I just finished this one for the first time and I’m totally blown away. It makes movies/books like Battle Royale/The Hunger Games, or other books that predicted/riff off of reality TV shows, seem kinda lame.
The ending especially is awesome. Not happy but the good guy absolutely wins. I cheered aloud when Ben piloted that plane into the Games Network Tower.
I had written off this film, directed by William Friedkin and starring Ashley Judd and Michael Shannon, for years since first seeing a trailer for it in theaters years ago (this was at a time before I knew who Friedkin was, or had developed any taste in movies to speak of). However recently the film came up on a rotation of films recommended by my smart TV, so I decided to give it a watch.
Bug was released a few years after the invasion of Iraq, and Friedkin (at least, from what I have read) intended for the film to address, in part, the post-9/11 breed of domestic paranoia that had led the US government to initiate what many felt was in fact a highly destructive mission to inject democracy into a foreign culture. Tracy Letts' play, upon which this film was based, was initially penned in the wake of the Gulf War, and speaks to the same kind of blind trust (albeit in a different historical context) in the need to dominate otherwise rational public discourse with ideologically-driven messaging, using fear and the threat of violence as emotional leverage, for the sake of furthering the desires of a Machiavellian political minority.
This military-industrial complex reading of Bug notwithstanding, the underlying theme of the film and play, in my mind, maps perfectly onto the context in which we are living currently - that is, a world filled with sickness spreading across the globe, and a multitude of irrational responses to this relatively new and pervasive threat of illness and death. What's more, with the exponential growth of digital media sharing platforms over the last decade-plus, the spread of misinformation has exacerbated and expedited the growth of fringe ideology into mainstream rallying cries to take concrete action against perceived state threats. This phenomenon is portrayed eerily in the psychological breakdown (first gradually, then expeditiously) of Agnes and Peter, the two main characters, over the course of the film.
I have refrained from describing much about the events of the film itself on purpose. This is not a film that benefits from much summary or explanation beforehand. I've summarized the main themes of its plot, as well as the context in which play and film were produced, but ultimately it is a work of art that is best experienced viscerally and with a fresh perspective. I myself went in without much knowledge of it, other than that it was originally a play, and that it was a passion project for Friedkin, who took care to c
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I just began reading Hunter S. Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72” and have been absolutely gob smacked with how much it, from social commentary to its political insight, applies to electoral politics and western society today. But the most impactful quoteseems to be this from when he took a flight with Edward Bennett Williams, a legendary trial lawyer and president of the Washington Redskins:
> We spent the rest of the flight arguing politics. He is backing Muskie, and as he talked I got the feeling that he thought he was already at a point where, sooner or later, we would all be. “Ed’s a good man,” he said. “He’s honest. I respect the guy.” Then he stabbed the padded seat arm between us two or three times with his forefinger. “But the main reason I’m working for him,” he said, “is that he’s the only guy we have who can beat Nixon.” He stabbed the arm again. “If Nixon wins again, we’re in real trouble.” He picked up his drink, then saw it was empty and put it down again. “That’s the real issue this time,” he said. “Beating Nixon. It’s hard to even guess how much damage those bastards will do if they get in for another four years.”
> I nodded. The argument was familiar. I had even made it myself, here and there, but I was beginning to sense something very depressing about it. How many more of these goddamn elections are we going to have to write off as lame but “regrettably necessary” holding actions? And how many more of these stinking, double-downer sideshows will we have to go through before we can get ourselves straight enough to put together some kind of national election that will give me and the at least 20 million people I tend to agree with a chance to vote for something, instead of always being faced with that old familiar choice between the lesser of two evils?
> I have been through three presidential elections, now, but it has been twelve years since I could look at a ballot and see a name I wanted to vote for. In 1964, I refused to vote at all, and in ’68 I spent half a morning in the county courthouse getting an absentee ballot so I could vote, out of spite, for Dick Gregory.
> Now, with another one of these big bogus showdowns looming down on us, I can already pick up the stench of another bummer. I understand, along with a lot of other people, that the big thing, this year, is Beating Nixon. But that was also the big thing, as I recall, twelve years ago in 1960—and as far as I can tell, we’ve gone from b
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Figured i’d post this for all You All’s feedback.
Haven’t seem a damn episode of STD and never intend to. Would take many many drinks and major personal lapse in judgement to make me fail this goal.
On the other hand I watched some video on youtube where Burnham is taking a dump while piloting some ship. Posted by somebody named Major Grin. Had me absolutely dying.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zWN7vVm2Ols
I honestly wondered whether it was a scene from the show, even after I read the comments and learned that it was a joke.
And I’m still not sure. Truly. I refuse to watch an episode of this crap and I have zero expectations for how low Kurtzman might stoop.
I will say it again- I am not fucking joking. Can someone please confirm whether it’s really a scene from the show or a joke?
Thanks You All.
Ok, just finished this and thought it was excellent.
Vivid, descriptive, a large but well defined cast of characters who feel real.
Had to re-read some passages as a lot of the sentences are long, but once I got into the rhythm it flowed really well and I flew through it.
Makes a great double-header with Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here with which it shares a central theme of fascism at the top of American politics. (Lewis even gets a very brief name check in TPAA).
Eerily prescient, and uncanny to read whilst the Jan 6th fallout is still so present in US life.
No real spoilers, but just in case - >!I thought it just kind of finished, rather than ended. I know that the narrator flashed forward before the end to give some detail on the future before returning to present-day 1942, but I wanted more, which is a good sign I guess.!<
Each morning I pick up where the previous day left off, catching myself up with all the data and information that floated past my head while I slept. Unplugging the dream catcher and licking the filter clean, I make sure that not a single photon was missed while I was outside the world. I truly live the 24-news-cycle-life-cycle. The time dilation of sleep corrected, my clock now matching the information doomsday clock of the world, I can go about being prescient.
I know what all my friends have been up to. I know what their public life has been looking like from their instagram. I know what their private life feels like from their finstas and tweets. I’m one of their Close Friends. I know they’ve been sad lately. So when I see my friend at the bar, my friend who made me feel at home in a city I knew nobody in when I moved here 3 years ago, silently and unwittingly pulling me from myself and into the arms of our now many friends, I do not ask how they are doing. We don’t talk about his struggles with loneliness and empty situationships, I saw the posts. I won’t ask what he’s been working on, I already liked it. The ground of our personal lives is already well worn by time we come face to face. Our subjective experiences are yesterday’s already-analyzed and fact-checked reports.
So, we do the news in our booth. We’re on a current events show that’s just for us, playing both audience and dueling hosts. We’ll disagree or know the other is incorrect, but never say, “I think you’re using that word wrong.” A little symposium is formed as we monologue back and forth, building on what the other says as a way “to get back to what I was saying.”
The whole time we do this, I want to stop. I want to ask if he’s been seeing anyone lately and how that’s been going. I want to ask if he’s seen our other friend, the one I haven’t seen in a while, and ask “How are they doing?” I want to stop the show, cut the imaginary camera. I want to be two friends in a warmly lit bar, sharing drinks and catching up as the cold wind of North East winter rolls down the street outside.
But I Literally Can’t. The last 24 hours must be analyzed and instantiated as part of a larger arc of media/historic/epistemological/culture narratives that we are just straight Noticing out here. I’ve received too many inputs by nightfall to do anything but output. I go home, slightly buzzed and feeling an emptiness akin to the afterglow of loveless sex. I plug in the dream-catcher and listen to a podcas
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So, The Turkish Lira has nosedived again after Erdogan defended lower interest rates and has promised to win the " Economic War of Independence" It's almost like Erdogan is waging war against the USD. 😲 He won't win the war though. International capital markets won't submit to his whims and fancies.
In that context, the State Bank of Pakistan looks prescient in having hiked interest rates by 150 bps. Maybe it's a little too high but a fast falling currency would pose bigger problems. Kudos to SBP!
>Power is only what you allow it to be. Very many people put up with political lying and political illusions and political propaganda because if they were to denounce it, because then they would have to admit that for many decades that they, themselves, had been fooled, that they had been taken for granted, that they had allowed themselves, so to speak, to be deceived. The conman’s work is always done for him by the victim. The victim doesn’t want to go to the police and say, “I’ve been conned. I was so stupid that I did this.” They don’t wish to admit it. So in a subtle and deadly way, the dictator can dirty enough people up to make them all complicit in his rule or, I suppose, her rule…can make them the tortured yet willing, masochisitic complicit element in his own sadistic mania. Now what you can’t necessarily do about power or about authority you can do for yourselves and your fellow readers and fellow students and fellow citizens: you can resolve not to be a citizen like that. You can resolve not to do the work of power for it. You can resolve not to let lies be told in your hearing. You can resolve not to use sloppy language that is euphemism.
Edit to add: he says this around the 30-33 minute mark.
Don't care about the price...they were crooked then, they're crooked now.
Zen AF, fellow apes. Zen AF
> The part-time goddess-Pallas Ril ... The only prayer that might sway her was the sob of a mother over her ill or injured child—be that mother human or primal, goshawk or bobcat, elk or rabbit—and this only because the human part of her remembered what it is to be a mother.
..............
>"It doesn't make sense", I tell him. "Why would-"
>"It doesn't have to make sense...This way dozens of conflicting theories will dominate the netshows for weeks, months and even years. And some of these theories will be more reasonable, more probable, will make more sense than the truth...
>"But Pallas' fans would never accept-"
>Garette waves all objections aside. "Pallas Ril has gone insane. Don't you see? The pressures of her enormous powers have driven her over the edge into madness. It is a cultural tradition: Men of great power become gods, women of great power go insane and become destroyers- who must in turn be destroyed by the men who loved them. The public is primed already to believe it; this has been a running theme for certain type of entertainment for over three hundred years.
About the book:
"Blade of Tyshalle is the second in Matthew Stover's cyberpunk/high fantasy mashup "Acts of Caine" series; the basic premise is it's the early 23rd century, Earth is a miserable post-capitalist dystopia of corporate rule, rigid castes and depleted resources. It's not all bad, though: fortunately it turns out the multiverse is a thing, and we've figured out how to tunnel through to the nearest habitable universe, dubbed "Overworld", which turns out to be none other than Faerie itself: a pristine planet drenched in magic and populated by elves, dwarves, orcs, dragons-- the whole basic fantasy menagerie. Unfortunately, the technology is proprietary and owned by the Studio, an entertainment hyperconglomerate (think Disney/EA/Amazon on crack) that uses it to send "Actors" to live out real-life Dungeons & Dragons campaigns among the very real, living peoples of Overworld, which are transmitted live back to adventure-hungry audiences on Earth."
"As for the context to the passage in question (spoilers!)-- the main character, Hari, and his wife, Shanna, are Actors who adventure on Overworld for a living; Shanna's character is freelance mage Pallas Ril while Hari's is the titular assassin Caine. In the first book, Hari was grievously injured and forced to retire while Shanna sort of accidentally became a minor nature goddess. The second book i
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we are the target market
we set the corporate target
we are slaves of what we want
we are numb and used
and we're just used to bad news
and we are slaves of what we want
I hope they dust it off more often on their headline tours in the future! If you've never read them before, here are Jon's thoughts on the song:
>Desperate times call for desperate measures. Over the course of our time on the road as a band I have met so many amazing, beautiful, desperate, lonely people. We are the lonely nation. We are the disenchanted, the disillusioned- we are the remnant of lonely souls wanting more than anything that we can buy with this cold, hard cash. I wrote this song while we were playing a stretch of rock radio shows. I’d walk around near the back and just breathe in the loneliness- masses of lonely, scared kids. I remember thinking about the irony. Here you have this connected generation of online communities, IM, TM, myspace, and cell phones that grows more and more lonely every day. This is a song is still yearning, saying, “Don’t settle, please, don’t give up. Fight for only the true and the beautiful!”
>
>We wanted to start the record with this track because we feel that this song picks up where Meant to Live left off. There is hope for meaning and truth in this life but it probably doesn’t come in the form of a corporate slogan. We, the target market, want more than this world has to offer. This is a song where Tim and Chad drive the verses and the guitars take the chorus. We’ve played this song many times live and refined it quite a bit from its original state. There’s nothing like playing a new song in front of real people with real opinions. The people at those shows, (the extended Switchfoot family), they shaped this song as much as anyone.
If anyone's interested in more old Switchfoot song stories, I've got some archived from Land of Broken Hearts, and I might just throw some links in a sub FAQ at some point!
Cool track inspired by the movie Primer ( great flick )
