August 2007 Archive

Karl Rove Quits

Bye bye!

—Bryan Klausmeyer

Terror-nomics

The Freakanomics blog on The New York Times has been intensely interesting the last few days. Steven Levitt started analyzing the most affective ways to terrorize the public and the readers went nuts in the comments section. His response post was also insanely interesting and made me jealous of his insight. At least a lack of original idea generating ability leads to some great links to fill the gaps.

—Mark Elliot Cullen

Exclusive Sneak Peek: Todd Haynes’ Bob Dylan film, ‘I’m Not There’

Some excerpts from the list:

• Cate Blanchett as Dylan, meeting Brian Jones at a party and calling the Rolling Stones a “groovy covers band,” then screaming “play your old stuff” at a statue of Jesus Christ alongside David Cross as Allen Ginsberg.
• Christian Bale as the late-’70s born-again Dylan, sermonizing about Christ and delivering the hidden Dylan gospel classic “Pressing On,” from Saved, sung by John Doe.

As a poet once said, I can’t wait to see this film.

—Bryan Klausmeyer

Facebook Is The New Panopticon

Foucault Blog:

Counterpunch argues that the Facebook phenomenon is pretty much Bentham’s panopticon made real:

Facebook has ushered in a revolution, and a failed one at that. It is much like the panopticon – ‘all-seeing’, that surveillance device the English utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham pioneered in the nineteenth century for penal reform.

…Personally I don’t buy it. Sure there are surveillant qualities but it is largely voluntary.

Diane, while I’m tempted to agree with Jeremy, I think he is wrong on that last point. At least on college campuses, there is a tremendous amount of social pressure to join the website, to “be a part” of the online community, that it is really more of a forced choice. That is why people who are not on it are considered to be either Neo-Luddites or social outcasts.

—Bryan Klausmeyer 1 Comment

The Hoax of the Global Warming Hoax

Larval Subjects:

Every story on the news has to present “both sides”, assuming that there always are two sides to a story and that both of these sides have equal credibility. One suspects that were a discussion about Copernicus to emerge, our media outlets would feel compelled to insure that both the geocentric and the heliocentric hypothesis were given equal time and that it was emphasized that both positions were “theories” and that it was therefore up to personal judgment to decide which one is true. This is something I encounter in my students as well (i.e., the idea that everything is an opinion, interpretation, or belief and that all beliefs are on equal footing appears to be trickling down through all of American culture), that manifests itself in sentence structures that have the form “I think”, “I feel”, “I believe”, “It is Socrates’ opinion that…” In short, everything has to be expressed with a minimal subjective distance or skepticism, implicitly suggesting that any claim is already simply a matter of opinion that can then be summarily dismissed…

—Bryan Klausmeyer 2 Comments

INLAND EMPIRE

I just watched David Lynch’s INLAND EMPIRE last night. I would have to pronounce it as his most incoherent film to date (probably a result of his writing parts of the script immediately before the filming of each scene), and possibly his most disturbing, but that’s debatable. Here’s a theatrical trailer:

I think if I were to rank all of David Lynch’s films that I’ve seen, the order would probably be the following:

1. Blue Velvet
2. Eraserhead
3. Lost Highway
4. Mulholland Dr.
5. Inland Empire
6. Wild At Heart
7. Twin Peaks - Fire Walk With Me

—Bryan Klausmeyer 1 Comment

Bush Signs Law Widening Reach for Wiretapping

President Bush signed into law on Sunday legislation that broadly expanded the government’s authority to eavesdrop on the international telephone calls and e-mail messages of American citizens without warrants.

And a little later:

By changing the legal definition of what is considered “electronic surveillance,” the new law allows the government to eavesdrop on [international telephone] conversations without warrants — latching on to those giant switches — as long as the target of the government’s surveillance is “reasonably believed” to be overseas.

I think what’s interesting about this isn’t so much the obvious point about the government intruding into people’s private lives (there’s always a minimum of “intrusion” in a modern nation-state), but rather that people in general aren’t that upset about it, like those people in reality TV shows who willingly submit themselves to 24 hour surveillance.

So maybe we should reframe it: perhaps this law isn’t simply an outgrowth of the “war on terror,” but that instead this and the “war” are more deeply connected to today’s sociopolitical dynamics than we’d like to think…

—Bryan Klausmeyer 1 Comment

Revolutionary Desire

Diane, I read an interesting critique of Zizek and Badiou’s notions of revolution through an analysis of Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus at Larval Subjects today. At the very least, it makes me want to read Anti-Oedipus.

—Bryan Klausmeyer

Scarlett Johansson Recording an Album

And it’s all Tom Waits covers (read his reaction.) And it’s being produced by David Sitek of TV on the Radio… and it features members of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Celebration. (Via Rolling Stone.)

The decision to do Tom Waits covers seems pretty Advanced, but it remains to be seen whether or not she’ll start sporting cut-off leather jackets, aviators and a mullet. Also, I still think it’s possible that this might just be extremely Overt, but I guess we’ll have to wait until the album’s released. She wasn’t that bad at karaoke in Lost in Translation.

—Bryan Klausmeyer 8 Comments

The Psychotic Animal: From A to Ž

An und für sich analyzes Agamben and Zizek’s conceptions of the primordial void of pure potentiality.

Perhaps Agamben’s enigmatic vision (taken from a medieval Bible) of the messianic humans who have animal heads but nonetheless sit down at a table to eat is a way of getting at what Zizek might mean by the possibility of a big Other that would be somehow free of the obscene superego supplement.

—Bryan Klausmeyer 25 Comments