From the short story My Aeschylus in Jim Shepard’s Like You’d Understand, Anyway:
I’ve labored to the top of this hill, and it’s taken half my life to get here and the other side slopes down. Today once again we’ll trust in the way heaven’s law compels but not always protects its human allies. Today he’ll [...]
There’s a lot of keen insights in this, but Zizek still lumps things together that are rightfully separated and draws what I see as rather nihilistic conclusions. To the first point, he rightly (in my view) castigates people who believe that the only thing wrong with voracious American consumption patterns is that they are not [...]
The hermetically sealed theocracy-meets-Stalinist dictatorship of North Korea does not allow foreign reporters or filmmakers onto their territory. The state’s quasi-racist ideology shuns them – they might taint Korean purity. So, aside from the Chinese and Russian workers who necessarily do cross-border business, or the odd tourist from harmless countries like Switzerland, there are not [...]
Nothing can provide as much intellectual security as the conviction that one’s position is not only factually warranted but morally imperative. This position is evident in the writings of activist (I hesitate to actually confer on him the honor of being referred to as a “scholar”) Ward Churchill. His “history” is more polemic than anything [...]
In the inter-war period, an American communist organizer decided for some reason to open his speech with the above. It’s a line so preposterous that if someone told me the speaker was actually a free market fundamentalist in disguise out to make Communism look ridiculous, I would have no trouble believing them. Such is the [...]
Where to begin. “The Box” doesn’t really make any sense, the acting is inconsistent (with the notable exception of Frank Langella), the score is abominable and Richard Kelly doesn’t seem to understand how unintentionally funny some of the images he puts on the screen are. That being said, there’s a certain charm to such a [...]