"He who does not at some time, with definite determination consent to the terribleness of life, or even exalt in it, never takes possession of the inexpressible fullness of the power of our existence."
-- Rilke
Love,
the powering,
the Widening,
light
unraveling
all faces followers of
All colors, beams of
woven thread,
the Skin
alight that
warms itself
with life.
-- Akhenaton, "Hymn to the Sun"
Opt your children out of Pentagon harassment
Donations appreciated:
WHO I WORK FOR: Mount Hope Wholesale
Wholesale nuts, grains, fruits and spices (and more) shipped from Cottonwood AZ
(Tell them you heard about them on Gordon's blog!)
WHAT I'VE SEEN LATELY:
MOVIES
(r) = re-viewing
God Told Me To (1976, Cohen)
Amores Perros (2000, Inarritu)
Times and Winds (2006, Erdem)
Dirty Money (Un flic) (1972, Melville)
10th District Court (2004, Depardon)
RFK Must Die: The Assassination of Bobby Kennedy (2007, O'Sullivan)
The Furies (1950, Mann)
In a Lonely Place (1950, Ray)(r)
The Adjuster (1991, Egoyan)(r)
TV
Mad Men Jekyll Intelligence (2006, Haddock) Family Guy
SUGGESTED VIEWING: The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear (2004, Curtis) [available for streaming/download here]
tart dan callahan piece on the inimitable gloria grahame
Grahame lives on the edges of most of her films, too disturbing an image, too turbulent a consciousness to ever really play a lead role. She could look severe, even plain, when she wasn't overly made up for gaudy seduction. Almost always, she played tramps of some sort, but she was enough of an actress to make them very different kinds of tramps, and her filmography offers a sort of strumpet cornucopia. She is capable of turning up in anything, even It's a Wonderful Life (1946), where she's the flip side of the film's Donna Reed sweetheart: Violet Bick (how's that for a mean/sexy name?), boy crazy in a black satin dress, doing the Charleston with older men at a dance. Grahame gives Violet a comic sort of speed and cluelessness, but when we see what would have happened if Jimmy Stewart's George Bailey had never been born, we catch a glimpse of Violet as a wrecked, angry whore being dragged to a paddy wagon, screaming that she knows important people. It's possible to imagine a whole film about Violet Bick, but it wouldn't have been made in 1946, and it might make even today's sexually jaded art film audience flinch.
In a Lonely Place & The Big Heat are 2 of the best films (not just noirs) of the 50s, both devastating and grahame is essential each time.
IK: Why do you think the government hasn't acknowledged that there is life outside of Earth? I thought that was sort of the point of NASA.
EM: Well most people in government don't know. The government is highly compartmentalized. You could work next door to somebody for 30 years not knowing what they're doing in certain areas. The whole point of all of this ... goes back to World War II. This Roswell incident took place right at the aftermath of World War II when the U.S. Army Air Corps was split off and became the Air Force and the OSS (Office of Strategic Services), which was the intelligence service of World War II, was disbanded and eventually became the CIA. At that point the Cold War was just starting to move under way and we were at odds with the Soviets.
The Air Force was brand new and supposedly in control of the skies and didn't know what they were doing, and the CIA didn't know what they were doing, so Pres. Truman was in a big problem here: Here people were telling him there were aliens around and nobody knew if they were hostile or what they were and what was he going to do about it?
So he formed a committee, a very high-level military and academic and intelligent people -- politically powerful people -- and said 'You guys work on this.' And that was called ... the MAJIC 12. And they did pass a National Security Act, or so I'm told, under highly classified auspices, that gave this committee virtually unlimited power to deal with this issue, which they have done for the last 60 years, slowly excluding everybody -- including presidents.
You may remember that Pres. Clinton tried to send (Webster) Hubbell to find out about this at Wright Patterson. He got rejected. And Barry Goldwater, back in the '60s when he was getting ready to run for the presidency and who was a brigadier general in the Air Force Reserve tried to get information about it. He got rejected. And I'm told that Gerry Ford tried to do some finding out and he got rejected.
Jimmy Carter announced his observation of UFOs, but that never went anywhere so obviously he made no progress. Only in recent years has the public interest become acute enough and enough stories leaked out so that people are starting to believe that it's all real. And the fact of the matter is, it is.
They're still around and there's a lot of stuff going on.
Are you aware of the so-called Phoenix Lights Incident? That wasn't our stuff.
have to agree with cory -- jack womack's random acts of senseless violence is one of the best books i've read in the last 20 years, and is criminally underappreciated
steven shaviro is talking about the new grace jones video, which is quite good -- mostly for the visuals/words, the music like good massive attack
I think that “Corporate Cannibal” — with its continual modulations and deformations that are no longer just on the surface of the world but inhabit and shape its depths, and with its violent Weird energy (in the sense of post-Lovecraftian “weird fiction” with its simultaneous slight hokiness and intense anxiety and dislocation) — gives the most profound expression or articulation that I have yet come across to the affect of the vertiginous “globalized network society” we live in today.
Rarely has reality needed so much to be imagined.
--Chris Marker