December 2011
13 posts
Steven Shaviro on Post-Continuity Cinema →
American commercial filmmaking has, in the last decade or so, been increasingly characterized by what I call the stylistics of post-continuity. This is a filmmaking practice in which a preoccupation with moment-to-moment excitement, and with delivering continual shocks to the audience, trumps any concern with traditional continuity, either on a shot-by-shot level or in terms of larger...
Pankaj Mishra on Recent writings about 9/11 and... →
A decade after 9/11 we seem no closer to defusing the sinister power of what Waldman describes as the “bellicose, lachrymose religion the attack had birthed” and “the fundamentalists who defended it by declaring the day sacred, the place sacred, the victims sacred, the feelings of their survivors sacred”. “So much sacredness”, as the novel unflinchingly...
Interview with Willie Osterweil regarding his New... →
I am always shocked by the number of (self-styled) leftists who are devoted to the truism that “there are no new ideas.” And I think it’s very important to some people to tear down anyone who doesn’t produce work that functions with bibliographical exactitude, or even just takes risks. For me, theory is ultimately a political project, and it is most meaningful when it is performative and...
Geoff Dyer on Academic Writing →
Academia has done a very good job of establishing its stylistic quirks as necessary trappings of erudition. Dyer takes the hammer to this conceit by approaching academic writing as a kind of genre:
What the reader discovers, however, is that Fried will continue to announce what he’s about to do right to the end: “Later on in this book I shall examine … ”; “I shall discuss both of these...
Interview with Simon Reynolds on the Idea of Pop... →
Pining for boredom seems absurd. But I think there’s something to be said for an empty space you then have to fill. I spent a vast amount of my life daydreaming and I had a rich interior life when I was a kid, a real kid, before I had the focus of music. I used to have stories in my head and I don’t really know what’s going on in my son’s head. He doesn’t seem...
Mark Player on Japanese Cyberpunk Cinema →
In the Western world, cyberpunk was born out of the new wave science fiction literature of the sixties and seventies; authors such Harlan Ellison, J.G. Ballard and Philip K. Dick - whose novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) was the basis for Blade Runner - were key proponents in its inception, creating worlds that featured artificial life, social decay and technological...
Anthony Olcott on Needing to Be Noticed:... →
Attention thus is a form of social capital—we offer “attention-worthy” things to a community of which we wish to be a part and then maintain or improve our status within that community (or more likely, within the several communities of which we are simultaneously a part) by continuing to collect, produce, and exchange attention. Viewed in this light, attention then is less a currency or...
Willie Osterweil on Towards a New Film Criticism →
For mainstream entertainment films, the director must be considered little more than a manager. “But, but, but,” one might protest. “There’s internal consistency to the films of some of the biggest-budget directors—Paul Greengrass, Zach Snyder, Christopher Nolan —these guys have a definable style!” They certainly do, because cinema has been structured around maintaining and capitalizing on...
Sarah Seltzer on the Patriarchal World of Twilight →
Just like a superhero fantasy in which a man gets to kick the villains out of existence, Bella gets to will the monstrous consequences of patriarchy into the ether.
And here’s why that’s such a hard lure to resist for readers. All the potential horrors that Meyer conjures up are actual fears women face: being shamed or hurt because of our own desires, being raped, death and...
Glenn Greenwald on the We-Are-At-War-Mentality →
The two most radical and dangerous premises ushered in by Bush/Cheney were these: (1) the whole world — including places where this is no shooting or fighting — is now deemed a War battlefield (which means unlimited Presidential war powers exist everywhere); and (2) presidential accusations of being a Terrorist are now deemed the equivalent of binding verdicts of guilt. Is there any...
Linda Hutcheon on Irony, Nostalgia and the... →
If the future is cyberspace, then what better way to soothe techno-peasant anxieties than to yearn for a Mont Blanc fountain pen? But there is a rather obvious contradiction here: nostalgia requires the availability of evidence of the past,and it is precisely the electronic and mechanical reproduction of images of the past that plays such an important role in the structuring of the...
Jacqueline Rose on Darian Leader's What is... →
The last thing, therefore, treatment should aim to do with severely disturbed patients is to crash in and rob them of their delusion or snuff out their minds with drugs. With paranoid patients, any such intervention is likely to be experienced as an assault. For Leader, the question the analyst should be asking is not how can I cure or help the psychotic, but what use can she or he make of...
Adam Curtis on the intellectual collapse of the... →
And as the revolutionary aims of that generation failed, a terrible suspicion began to grow. Maybe all dreams of other worlds were just illusions. And that in turn led them to accept the dreary functionalism of the material world and the utilitarianism of modern economics which simply said that dreams were located in material, physical objects that could then, conveniently for capitalism,...