhat-realistic war film I'd ever seen, but all the previous violent films I'd been exposed to, most of it up the James Bond alley, sanitized violence pretty heavily. A bad-guy red-shirt is shot, falls away, and there's no blood. Sure, I don't agree with American TV and cinema's heavy reliance on the troped of violence and guns and whatnot, but as depictions go, the Bond franchise is pretty blasé. It isn't as much about the violence (one could argue) and doesn't fawn over it. It's about one-deminsional hero/villain archetypes, patriarchal depictions of the masculine savior, and a lot of other stuff, and there is violence, but few people being violated. Private Ryan was a different story. It's depictions of war aren't exactly ground-breakingly radical (quite the opposite), but a dead man in Spielberg's film, a person who has had violence inflicted upon them, is obviously violated. It's really quite a shocking thing to watch if you aren't used to that level of gore (as most are these days — in America and elsewhere). And yet, unshockable as I think myself, Inglorious Basterds had my stomach churning at a few points, and ultimately, I don't think it was the violence.

Tarantino doesn't sanitize his violence in this movie (not that he often does) and perhaps his refusal to depict violent action as somehow humane and easy to witness should be taken as a virtue. But in this alternate-history vengance story in which a troupe of Jewish-American soldiers set out for no other purpose than to kill and scalp enemy soldiers, the terms are not of a drama or even a political statement. For that, the film would have to be current, it would have to address modern issues, which is does not. I find myself often tiring of World War II films, and this one only reinforces that: it adds no new story to the canon, no interesting insight that often comes from examining horrible tragedy. In fact, written from a modern perspective (in which American society has somehow been scrubbed clean of its own anti-semetism that was rife in the first half of the 20th century) it is nothing more than a high-budget rehashing of Tom Cruise's ridiculous sentiment about how he 'always wanted to kill Hitler' as a kid. And man, does Tarantino kill Hitler. Sets him up for the kill in triplicate, in fact, finally doing the deed with a big spray of machine gun fire, and another, as the camera lingers over the body (a fleeting linger, like Sharon Stone's naughty bits in Basic Instinct, but still a linger), that chews up the man's face for us to take in. Did I call Hitler a man? Yes, because this is the important point that Trantino misses in this feature-length masturbation that is Basterds: each of his dead villains, each 'Nazi,' though ficticious, is a stand-in for a real human being. All of the fetishizing of murder (since soldiers killing soldiers is still murder) is the murder of people, not Bond villains. Maybe that's the ultimate problem with historical fiction — your adolescent fantasies still exist in a continuum that's based in reality, and lingering, fawning, even relishing in the death of real people (and relish this film does, with every close-up of a German scalp being detached) is ultimately a sick enterprise. Don't get me wrong, the endeavours of the Nazis in the second World War were so far beyond the pale of crimes against humanity that they belie understanding; yet Tarantino, in the protective casing that is a work of art, aims to reproduce a similar kind of inhuman violence and expects us not only to enjoy it with him but to cheer (just as his Nazis do watching a propaganda war film in the movie's climax), even to laugh (just as his Hitler does watching the same film).

It's a sentiment that fuels America: us versus them; we're right, they're wrong; righteous violence in protection of home, family, and retribution against those who would do us harm. It's probably one reason why history classes in America so guiltlessly discuss the dropping of the atomic bomb, why Israel's rutheless, disproportionately violent foreign policy is to roundly lauded (and why Spielberg's Munich was so successful), why every home-invasion turned-on-its-head film is so satisfying—even why, in many ways, I enjoyed rather than scorn Death Proof. It's pretty much built in to the American pathology (though not unique to it) that the greater wrong someone does you or your people, the more license you have to dress somone up as their effigy and pump bullets into them (after you've done the real thing, of course, or even more so if you've been denied it). But I don't have the stomach for that in cinema any more, or on TV (jesus, is 24 still on the air?) or anywhere else for that matter. Hanging on to our grievances, taking eyes for eyes and never forgetting or forgiving or stopping hating is one reason why shit never gets done, and frankly the likes of Tarantino aren't helping the matter. Artists, along with their art, have a responsibility, and Quentin has to take responsibility for every person that went to see his newest film and walked out cheering, a bounce in their step, because some Nazis got slaughtered, nevermind how easy it is to use them as a two-dimensional villan you don't have to humanize, or as a historically distant placeholder for this fanciful notion of 'evil.' Where number one on the list of Worst Films Ever gets its position for being utterly worthless, devoid of interest or value and at the same time winning the praise it did, number two gets it for being a twisted, immature, onanistic, and morally bankrupt piece of anti-intellectual pornography. And that is all I have to say about that.

Can I think be now declared it's own meme: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=414TmP12WAU&feature=player_embedded