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365days365movies · 4 years

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March 18, 2021: The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) (Part Two)

This movie is interesting so far, and funny!

Granted, it’s a Woody Allen movie, so that shouldn’t be terribly surprising to me. It also won’t be the last of his films I’m watching this months, little spoiler alert there. You can go ahead and guess which one’s coming down the pike, if you want to.

By the way, this is a surprisingly uncommon trope. Most of the time, people will go into a TV, rather than coming out of it. Why is this not done more? Seriously, this is an interesting idea, and it’d genuinely odd to me that this is still a mostly untapped idea. Get on that, Hollywood! Although...the last time you did something like that...

Right. Maybe...maybe do something else with the idea, huh? Like, use it...but use it well, please. Anyway, back to the movie! First part right here!

Recap (2/2)

As agreed, Cecilia takes Gil to meet Tom, and when he does, Tom goes OFF on the dude, accusing him of ruining his career, just as it was about to take off, yaddayaddayadda. This is contrary to the claim that Gil wouldn’t get angry at Tom, disappointing Cecilia. Tom and Gil argue about Tom’s presence n the world, and Tom insists that he’s in love with Cecilia.

Gil asks Cecilia to tell him to go back, as he’s a fictional character, and she’s real. Tom insists that he can learn to be real, the possibility of which Gil denies. Nevertheless, Gil informs his superiors and the authorities about this, which Cecilia shows Tom what the real world is actually like. And back at RKO Pictures, it’s revealed that another iteration of Tom in a theater in Texas is forgetting his lines. The plot thickens.

Cecilia takes Tom to a church, and as they’re beginning to talk about religion, Monk shows up. He’s gotten word of the two spending time together, and he’s here to break it up, like an asshole. Tom defends Cecilia as Monk is about to assault her, and the two fight in the church, although Cecilia pleads with both of them. And the way the fight is stages looks...well, staged, which is clever.

However, this isn’t a movie, and Monk plays dirty, sucker punching him and literally kicking him while he’s down. Cecilia steps in to stop it, and she refuses to come with him, staying with Tom to make sure he’s OK. Monk leaves, angry and needing a drink, and Tom gets up completely fine. A perk of being an imaginary person, it would seem. No blood, and no injuries.

After this, Cecilia runs into Gil once again, and he bemoans the situation, and his potentially ruined career. However, Cecilia feeds his ego mercilessly, calling him a movie star with great potential. This ego inflation works wonders on Gil, and he quickly warms to Cecilia, offering to buy her lunch. He also reveals his real name, Herman Bardebedian, and compliments her looks as well.

Meanwhile, at the amusement park, Tom is lingering about. He’s called on by Emma (Dianne West), a “working girl” that offers to take him back to her place of work, which is a brothel. There, he speaks with the sex workers there, who attempt to proposition him. However, he’s only interested in speaking philosophy and existentialism, charming all of the women there. They offer him a “free night”, but the pure-hearted Tom refuses, as he’s in love with Cecilia. It’s a surprisingly sweet scene.

Meanwhile, Gil and Cecilia are walking the town, with Cecilia showing her talents in playing the ukelele at a music shop, and with Gil singing along, in yet another VERY sweet scene. This is an interestingly sweet movie, hidden beneath the sardonic nature of the whole thing. After this, the two recite one of Gil’s scenes in a movie, culminating in a kiss between the two.

Cecilia’s extremely shaken by this, although she does appreciate the kiss. And yet, she’s still married, AND she’s devoted to Tom, whom she says is “fictional, but you can’t have everything.” Confused, she heads out. Which makes this the rare film where a man is technically cucked by himself. Nice.

Meanwhile, at the movie theatre, the cast is speaking to an empty theatre, and noting their complete uselessness without Tom present. They once again note the futility of their situation. A communist character tries to get the rest to revolt, while Henry proposes that they’re reality, while the audience is the screen.

Meanwhile, elsewhere, Tom Baxters are starting to cause trouble in other theatres. Four theatres report Tom Baxter attempting to leave, prompting RKO to pull the picture from theatres. But first, they must get the rogue Baxter back into the movie, then they’ll take every copy of the film and BURN THE SHIT OUT OF IT. Meanwhile, at the amusement park, Tom attempts to woo Cecilia one again, and proposes going out that night. And he does go out with her, but to the theatre. And there...he pulls Cecilia into the movie!

In the movie, his money is good and real, and the entire cast goes to the Copacabana as scheduled, with Cecilia tagging along this time. And I’m loving every second of this, this is an awesome story. At the Copacabana, Kitty the nightclub performer is singing. Once she’s done, she questions Cecilia’s presence, as it goes against the plot. Tom tells her that Cecilia is real, and Kitty faints at the realization.

Tom takes her out on the town, and the maître d’ realizes that they’re chucking out the plot...meaning that he can finally do something that he’s always wanted to do: DANCE. And as he tap-dances on stage, can I just say, I adore this movie. Because I ADORE this movie.

After this, Tom takes Cecilia out on the town as promised, and we get a stereotypical film montage of dancing and partying in the fictional New York City. They go back to the apartment in the early morning, which is now empty of people.

There, the two finally kiss...only for Gil to show up in the movie theatre and interrupt it. Between the screen and the theatre, the three have a conversation, where Gil admits that he’s in love with her. The two step out of the screen to speak with him, and the love triangle crystallizes in a conflict. As the other movie characters arrive and add their input, the choice is up to Cecilia.

And she chooses Gil. Tom is crushed, but Cecilia explains that Gil is in the real world, and Tom...well, Tom is a fictional character. And Cecilia has to live in the real world. Tom goes back into the film, which finally proceeds as scheduled. And Gil and Cecilia leave together, to start a new life.

...Or will they? Cecilia goes home and packs, as Monk attempts to reconcile with her. But Cecilia’s done, and she’s leaving him for good. Monk threatens her once again, but this whole situation has filled her with some courage, and she leaves, like leave-leaves. She goes to the movie theatre, where she’s set to meet Gil...but he’s gone. Because Gil never loved her. It was all, well...an act. He played Cecilia to get Tom to return to the screen, and to continue his own career, the absolute piece of shiiiiiiiiit.

Left with nothing at all, Cecilia once again delves into escapism, and views the real film Top Hat, starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. She walks in on the scene where Astaire is singing...well...Cheek-to-Cheek.

Fade to black.

And, damn! That’s The Purple Rose of Cairo! A terribly bitter ending for a great movie! And, uh...yeah, this is a low fantasy film, but it’s also high up there in my favorites, and is now my favorite Woody Allen film. But I’ll elaborate more on that in the Review. See you there!

#the purple rose of cairo #woody allen #mia farrow #jeff daniels #danny aiello #edward hermann #john wood #deborah rush #zoe caldwell #fantasy march #user365 #365days365movies #365 movie challenge #365 movies 365 days #365 Days 365 Movies #365 movies a year

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papermoonloveslucy · 6 years

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LUCY: 40 YEARS OF TELEVISION

1953 Part Two ~ JULY to DECEMBER

The launch of season three turns the Ricardos from a show-business couple to a struggling family.

"Ricky's 'Life' Story" (ILL S3;E1) ~ October 5, 1953

Life Magazine, that is. The Arnaz Family was featured in the magazine, so they returned the favor on “I Love Lucy.” This is the first time Little Ricky was played by the twins Joseph and Michael Mayer. This episode was filmed in May 1953, but saved to open the new season.

"The Girls Go Into Business" (ILL S3;E2) ~ October 12, 1953

This was the first episode filmed (September 11, 1953) for season three. At the same time, Lucille Ball had been accused of being a communist. Desi made a pre-show announcement of support before the filming. “And now I want you to meet my wife, my favorite redhead, in fact, that’s the only thing RED about her and even that’s not legitimate.”

"Lucy and Ethel Buy the Same Dress" (ILL S3;E3) ~ October 19, 1953

Lucy and Ethel sing “Friendship,” a Cole Porter tune Lucille sang in the 1943 film DuBarry Was a Lady. We learn the first of Ethel’s three middle names: Louise, the same as William Frawley’s ex-wife. Filmed September 17, 1953.

"Equal Rights" (ILL S3;E4) ~ October 26, 1953

Lucille was a perfectionist in all aspects of her work. During rehearsal for this episode, she spent hours trying to find the perfect paper bag to make the sound of the fake gunshot. Filmed September 24, 1953.

"Baby Pictures" (ILL S3;E5) ~ November 2, 1953

This is Doris Singleton’s fifth of ten appearances as Carolyn Appleby, but his is the first time we see her husband Charlie (Hy Averback). Filmed October 1, 1953.

"Lucy Tells the Truth" (ILL S3;E6) ~ November 9, 1953

This episode is best remembered for Lucy being a knife thrower’s target! Less memorable is the woman who sings like a chicken, a moment generally cut in syndication. The Ricardo apartment is re-numbered to 3D for the sake of a joke. Charles Lane, making his first of many appearances on the series, plays a talent scout. Filmed October 8, 1953.

"The French Revue" (ILL S3;E7) ~ November 16, 1953

A classic “Lucy Wants To Get Into the Act” episode with Lucy in a variety of disguises. Everyone imitates movie star Maurice Chevalier, not knowing he would guest star on the show in 1958. Filmed October 15, 1953.

“Dinner with The President” ~ November 23, 1953 on CBS

A news special in which the “I Love Lucy” cast are invited to perform at the 40th Anniversary Dinner of the Anti-Defamation League in Washington DC. Because Lucille Ball had been cleared of charges of being a communist, she thought they owed it to President Eisenhower to attend and perform a skit live. Lucy and Desi performed the “Under the Bamboo Tree” song and witty patter routine they did in “The Benefit” (ILL S1;E13) and Vivian and Bill sang “Carolina in the Morning” which they sang in “Ricky Loses His Voice” (ILL S2;E9).

"Redecorating the Mertzes' Apartment" (ILL S3;E8) ~ November 23, 1953

The writers also reasoned that if Fred and Ethel had better furniture, more scenes might take place in the Mertz apartment. Set designer Ted Offenbecker didn’t like the Ricardo’s sectional couch so replacing it was the inspiration for this episode. This is the third and final living room set change but also the one that lasts longest. The feathers floated down from the studio ceiling for days afterward. Filmed October 22, 1953.

"Too Many Crooks" (ILL S3;E9) ~ November 30, 1953

Urban crime is the topic of this episode, featuring a female villain, Madame X. The night this episode first aired, Desi Arnaz threw a surprise 13th wedding anniversary party for Lucille Ball at Hollywood’s glamorous Mocambo nightclub. After a towering cake was served, a TV set was wheeled in and guests watched “I Love Lucy”! Allen Jenkins returns as a policeman. Filmed October 29, 1953.

"Changing the Boys' Wardrobe" (ILL S3;E10) ~ December 7, 1953

The premise of this show is not completely believable. Fred and Ricky are generally well dressed men, even when lounging around the house! This is the third time on the series that Ricky sings "Granada.” Filmed November 5, 1953.

"Lucy Has Her Eyes Examined" (ILL S3;E11) ~ December 14, 1953

“Parker Preps Prod for Pitts Preem!” Lucy is taught to jitterbug by Arthur “Cool Cat” Walsh, who uses his own name on the show. Filmed November 12, 1953.

"Ricky's Old Girlfriend" (ILL S3;E12) ~ December 21, 1953

The episode features a lengthy dream sequence, something that won’t be repeated until Lucy visits Scotland. Carlota, the old girlfriend of the title, is portrayed by Lillian Molieri. In Lucy’s dream, Little Ricky is played by five year-old Jerry Mathers, who would later become known as the Beaver in “Leave it to Beaver” (1957-63). Filmed November 19, 1953. There will be no new episode until January 11, 1954.

Also in 1953...

“I Love Lucy The Movie” (unreleased)

This film consisted of three episodes edited together: "The Benefit" (ILL S1;E13), "Breaking the Lease" (ILL S1;E18) and "The Ballet" (ILL S1;E19). New scenes were filmed to help connect the three episodes into one cohesive whole. Also, new wraparound segments were filmed. The opening segment shows the studio audience filing in for the filming. Desi Arnaz welcomes the audience and introduces the cast as he typically did before every filming. In the closing segment, Arnaz thanks the audience and Lucille Ball and the cast take their final bows.

#I Love Lucy #Lucille Ball #Desi Arnaz #Vivian Vance #William Frawley #Jerry Mathers #1953 #TV #CBS #I Love Lucy Movie

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stephenjaymorrisblog · 3 years

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The Black Cat of Anarchy

Stephen Jay Morris

February 3, 2022

©Scientific Morality

Science is the path for discovering the truth of a mystery. When some Christian accuses Science of being a religion of its own, that is not only a lie but it is a brain-dead remark and projection. A lot of fundamentalists hate the label “religion,” even though they are part of one themselves. A lot of religious types think that labeling someone is like a magic wand. By uttering a noun like “religion” and attaching it to an ideology they don’t like, then it is magically discredited for infinity. Uh, not really. I heard Right wing Evangelicals say that Atheism is a religion, and even Communism is a religion. It’s an old game played by amateur debaters in a contrarian game. Accuse anti-racists of being racists. I ask you, if Jesus had his moment of doubts, does that make him agnostic?

As a child, I heard many superstitions repeated over and over. Like, “don’t walk under a ladder,” or “don’t break a mirror or you will have seven years bad luck.” Then there is Friday the 13th. I recall how a lot of people would call in sick on this date because they feared something bad would happen to them. And then, there’s this one—my favorite: “Whenever a black cat crosses your path, it means bad luck.”

I believed in superstitions as a child, but I grew up. Religion fecundates the IQ of our nation. In fact, it retards the advancement of any society. There are more doctors on the island of Communist Cuba than in the Christian state of Mississippi. Why is that? Duh! God would know the answer, so why don’t you?

Did you know that, during the month of October and especially on Halloween, black cats are ritualistically tortured and even killed? Why? Because some Christians believe that black cats are designated “familiar evil spirits” who come from Satan. This is all because of their distinctive black coat! A lot of Christians fancy themselves as experts on the occult. They are vicarious voyeurs of the inner workings of evil. To them, the whole purpose of religion is to monopolize all people around the world. All other religions are considered evil, even Catholicism. Those same people adamantly declare a one-world government as evil. So, a one world religion is just dandy? Fuck off, Boss!

When I was a child, many cats were attracted to our house. We never knew where they came from. Once, even a duck showed up on our front lawn! One day, a black, short-haired cat came around. We started to feed him and my sister named him, “Midnight.” If you ask me, black cats are very picky about who their owner or guardian will be. After two months, Midnight left us.

Many years later, I was living in a large artist’s studio in Pasadena, California. I befriended a black cat there and named him “Anarchy,” as in the “Black Flag of Anarchy.” A fond memory I have of Anarchy is how he would lick my hair as I languished on a lawn chair atop the garage roof, soaking in the sun. One day, he just up and left, never to return. Afterward, anyone could clearly see the dolorous expression on my face. A co-worker remarked, “You look like a chick dumped you!” I replied, “Worse! I lost my cat!”

Fast forward to now. We have a neighbor who owns several cats, one of which comes around almost every day and hangs out on our back porch, waiting for our welcome invitation. She is a black cat, about eight months old. I and my wife first met her last summer, when we soon fell in love with her! She is just beautiful! Her fur feels like velvet and it shines in the afternoon sun. Her yellow eyes are the center of her beauty. She is affectionate and playful, a young cat going through her adolescence. If she is at the top of our backyard hill and sees one of us watching her, she immediately runs down to greet us and rub against our legs. It’s as if she is saying, “I’m glad to see you! Let’s play!”

Last month, when the cold of winter set in, we noticed how the neighbor continued to permit his cats, including her, remain outdoors to roam and play for hours. That was when she began spending time on our back porch. We became so concerned and agitated over this negligence that, on one very cold and wet day, we brought her inside. Since then, we reached an unspoken agreement with her owners to have her in whenever we wish. She is a joy and a sweetheart!

So, if any of you Evangelical freaks try to tell me who is evil and who is not, I just say “Let your God tell me him-/herself in person! Otherwise…Stai zitto o muori!”

#animal rights #vegan #stephenjaymorris #poets on tumblr #american politics #baby boomers #anarchism #stephenjmorris

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curious-minx · 4 years

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Heat Lamp vol. 2 - Age Defying Light

(Photo taken from the Tumblr page: CLASSIC HOLLYWOOD GLAM)

Margaret makes a killing at her recent photo shoot. NRA Artistic Director, Derrick Fistual is rubbing his gun powder scented and arsenal oiled palms together, he’s basking in the pleasure of a newfound revelation: Give a woman a gun and they sell themselves. Margaret tries making a joke about penis envy when she first wrapped her manicured and digital gloss-ready porcelain hands around the butt of the rifle. Derrick tries shushing her at the very mention of the phallic, but then she points the rifle directly at Derrick and he falls backward into his holster shaped director’s chair.

“You really thought you could use a pretty lady to push your craven gun industry onto the rest of this gullible nation of baby faced killers?!” Margaret demands trying to tamper down the height of her question so that no one can accuse of her sounding hysterical. One more mental braid and twist straining against her toll. That and the heat of this “Margaret’s” wig.

Derrick picks chips and dip out of his finely bleached chompers, he grabs hold of Margaret’s gun and squeezes Margaret’s trigger finger. The gun clicks and fires a blank. Derrick winces and opens up the sound stage’s blinds and starts yelling,

“She’s trying to kill me! This raving bitch is trying to kill me! Come on pull the trigger! You think you’re so bad! So tough!”

Margaret/Antonia, The Daycrawler lifts up her rifle and begins twirling it around and round until it becomes one continuous, complete blur reflecting back at the NRA artistic director. Antonia, The Daycrawler times her next move to her internal martial rhythm and knocks Derrick onto the fake linoleum tiled stage floor with a flurry of her flat and viciously slippered feet. Antonia is standing above Derrick, pinning him down with her well calculated lower body muscle coordination. A life lived being the heel. Striking back!

Antonia fires the rifle directly into Derrick, the Artistic NRA Director’s , quavering O-Shaped gaping expression. The expression of a Death Peddler. The rifle fires, not a bullet, but a flash of light that fills up Derrick’s skull and bright shining white lights bursts forth out of every opening in his head. The light subsides and other than the faint smell of burning flesh Anton looks more or less unharmed. Smoke is pouring out of his scalp. Antonia drops the gun and saunters back behind the screen of the NRA film shoot costume cabinet.

She steps out as a red headed Communist influencer gal with an eye patch. She steps out a collagen infused Valkyrie of Beverly Hills. She steps out as a Pilgrim woman and wraps a lace and frill trimmed bonnet around her red wig. In the pile of her former night gown she picks up a vial of Monique’s Aura Cleanser Spritz and a Pixie Stick that promised to infuse the air around you with dayglo pink beach sands.

The NRA President, Carolyn D. Meadows, walks onto the sound stage set. Anton is still lying on the floor and the smoke has drifted up and away into an air vent. Meadows immediately assess the scene and pulls out her favorite pug nosed revolver and fires a ripping bullet straight into Antonia, The Pilgrim piercing her bodice. The bullet ricochets and flies right back into Mrs. Meadows face. Her face should have been torn to smithereens, and in a way it had, but the Monique perfumed air censored out her gore. American bloodlust will not be satiated.

Antonia takes a brisk step over to the turkey cages of well mannered and quiet turkeys hoping and praying that the pink fleshy monsters would go ahead and kill each other. Revenge is a dish best served without turkey. Antonia releases all of the turkeys being prepped for the annual NRA Blood Feast. The liberated turkeys cluck in approval and hop onto Antonia, The Daycrawling Pilgrim’s extended arms. They all start flapping gusts of wind with their winds, lifting her up into the air. Antonia fires the gun once more, this time with an actual bullet, a bullet made of exploding steel that creates an exit for Antonia and the turkeys. Floating up and away with her turkey brigade, Antonia snaps her rifle in half and throws it back down onto the shrinking remains of the NRA headquarters.

////

Antonia finishes her recital of Daycralwer fan fiction that she had comprised for herself in lieu of actually taking matters onto her own hands. Antonia and Magda Marlene, the Lady Light Tower herself, are luxuriating on two lumbar supporting poolhouse recliners taking the occasional drag of Pixie Stix and enjoying the vastness of Monique’s desert plateau property.

Magda places the butt of her burnt out Pixie Stix into the antelope skull ash try and then looks Antonia over and asks,“Do you really think Monique’s manufactured scents are that powerful? Sporting a potency capable of altering r a person’s cognitive perception, changing certain specific aspect of the ways an individual perceived reality? I’d be awfully scared of a woman spritzing such power.” Magda is trying not to be overly critical and call out Antonia’s adolescent tale for what is is: puerile adolescent fantasy. Reducing Magda and Monique as nothing more than the patron radioactive spiders biting her solid, Nordic Scandinavian Amazon Warrior charms! Magda rolls her eyes and it causes the sky to cycle through night and day.

“I know you’re going to say that this is superhero sensationalism, but I think I am the perfect canvas for you and Monique to use your powers on. Don’t you think so Monique?” Antonia asks Monique who has now made her eleven presence known the two chatting women enjoying the arid expanse of Monique’s property. Monique is heavily robed, covered head to toe in a sealed and plastic shroud. A Red Milk Snake pattern design running through the rest of her black and secretive ensemble.

“Antonia, I have no powers. I am a scientist, we’re the most powerless lot you’ve ever met. You really want to make the world a better place? Then may I suggest that you keep on keeping on as my number one test subject. Hun, as long as you keep showing up and crawling through the day or whatever it is you do we’re golden.” Monique then runs a multilayered glove hand down one of her braids, one of her ornamental beads catching a glare in the sunlight. Monique after a moment of quiet sneers, “Seriously, The Daycrawler? Really the best you could call yourself? Note to self: Antonia needs a rebranding. And don’t you think I didn’t hear how much you believe in me, Magda. I could easily create a scent capable of hijacking the brain into censoring violent imagery and don’t you forget it. Now could both of you be a couple of dears and quietly fuck off my property. If only I had a swamp instead of this arid rollicking plateau of dust and brush robbing me of the occasion to yell, ‘get off my swamp’! I simply can’t concentrate knowing that the two of yous are out here brooding, swapping stories, and murder fantasies about taking down the NRA like a couple of gal pals. As far as I’m concerned you’re trying to alienate my clientele and that’s pretty lousy Antonia. Don’t alienate the clientele.”Monique exhales a long sigh and her cheeks are burning bright red. Monique underneath her scarfs and additional PPE is typically making wild and erratic facial expressions that no one can see, and she then gives he two interlopers one more shooing away gesture, and begins walking back inside. Monique stops, turns around, and walks back up to the still static Magda and Antonia.

“And I also remember that we have a contract! Magda can’t share her light with anyone except for me!” Monique then pats herself down searching for some kind of paper proof, cannot find any and then shoves her hands back into her pockets. “On second thought maybe that contract doesn’t exist! Anyway I don’t think she will ever share her light with you. Ultimately Antonia I’d leave her alone. She’s more dangerous than you’ve been in your wildest assassinations. Ciao!”

Magda and Antonia are both standing over their shaded lawn chairs and start parting ways. Magda thinking about how she is potentially a dangerous ticking warhead of Energy and Light, and Antonia feeling emotionally bruised and yearning for a more active plot. How could she, a former assassin, be casted into this life as a layabout science experiment? Despite walking off into opposite directions from Monique’s compound property they still manage to meet back up onto the public street obscuring Monique’s private street entrance.

“I am sorry. I know I should have been more grateful about that other assassin you had kidnapped for me. Soy Hands, that’s her name right? She’s a real steal and could have used those slippery mits of hers to wrangle up all sorts of missing persons. Probably gotten really super helpful intel. But Antonia this is my personal affair and I would prefer if you would stay out of it , and in return, I will grace you with your privacy. Fair! Now that I got that shitty business out of the way, why don’t we head off to Marietta, Georgia? Let’s go nab us an NRA President!” Magda squints and feigns a smile towards Antonia casting her in the most flattering light from the sodium streetlamp.

“No, the NRA headquarters is in Fairfax Virginia. That’s more or less where I was imagining we’d infiltrate.” Antonia says with a wistful glint in her eye.

“Oh wait! I forgot I have to go help out at my siblings Light shop. Do you think this wholesome assassination plot can wait? I’ve been dodging those two for over a year and half now and because of this pandemic I finally broke down and am going to help them today.”

“That’s great. You can go ahead and forget about all of that. I know that killing someone objectively bad won’t make me feel any better. The act of killing is rarely the day at the spa you’d hope it to be. Not that you’d understand.”Antonia lifts her entire and herself against the streetlamp bending it so the light no longer focused on her.

“No, I really do understand. I may not have killed anyone because I meant to, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t killed someone by accident. Okay I didn’t kill anyone, but I did accidentally blind this guy I dated and may have ruined his dreams of becoming the next Fellini…” Magda looks away, embarrassed for even trying to open up in front of such a cold and ruthless killer. Antonia reaches out and puts her hand on Magda’s shoulder.

“That’s okay! I don’t want to hear about it! We’re cool. We’re apparently both enjoying the same Sugar Mother relationship with Monique right now, but we’re also going on pathways to friendship. I’d love to keep busting this friendship business wide open, but I’ve got to get back to my live parkour stream. Basically I’m the hottest sticky hand gymnast in the nation!” Antonia releases her hand from Magda’s shoulder, leaving behind a faintly thin treacly trail of some mysterious sweat. Antonia, The Daycralwer is already halfway through ascending the thirty story residential apartment complex. Magda thinks about attaching a bulb of light to the bottom of Antonia’s shoes as a friendly light up gesture, but realizes the opportunity to do so has long since past. Magda finally reaches her space craft almost two miles away from Monique’s laboratory compound. Parking is a space craft in this city is always a bitch, oh well, time for Magda to return home to help her brother and sister.

/////

Gidget and Chester’s Light Factory

Starring right at Magda is a lamp that looks exactly like Hillary. Magda’s Hillary. Bulbs of light for each button on her power suit. Magda had not told anyone about her hidden Lady Crush/Obsession Hillary. Magda grits her teeth and the boxes of unlit bulbs begin glowing and whistling in response to Magda’s anger. The generous skylight is turning a burning shade of chocolate cosmo reflecting back at Magda’s fury.

“Maga chud!” Gidget and Chester squeal in unison. Gidget, Magda’s taller and much dimmer sister chirps up, “So happy you could finally grace us with your presence. Chester and I were just about to run through the speech explaining why it’s okay that Magda broke her promise as always and didn’t show up.”

“What sort of sick game are you two playing at? Why don’t you get your own lives and stop mucking around in mine! Don’t think I haven’t felt you two messing around my head whenever I’m asleep or getting whatever pale facsimile of sleep this body allows me. Why did you two make a lamp out of my crush? What did you two possibly hope to gain from doing this?” Magda stops herself from shaking with anger because it’s causing the overhead workshop lights to flicker and strobe giving Magda a lurking headache. Magda looks around the crates of light bulbs, freight carts sporting various Lampshades and jungle of wires and snatches up a clean linen sheet and drapes it over the Hillary lamp like the shameful Delorean it is!

“This was going to be your Xmas present! Sister Magma don’t be ungrateful. Chester and I made sure to study your most erotic dreams! We’re your siblings we would never judge you for your tastes! We think the fact that you’re attracted to all sorts of types pretty fascinating. Especially Chester!”

“Yeah sis! I can’t get it up for anybody. And it’s not for lack of trying!” Chester adjusts his shaved pyramid shaped hairdo back into place and cracks his fingerless gloved knuckles before lifting up the Hillary lamp and placing it on a dolly. Chester removes it from the room while Gidget pulls the brim of her sailor cap covering her eyes.

“Maybe whenever I open this gift I’ll like it more? I guess Overall, your manner of presentation is too overwhelming for the likes of me. I haven’t actually seen Hillary in person yet…”

“Yeah, we know!” Chester calls out as he deposits the Hillary lamp back into her lamp locker. Chester then crosses to the opposite side of the workshop and starts sauntering the bending lobes of a brain shaped electric chandelier. Chester accidentally singes one his fingers but instead of crying out in pain he spits onto the ground and shakes the sensation away. Gidget scowls at Magda and goes back to testing the conductivity of connector, placing different plug blades onto her blue and barely pink tongue. A spark flies off in her mouth and then Gidget writes down a number or some kind of code into her ledger.

Magda takes a seat on a stool and waits for any further instruction. A minute goes by and it becomes clear to Magda that Gidget and Chester have already completely forgotten about her. Magda clears her throat and the brain model lights up and Chester stares into blinding mass of a lit up frontal lobe without any form of eye protection. Chester stares directly into the lights unblinking, only a silver rolling wet tear pooling in the pockets of his cratered cheek. The brainy chandelier goes back out and Magda crosses her legs, causing an entire rack of anglepoise lamps to swerve their joints around and wink lights at her.

“Can you not with the light show for five fucking minutes?” Gnashes Gidget, who has switched over to the shaping of loose lamp rods. Gidget pulls out a vibrantly pickle green THC enriched lollipop from her apron pocket and begins sucking on the green relief orb with all of her might. Gidget and Chester only increase in concentration in response to Magda’s agitation.

The double leaden French doors of the Gidget and Chester’s workshop feebly creak open and an infant’s small and chubby hand is struggling with pulling the doors fully back. Another hand reaches joins the other, a varicose and grey hairy knuckled hand. Magda stands up from her raven clawed stool and is immediately joined by Gidget and Chester unabashedly cowering and using Magda as a human light-up shield. Gidget and Chester are both muttering something that sounds like an ancient Latin prayer to themselves and Chester is doing that thing with his lower jaw that Magda finds abhorrent.

“Oh, hi! Elroy” Magda attempts in her best Tommy Wisseau to break the ice with this fully transmogrified and physically disorienting version of Elroy hobbling towards her. Clanking and clattering behind the Elroy abomination is a seven foot tall torchiere lamp still wrapped in its original bubble wrap.

“Duh lamp! Ugh dee LAMP!” Slobbers and groans the man with the roof a mouth of someone starting to teeth and the rest of his mouth decaying with age. Gidget and Chester dart out from behind Magda in separate directions and throw another layabout workshop sheet over the haphazard human quilt of ancient and newborn flesh. Elroy continues moaning on about a lamp and thrashes around unable to free himself from the diabolical sheet covering.

“What are you two doing? He needs light! The right kind of light!” Magda lifts Elroy into her arms, he feels as heavy as a cracked egg in Magda’s sinewy arms. She nods over to the garage door leading to the outside loading dock. Magda arranges the cloth covering Elroy so that both sides of his sallow and nubile flesh are exposed directly into sunlight. Magda uses her free hand to start gathering up a particular singled out ray of sunlight and works the light like it is clay on a wheel. Magda stretches her band of sunlight until it is the entire length of Elroy’s compact frame. Magda rolls Elroy up into the sunlight like he is hummus on a collard leaf or a butterfly testing out a new cocoon. Magda looks over her shoulder and sees Gidget and Chester both watching her with crossed arms and snarls, diligently recording her “miracles” like they have always done.

The cocoon of light pulsates and dims and repeats this cycle for several interminable moments. Elroy unfurls himself from his sleeping bag of daylight and continues free rolling. He rolls himself a distance away from Magda and is quietly laughing face down onto Magda’s family’s patchy lawn. Elroy snaps back up and runs around in circles around Magda clicking his heels and bouncing around her like a too exuberant pogo or haughty kangaroo.

“Are we finished? We’re good right? You’re not going to sue anyone for this faulty product, right?” Magda asks Elroy but is making eye contact with her siblings who are growing increasingly pale and despondent.

“No, of course not! I should have just starved myself and bathed in stem cells and not have cheated with this..questionable technology. That’s why you have to let me just borrow your light. I bought this pendant with a vial charm on it. It’s only a few drops of your luminosity! Then I will be happy to forget about all of this mishap with your siblings faulty and definitely cursed lamp.” Elroy bites his bottom lip after he finishes talking knowing that he has just taken a huge bite out of risk.

“Get out! There’s nothing faulty about a Magdalene lamp! I’ll-I’ll…”

“Do what?” Challenges Elroy who is trying to straighten out his spine despite still feeling rubbery all over, he swallows and bobs his knotted Adam’s Apple, “Are you going to kill me? Fry me? Zap me? Because we all know how capable you are miss Magda! Maybe too capable for your own good?” Elroy continues waving around his newfound confidence in Magda’s face. Magda pushes him aside, an action that results in an ornamental lawn light to splash a harsh noxious red light directly into Elroy’s eyes causing him to double over. Magda rushes herself over into her space craft that hovers for a moment emitting a high E sharp synthetic tone before launching itself and Magda as fast and as far away from her home, away from these vain people and their constant demands, away from meddling scientists and the Family Businesses and Energy Baron politics.

Back down at Chester and Gidget’s workshop Elroy is clutching his Ponce de Leon Torchiere and tearing up a receipt. Gidget and Chester shrug and make no effort to stop him.

“Should we bother telling him that he’s broken his dimmer switch?” Gidget asks Chester who have both returned back to their work benches.

“Probably not. Should I tell you that that lamp we made of Hillary has gained sentience and is frantically making its way out into the world?” Chester gestures to the Lamp Hillary that has the empty panicked expression of a runaway android. Chester and Gidget shrug in unison once again and return to making a blacklight lamp that shows you all the sex you could be having.

#short story #short fiction #indoor lighting #lightning #lamp #surrealism #mojave #classic hollywood glam

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nanyoky · 7 years

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HAD ONE ON AN EMPTY STOMACH AND NOW TIME FOR THE BIG SHOW

OH god it’s a CHRISTMAS EPISODE. our core four pairs have broken up, fp is about to die and it’s a CHRISTMAS EPISODE

mary booked a singles cruise so i guess they couldn’t get molly ringwald for more eps this season

yay my girl polly’s back for a presumably horrifying dream sequence

That Kubrick-esque centered shot of Hood!santa climbing over the couch back????? *kisses fingers like cartoon italian chef*

Cheryl still EXPECTS her mother to put out jason’s stocking and demands to know what such a tiny candycane is doing in their home because she is still GRIEVING but still SO MUCH . this is what the death of a twin looks like take fuckin note marvel

Also nana rose didn’t die in the fire? so that’s nice.

“86,000″ “what- dollars?” like the hospital in smalltown usa might charge people in pesos or forint- godbless you archie

“Kevin’s secret santa has a 20$ limit” “Kevin needs to chill” no, v, YOU need to chill. or rather don’t. because we love you so much.

“Havent you heard? we’re still friends!” “oh yeah. isnl’t everyone?” i love these girls almost as much as the lund and byerly’s checkout lady who never judges my wednesday night sale sushi runs

fp looks so thin without his jacket and warm vestiges i’m worried about him is he taking his vitamins eating his spinach if he has been surviving on hot pockets and beer since he got out i will be so cross with him

“BOY.” i’m DISTRAUGHT. fp and jughead are living together again and we’re finally getting to see what that looks like and it’s exactly as heartbreaking as we knew it would be

also fp wears his wallet with a stylish chain that goes from his pocket to his beltloop because it’s apparently 2008 in that trailer

“Couples massage.... thanks” “You can go with betty!” audience: YES PLEASE.

also who the fuck would do a couples massage with their highschool boyfriend- veronica lodge that’s who, but who ELSE.

archie didn’t spend any money on his gift and it is obviously the ebst one int he exchange and we love him

MOOSE AND MIDGE ARE HERE TO MAKE THINGS WEIRD FOR KEVIN (HOPEFULLY)

REGGIE *SPRINTS* TO HUG MOOSE AND THE SHIP I DIDN’T KNOW I NEEDED EMERGES

oh dear. mr. svenson. of course i love that betty and co. know the janitor at their school’s name. is that normal? i went to an enormous highschool- i barely knew my teacher’s names half the time. but i imagine it’s very sweet and very betty of her.

oh god jughead came to riverdale high for the gift exchange because he’s a good dude. a good dude.

his little SMILE when he feels how heavy it is is the most boyish he’s looked since the scene where we find out fp is his dad in the drive in episode and I’M NOT OKAY

veronica giving archie an expensive engraved watch is CLASS COMMENTARY and it is very good of archie to try to explain that to her calmly and without accusation or bitterness i don’t know if i would handle it that well cuz fun fact i once accused a guy of making me into Pygmalion because he tried to take me to a restaurant with multiple spoons

jughead wants to help but now sweetpea has replaced joaquin as the unreasonably beautiful surrogate son fp feels more comfortable putting in danger than his own kid help

what is the point of showing cheryl is interested in buying a tree? other than maybe she’s going to spend more than her mom can afford now??? or that she’s back at archie now that josie is weirded out by her possessive obsessive tendencies? not sure what the point of that was

nice reverse zoom/dolly into a dutch angle on this modest janitor house

the parole officer calls him “jughead” that is all

hermione and hiram being deliberately flirty in front of veronica after she and hermione had that talk about loving one’s partner

“Since when are you a communist *deliberate eyeroll at hiram*” i still can’t tell whether season 1!hermione or season 2!hermione is the act and i’m still RIVETED

okay it was to show she’s just spending a bunch of money to piss off penelope who coincidentally, is wearing a WINNER of an outfit rn damn son i have that but like- not as good cuz my black lace sheath is from target

not to take credit away from cheryl’s high quality cherry sweater

“you should have drowned them at birth like a basket of kittens” NANA ROSE. NANA FUCKIN ROSE. COMIN IN HOT FOR THE HOLIDAYS.

i honestly don’t know if it’s ever stated if nana rose is penelope’s mom or clifford’s but judging purely on penelope’s eyeroll and non-verbal expression of “UGG. MOTHERRRRR” i’mma say her’s.

betty pulls her sweater over her hands when approaching her mother because how often did alice tug roughly at young!betty’s clothes to make sure she was PICTURE PERFECT at all times

we all knew that it was going to be a finger right we all knew

and of course she only tells archie because this is betty cooper we’re talking about

“would the sisters talk to us?” “pft- they better” betty’s gunna beat up a nun

also my first assumption is that the janitor’s sin is pointing out the wrong guy to the lynch mob??? could be wrong but it seems kinda odd that archie isn’t bringing up that part of the story

the lodges have the same “christmas classics” cd as my mom because of course they do

the fact that veronica finds the deed to pop’s and doesn’t react in shock or anger but sits back in her dad’s leather office chair and crosses her legs to think things over is CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT

jughead knows fp too well to apologize for thinking badly of him and the duffles and IT HURTS SO GOOD

“maybe this isn’t gunna work- us living together” FP ISN’T A DAD HE’S A BIG BROTHER AND I KEEP SAYING IT BUT IT KEEPS HURTING EVERY TIME IT’S PROVEN TRUE

oh god jughead is calling on the next gen serpents for help this isn’t going to end well, son

“take out penny” take out? TAKE OUT???? TAKE OUT?!?!?! JUGGIE. take a nap.

sweet pea and fangs are either the bestest of bros or engaged to be wedded i can’t decipher their eye communication exactly

the serpents are FACTIONING and this CANNOT end well

“it was a group of men... and one woman” FOUNDING FAMILIES FOUNDING FAMILIES FOUNDING FAMILIES

next gen serpents are going to fuck everything up and i can’t take jughead trying to do an intimidating under the brows stare seriously

we all think that nun is the drug dealer lady in the wheelchair right?

“white with a cherry red stripe” THAT’S MY GIRL. THAT’S MY NANA ROSE. BACK WITH PLOT AND BACKSTORY. BATTING FOR THE TEAM. NANA ROSE BLOSSOM.

“the truth” THE LODGE TRUTH. HOOO BOY. *pours another drink*

OH MY GOD IS HE CUTTING IT OFF JUGHEAD. JUGHEAD. BETTY HAS BEEN A BAD INFLUENCE ON YOU.

i just pictured fp’s face if he saw this and did the most ridiculous puppy whine

“oh noooo. no girls allowed” NANA ROSE BLOSSOM. MY MAIN GIRL.

founding families. what did i say.

hefty sigh at barchie kiss. like- i’d be more into this if they actually built it and didn’t keep breaking up and putting everyone back together back and forth

oh cheryl saw- THAT i’m interested in

they’re not going to tell us the lodge truth because they’re bastards

penny didn’t show up for your pickup, did she?” “no.... no she didn’t.” JUGHEAD IS THE PARENT AND FP IS THE KID AND IT IS HORRIBLE AND PERVERSE AND I LOVE IT SO MUCH

“this life you tried to protect me from? i’m proud of it!” *WHALE NOISES* FP’S FACE. FP’S *FACE*. THIS IS THE LOOSE HENRIAD CRIME FAMILY AU I’VE BEEN HURTING FOR.

oh god there’s one black guy in the picture please don’t tell me our sweet angel pop was involved in this how old is pop he’s not old enough right tell me he had no part in this

*DISTRESS SCREEEEE*

UNMASK HIM BETTY UNMASK HIM ARCHIE IS FINE HE’S A BIG STRONG BOY WHO CAN TAKE A LITTLE DIRT IN HIS FACE

oh god oh god oh god did sheriff keller shoot bh so he can’t talk oh god oh god oh god

this is too easy and we all know it i’m still pulling my multiple killers theory and i haven’t given up on shady!keller yet

weird sound editing trying to give studio quality to josie and kevin just jammin acapella outside a diner

WHO THE FUCK IS PENELOPE SNOGGIN ON XMAS MORN?!?!?!

YASSS JUGHEAD GETS HER A SIGNED FIRST EDITION OF BELOVED WHICH I HAVE BASICALLY BEEN WAITING FOR SINCE BETTY SAID SHE LOVES TONI MORRISON IN EPISODE ONE. well- not exactly this. but that IS one of my alltime favorite books and a huge influence on my own gothic writing so to see it referenced on this show is just GRAND

we all know it’s not over juggie, we all know.

Episode Scorecard:

Number of sick beat drop rhythmic editing moments: none

Episode hair MVP: Nana rose’s stripe was featured as a plot point and is always of the highest quality

Do I still miss Joaquin: yes

Episode outfit MVP: Penelope’s black lace sheath

Cast/Crew shoutout: There were some really solid cinematography moments, but I would have liked to see better editing? pacing was a bit rough.

#Riverdale spoilers #riverdale season 2 #nell liveblogs #nell drinks #unsubtle highschool suburban gothic of my dreams #i can't believe fp is still alive?#a whole episode after quoting the most famous eulogy poem in the english language???#i'm in shock honestly

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justanothercinemaniac · 7 years

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Epic Movie (Re)Watch #158 - Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country

Spoilers Below

Have I seen it before: Yes

Did I like it then: Yes.

Do I remember it: Yes.

Did I see it in theaters: No.

Format: Blu-ray

1) This would be the last Star Trek film to feature the entirety of the original series cast (as it was followed by four films with the Next Generation cast and now the three films in the rebooted timeline) and is intended as such. Nicholas Meyers (director of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan) returns as director, Gene Rodenberry died just days after seeing a cut of the movie, and it seeks to give the original cast a fitting send off.

2) Even though it at times keeps his involvement in the plot minimal, I like that Sulu is Captain. It shows that there are officers who are as competent as Kirk and who seek to be more than just his inferior officers.

3) The opening of the film (where a mysterious wave knocks around Sulu’s ship only for it to be discovered to originate from parts of Klingon space) is an incredibly strong way of opening the film. It establishes the conflict and sense of mystery which will come to define the story.

4) Sassy Sulu is the best Sulu.

(GIF originally posted by @williamtriker)

5) I think deciding to end the stories of the original characters with a plot based around peace between Klingons and the federation is a great one. It pushes each of these characters into an alliance they are uncomfortable with. Klingons have been antagonists towards them since the original series, that’s 25 years at this point. And it forces all of them to examine things they are uncomfortable with, ESPECIALLY Kirk.

(GIFs originally posted by @readysteadytrek)

Kirk is obviously horrified and disgusted at the idea. He refers to the Klingons as admirals and calls Spock, “arrogant and presumptuous,” after learning he recommended him as a peace ambassador. How many times have Kirk and the Enterprise gone up against Klingons? How many times have they threatened them? And, most relevantly, what was the species of those who killed his son in Star Trek III? He is pushed into a place he never thought he’d be and never wanted to be. It is so much easier to vilify them and hate them than it is to work towards peace. But that is what Kirk has to do over the course of these two hours. Work towards peace. And that is an amazing conflict to see play out.

6) According to IMDb:

The film is largely an allegory about the fall of Soviet Communism. When General Chang demands that Kirk answer a question without waiting for the translation, it is an allusion to the real-life exchange at the United Nations between U.S. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson and Soviet Ambassador Valerian Zorin during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. Also, the explosion on Praxis due to "insufficient safety measures" is akin to the meltdown at Chernobyl nuclear power plant in present-day Ukraine, which is believed to have contributed to the decline of the Soviet Union. Spock says that there was seventy years of "unremitting hostility" between the Klingon Empire and the Federation, which is not how long the Cold War lasted, but is the approximate length of time that the U.S.S.R. (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) existed in the twentieth century, with a communist form of government.

That makes the conflict all the more ripe in may opinion & I love it all the more.

7) Kim Cattrall as Saavik Valeris

(GIF originally posted by @readysteadytrek)

According to IMDb:

Valeris was originally written to be Saavik, Spock's trainee from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982), Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984) and Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986) lending greater impact to her character's betrayal. However, Gene Roddenberry objected to the character's actions, ending up in a battle with Nicholas Meyer (who believed the Saavik character was his to do with as he pleased). Roddenberry won the dispute and the character was re-written into Valeris, who is played by Kim Cattrall. Cattrall wanted to play a different character rather than be the third incarnation of Saavik, following Kirstie Alley and Robin Curtis. Meyer had originally wanted Cattrall to play Saavik back in 1982, but she was unavailable.

I prefer that Cattrall is playing an original character. I don’t see it as being in line with what we’ve seen of Saavik in the past that she be a traitor and I think Cattrall is able to play a unique character because of it. Saavik - for me - will always be the somewhat proud closer-to-Kirk-than-Spock Vulcan in Wrath of Khan (as opposed to her more logical portrayal later on) so allowing Valeris to be her own character works. Cattrall is able to portray her as logical but with her own strong sense of morales and beliefs which leads her to some very interesting places/decisions by the film’s end. I think she’s a worthy character/actress to join the original crew on their final voyage.

8) Look how much Spock has grown!

Spock [to Valeris]: “Logic is the beginning of wisdom, not the end.”

9) I have to say the kinship Spock and Valeris are portrayed as having is done very well. Even though this is the first film she is in, we understand how and why Spock trusts/is proud of Valeris. This makes her betrayal by the film’s end all the more painful.

10) I can never get past the fact that Chancellor Gorkon is played by David Warner who was Sark in the original TRON.

11) There are a lot of lines in this film which allude to the racism the Enterprise crew feels towards the Klingons.

Chekov: “Guess who’s coming to dinner.”

Nichelle Nichols’ Uhura originally had this line but the actress referred to say it. According to IMDb there was another line she refused to say which ended up being dropped from the film and that was, "Yeah, but would you let your daughter marry one of them?"

12) Christopher Plummer as General Chang.

I truly enjoy Plummer’s performance as Chang and the character himself, although he runs out of steam a little bit by the film’s end. He is a poetic man, quoting Shakespeare often throughout the film, but a warrior through and through. A proud man who wishes to see the continuation of his race in what he believes is the best way (which isn’t necessarily the actual best way), Chang has an intense focus which Plummer performs well. A wonderful final villain for the original crew to face off against.

13) Remember how this film analyzes future bigotry?

Crew Member #1: “They all look alike.”

Crew Member #2: “And what about that smell? You know only top of the line models can even talk.”

(GIF source unknown [if this is your GIF please let me know].)

Also the filmmakers are doing a good job of drumming up sympathy for the Klingons right now. I am very much pro-Klingon in that moment.

13) The dinner scene.

There are a lot of mixed emotions at play in this scene. Hope for the future - championed by Chancellor Gorkon - quickly turns into fear, distrust, and discomfort. It becomes apparent that most Klingons are not comfortable with this situation either.

Azetbur [Gorkon’s daughter]: “ ‘Inalienable.’ If only you could hear yourself. ‘Human rights.’ The very name is racist.”

14) And the conspiracy begins.

Kirk [after the chancellor’s ship is fired upon]: “What happened.”

Spock: “We have fired on the chancellor’s ship.”

Honesty I think it is the conspiracy and mystery which makes this film as good as it is. It helps to set it apart from the epic which was Wrath of Khan or the more lighthearted fun if The Voyage Home. It plays out very akin to a Sherlock Holmes or Agatha Christie mystery and I am a sucker for a good mystery.”

15) Kirk may be struggling with peace but damn if he doesn’t immediately do the right thing.

And then Bones - who is always a doctor first - goes with Kirk to tend to the wounded and tries to save the chancellor’s life. They put aside their fears and their prejudices in an attempt to do what’s right and I applaud them for doing so.

16) I don’t know why, but something about this exchange makes me smile.

Scotty [after the data is says they fired at the Klingons, even though all torpedoes are accounted for]: “No way!”

Spock: “I sympathize with you, Mr. Scott.”

I think it’s just Spock being Spock really.

17) Kurtwood Smith (of “That 70′s Show”) as the Federation President.

The nicest part about Smith’s character is that I found this line nicely refreshing:

“This president is not above the law.”

(GIF originally posted by @marshmallow-the-vampire-slayer)

18) The trial.

I think the trial of Kirk and Bones for the attack on the Klingon chancellor is the best part of this film. It makes you wildly uncomfortable the entire time, as it is meant to. While this film is an allegory for a post-Soviet-Union world, there is a lot of McCarthyism at work here. Their verdicts were clearly determined before they took the stands, with even Bones’ intentions as a doctor challenged.

Bones [after Chang accuses him of incompetence]: “I tried to save him [Gorkon]. I was desperate to save him.”

Bones has always been a doctor, so to accuse him of not doing his best to save a patient is such a painful strike to his soul. The scene also gives us this line from Kirk.

Kirk [after it is suggested some of his crew were the assassins]: “As captain I am responsible for the conduct of crew under my command.”

There is a difference between responsibility and culpability. There is a difference between responsibility and guilt. That is important to know.

18.1) Also we get this wonderful Michael Dorn cameo during the trial!

Dorn is most famous for playing fan favorite Commander Worf on “The Next Generation” which was already airing when he filmed this part as Kirk’s/Bones’ legal council in front of the Klingons. Although he is not credited as such in the film, it is understood that Dorn is playing Commander Worf’s ancestor Col. Worf here. I like the continuity, it’s a nice touch.

19) Ah, the connection between Spock and Sherlock Holmes.

Spock: “If you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains - however improbable - must be the truth.”

I love when Spock uses his logic skills in a Holmes-ian nature. Detective Spock is a lot of fun to watch.

20) The prison asteroid Kirk and Bones end up on I think is a great example of place in the film. It’s cold and desolate nature is an incredibly powerful atmosphere which conveys not only where theses characters are physically but emotionally by this part of the movie.

21) Expectations vs reality at its finest.

Spock: “If I know the captain, by this time he is deep into planning his escape.”

[Kirk is in a fistfight with another prisoner, trying not to get crushed.]

22)

Kirk [to Bones, in the prison, while they’re waiting for sleep]: “Are you afraid of the future?”

THIS is Kirk’s conflict right here. He’s TERRIFIED of the future and his place in it. It’s a conflict which goes all the way back to Wrath of Khan: he is afraid of being obsolete. Of the march of time. That’s what truly terrifies him and that’s what he has to deal with in this film.

23) Hey look, it’s Christian Slater!

According to IMDb:

The Casting Director was Mary Jo Slater, mother of Christian Slater. Thus, his small role as a Communications Officer aboard the Excelsior.

Christian Slater wore the trousers made for William Shatner in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982). "It was an honor to get into Shatner's pants", he quipped during a BBC interview.

Christian Slater framed his 750 dollar paycheck for his walk-on part.

24) According to IMDb:

Nichelle Nichols objected to the scene in which the crew desperately searches through old printed Klingonese translation dictionaries in order to speak the language without the standard universal translator being used. It seemed more logical to her that Uhura, being the ship's chief communications officer, would know the language of the Federation's main enemy, or at least have the appropriate information in the computer. However, Nicholas Meyer bluntly overruled her. In Star Trek (2009), Uhura specializes in xenolinguistics, intercepts and translates a Klingon communication, and speaks Klingonese in Star Trek Into Darkness (2013).

I agree with Nichols.

25) So in the prison Kirk makes out with a woman who turns out to be a shapeshifter, and when he learns she was a shapeshifter kind a recoils from her. Then she tries to kill him and Bones (which was her plan all along) and shifts into Kirk to cause confusion. Shatner seems to have a lot of fun playing the shapeshifter Kirk. It’s almost like he’s doing an impression of himself, dialing all the Shatner-isms up to 11. It’s brief but enjoyable.

(GIF originally posted by @trekgate)

26) Damn, Spock is PISSED when it turns out Valeris is the traitor. He is hurting, and the mind meld he performs with her is super intense. It’s a nice side of the Vulcan I haven’t seen much of in Nimoy’s tenure as the character (Zachary Quinto would have some wonderful angry scenes though).

youtube

27) Dude, I love this.

Scotty: “Then we’re dead.”

[Beat.]

Spock: “I’ve been dead before.”

28) Spock and Kirk have one last heart to heart before the climax and resolution of this film and I appreciate that the film took the time to analyze their friendship one last time.

Kirk [while Spock is beating himself up over Valeris]: “Spock you want to know something? Everyone is human.”

Spock: “I find that remark offensive.”

29) The film creates some great climactic conflict by creating the dual scene of the Enterprise fighting off Chang’s ship and the nearing assassination at the peace conference. You know they can feasibly beat Chang, but do it in time to stop the assassination which gets dangerously close to fruition? THAT is the conflict. That’s the double jeopardy.

30) And this is the resolution of Kirk’s conflict with time.

Kirk [to Azetbur at the peace conference]: “People can be very frightened of change.”

Azetbur [realizing Kirk just saved the treaty signing]: “You’ve restored my father’s faith.”

Kirk: “And you’ve restored my son’s.”

Kirk has made his peace with the movement of time and is ready for its march.

31) Spock sass!

Spock [after the Enterprise is ordered to return to port to be decommissioned]: “If I were human, I believe my response would be, ‘go to hell.’ If I were human.”

Chekov: “Course heading, captain?”

Kirk [in his final line as captain of the Enterprise]: “Second star to the right, and straight on ‘til morning.”

32) Having the final credits for the main cast be their signatures is a nice touch.

youtube

When it comes to the original cast Star Trek films, Star Trek VI is second only to Wrath of Khan in my opinion. The added elements of conspiracy and mystery as well as themes of prejudice and bigotry help to set the film apart from the others. The characters are pushed to a place they’ve never been before personally and the entire cast shines in showing that. It’s a wonderful final film for the original stars after 25 years.

#Star Trek #Star Trek VI #Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country #William Shatner #Leonard Nimoy #Nichelle Nichols #George Takei #Epic Movie (Re)Watch #Christian Slater #Christopher Plummer #David Warner #Kim Cattrall #Michael Dorn #Kurtwood Smith #Movie #Film #GIF

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apriltwentythree · 5 years

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on politics:

none of us in our right minds would refer to an afro american as ‘nigger’. but afro-americans do not have the same obligation to be careful regarding that word or act sacred about it, unless they wish to. they can laugh while calling each other ‘niggah’. I feel something similar about the word ‘comrade’. it’s my inheritance, and can laugh about it if I so wish, there is no obligation to go around being reverent about it, and by extension, it can surely never sound patronizing when I say it.

i equate niggah and comrade only because both words did not start out as words referring to the ruling or protected classes, and were even used derisively by them then! but now, both words are not really tied to their historical connotations, at least not in their entireties, also not in every context. it can be cool to be a nigger(ask Dave Chapelle), it can be cool to be a comrade(ask Dulquer Salman). naturally, to pretend that it can sound patronizing any longer, is at worst lazy ignorant or at best a lazy lie….esp. when the accused is someone who mostly sits in a room staring out of the window by herself, and have no real party politics to speak of! meaning, when you are equally pissed off as your accuser, you don’t think that you owe them any explanation.

anyways, because it’s my inheritance, i value the word just as much as the average comrade does. say, if i find an election manifesto on a celebrity feed, it’s tough to get too excited, instantly! so i try to look for a connecting link— healthcare, medicine, disability. there! that I truly care about. and when i read and learn about just that, it helps me to retain some integrity regarding the comrade inheritance. guess this is more to do with people’s personalities, i don’t think this is how most people prefer to approach their politics or, feel the need to, I am just saying this is how I look at it. something of a personal nature really, nothing more to it!

what made me wish to be like eeda_Leela who is slightly more familiar with the politics of everything happening around her than eeda_Aishwarya, is the year-long hackathon that brought me up-close to society and the politics of the everyday, than ever before! everyday politics is mostly always about feeling than thinking, ask Brexit voters or Trump supporters. I’m not even referring to ideologies per se, I’m just saying, it��s mostly about influencing people, enough to make them ‘feel’ something. so, if i say I am now a comrade just like all my friends are, and wish to join the election festival alongside everyone, it’s bcoz now i am starting to ‘feel’ something; the ‘KL wave effect’ is influential clearly ha ha! BK, who has always been the poster boy of elite hipster-hood, now aspires to reach the entirety of his troll soul depth and party with the proletariat through the night. that says it all for me! Advaid(AD) says he came to Kerala at the age of 18. soon, in 2015 —was he 24 then? i was 31— I saw him shrug off all his hipster English and start to dappankoothu his way into Malayalam. If I’m remembering right, there were quite a few civic-conscious Facebook posts by him, in all-Malayalam. i don’t know who influenced him in particular, may be he self-influenced, having stayed long enough in Kerala!

I had some time to myself these past couple of weeks, and realized that I’m naturally-inclined to be eeda_Aishwarya when it comes to Kerala politics, and that I cannot self-influence regarding the politics of the everyday, unlike eeda_Leela who easily can. and I’m eeda_Aishwarya in Boston too, I cannot naturally-invest in party politics here either. i don’t even know what is the Mueller Report! I don’t know who are the Senators from Boston after the 2018 November elections. occasionally, I try to read up on some Healthcare-Medicine-Disability, but it has been a while I did that too.

on the other hand, i always had a thing for ‘World Politics’, it has always been my political weed. i can self-influence, and read all kinds of shit on that, enlightening or otherwise! maybe it’s because it’s more humankind-drama, and less humanperson-drama. even if you are not invested in the politics of the immediate, everyday surrounding for any reason, still it encompasses all. reader you, writer me, all of everyone —together, over a lengthy period of time. and I recently discovered this academic-historian, Yuval Noah Harrari. his critics call him ‘pet historian’ of the liberal elite bcoz Obama, Bill Gates, Zuckerberg…everybody is his fanboi! apparently, he is a best selling phenomenon, and I got a copy of his latest book from the local library. from reading so far, it looks as if the book is a bunch of op-Eds put together to meet some rushed-deadline. meaning, the book is good only in parts, not as a whole! some passages seem mind numbingly rhetoric, and even the title of the book feels cliched — 21 lessons for the 21st century. if your politics is quite evolved and up-to-date, the book may not do much for you. but it did give my half-baked politics, some nice perspective; my politics is far from evolved.

say, he talks about the tidal wave of disillusionment that has touched the liberal elite in a sad Trump world. Harrari says ‘’this is not the first time the liberal story has faced a crisis of confidence. the first era of liberalism ended with WW-I, with imperial powers cutting short the global march of progress. when Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Sarajevo was murdered, it looked as if all the great powers believed more in imperialism, but liberalism survived the Ferdinand moment. it was short lived though, as Hitler came on the scene and made fascism look cool in the 1930s40s. next when 50s70s saw Che revolutionizing minds everywhere, it seemed communism was the true solution, and that liberalism was on it last legs. but then, it was communism that collapsed first, as everyone liked the supermarkets better! so, it seemed like liberalism was the most dynamic and the most solid story through times, and it soon adopted best ideas and practices from others. say, it learnt from communism to expand the circle of empathy, and value the concept of equality alongside liberty (communist welfare programs).’’

‘’as liberalism mostly catered to the middle classes and upper there, western liberals had a hard time applying their universal values to the non-Westerns. say, even when the Dutch finally got out of Nazi occupation, they were still adamant about colonizing Indonesia. liberalism didn’t become everyone’s favorite, many nationalist movements throughout the world felt like placing their hopes on Moscow or Beijing, rather than champions of liberty from the West! Harrari says that over time, liberalism survived it all — the Ferdinand moment, Hitler moment, Che moment— but now it cannot easily survive the Trump moment, which is far more nihilstic. bcoz all the other movements of the twentieth century offered a vision for the entire human species—global domination, revolution, liberation— Trump offers nothing global for all! he just says Nammude America. and he still mostly likes the liberal package — democracy, free markets, human rights, social responsibility — except all the fine ideas stop at the border. just like the Brexiters who still like all the liberal values, but only for natives of Nammude Britain. Like Xi Jinping who advocates Nammude China and still adores liberalism: their domestic politics is not so liberalized, but their international cooperative-politics is quite Obama-like-liberal. I was watching some Anthony Bourdain the other day, i didn’t even know that Oman is still a Sultanate, and not yet a liberal democracy. but the people seem contented, and in no rush to fuel a democratic government like the rest of the progressive world, and it felt like Nammude Oman there too’’.

all that made me think of how growing up across small-towns-Kerala in the era of Doordarshan, the middle-middle class aspiration extended only up to that of the nation’s cool and confident —be it Northies or Tamils or Bangaloreans or Goans. Hindi was my second language in school, used to write lengthy literary essays. but bcoz I never conversed in Hindi back then, haven’t retained anything from it at all! now when a colleague at work or someone at the desi grocery shop here tries to engage with me in Hindi, i speak in English back. my Tamil is relatively better than my Hindi. I still listen to both Hindi and Tamil music though, and care about following the lyrical meanings. but the aspirations of that Doordarshan watcher have changed, it’s less of, caring for validation from the Hindi speakers and the Tamil speakers surely. it seems more of, staying local and caring for validation from Nammude Boston at random— Mandarin speakers and Spanish speakers maybe or, going the other kind of local and caring for validation from Nammude Keralam at random— Vaikkom dialect speakers and Kasargod dialect speakers maybe!

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libertariantaoist · 7 years

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As the “Russia-gate” farce continues to dominate the American “news” media, and President Trump’s foreign policy veers off in a direction many of his supporters find baffling, one wonders: what the heck happened? I thought Trump was supposed to be “Putin’s puppet,” as Hillary Clinton and her journalistic camarilla would have it. The Russian president, in his extended interview with filmmaker Oliver Stone, has an explanation:

“Stone: Donald Trump won. This is your fourth president, am I right? Clinton, Mr. Bush, Mr. Obama, and now your fourth one.

“Putin: Yes, that’s true.

“Stone: What changes?

“Putin: Well, almost nothing.”

Stone is surprised by this answer, and Putin elaborates:

“Well, life makes some changes for you. But on the whole, everywhere, especially in the United States, the bureaucracy is very strong. And bureaucracy is the one that rules the world.”

This is a reiteration of something the Russian president said earlier in the context of Stone’s questions about the US election. Stone asks what he thinks of the various candidates: Trump’s name doesn’t come up, but Stone does ask about Bernie Sanders. Putin replies:

“It’s not up to us to say. It’s not whether we are going to like it or not. All I can say is as follows … the force of the United States bureaucracy is very great. It’s immense. And there are many facts not visible about the candidates until they become president. And the moment one gets to the real work, he or she feels the burden.”

So it doesn’t matter who wins the presidential election, and inhabits the White House, because the national security bureaucracy is forever, and their power is – almost – unchallengable. And so, given this, Putin’s answer to Stone’s somewhat tongue-in-cheek question, “Why did you hack the election?”, is anti-climactic. The answer is: why would they bother? Putin dismisses the question as “a very silly statement,” and then goes on to wonder why Western journalists find the prospect of getting along with Russia so problematic.

Trump and his campaign, says Putin, “understood where their voters were located” – a reference, I believe, to the surprising results in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. Clinton’s supporters “should have drawn conclusions from what they did, from how they did their jobs, they shouldn’t have tried to shift the blame on to something outside.” This is what the more perceptive progressives are saying – but then again I suppose that they, too, are “Putin’s puppets.”

This section of the interviews occurred in February, and so it’s interesting how Putin predicted what would happen to the Trump presidency and the conduct of his foreign policy:

“And I think that Obama’s outgoing team has created a minefield for the incoming president and for his team. They have created an environment which makes it difficult for the new president to make good on the promises he gave to the people.”

To say the least.

There is much more in this series of interviews, including some real news that has been ignored by the “mainstream” media, including

Putin tells Stone that the Ukraine snipers who shot at both the government forces and the anti-government crowds in Kiev – an event that signaled the end of the Yanukovych regime – were trained and financed in the West: “[W]e have information available to us that armed groups were trained in the Western parts of Ukraine itself, in Poland, and in a number of other places.”

Putin has evidence of Turkish support for ISIS: “During the G20 summit, when the journalists left the room, I took out photos … and from my place where I was sitting I showed those photos [of ISIS oil being transported to Turkey] to everyone. I showed it to my counterparts. I showed them the route I mentioned earlier. And we have shown these photos to our American counterparts…. Everyone knew about everything. So trying to open a door which is already open is simply senseless. It’s something that is absolutely evident. So it’s not about one single truck – there are thousands of trucks going through that route. It looks as if it were a living pipeline.”

At one point, Putin takes out his cell phone and shows Stone a video of a Russian attack on ISIS forces, remarking “By the way, they were coming from the Turkish side of the border.”

Putin reveals how US aid reaches jihadists: “According to the data we received, employees of the United States in Azerbaijan contacted militants from the Caucasus.” In a letter from the CIA to their Russian counterparts, the Americans reiterated their alleged right to funnel aid to their clients, and the missive “even named the employee of the US Special Services who worked in the US embassy in Baku.”

And then there’s one specific instance in which the news is anticipated: Stone brings up the Snowden revelation that the Americans have planted malware in Japanese infrastructure capable of shutting that country down, and he speculates that Washington has surely targeted Russia in the same way. Which brings to mind a recent Washington Post story reporting that this is indeed the case.

There’s a lot more in these interviews than I have space to write about: my favorites are the instances in which Stone’s leftism comes up against Putin’s paleoconservatism. At several points the issue of “anti-Americanism” comes up, and the debate between the two is illuminating in that it reveals the Russian leader’s instinctual pro-Americanism, despite his objections to the policies of our government. I had to laugh when Putin asked Stone: “Are you a communist?” Stone denies it: “I’m a capitalist!”

There is also a lot of humor here: Stone insists on showing Putin a scene from “Dr. Strangelove,” the part where the mad scientist rides a nuke, laughing maniacally. The sardonic expression on Putin’s face speaks volumes. Early on, Stone asks “What is the US [foreign] policy? What is its strategy in the world as a whole?” To which Putin replies: “Certainly, I am going to reply to this question very candidly, in great detail – but only once I retire.” In speaking about Washington’s unilateral abrogation of the ABM Treaty, Stone remarks:

“You know, the American Indians made treaties with the US government and they were the first to experience the treachery of the US government. You’re not the first.”

To which Putin replies: “We wouldn’t like to be the last.” And he laughs.

Putin’s sense of humor is a bit dark, and things get darker still as he predicts what the consequences for Stone will be when “The Putin Interviews” is released:

“You’ve never been beaten before in your life?,” says Putin. “Oh yes, many times,” says Stone. I think Putin was talking about being physically beaten, but, anyway, the Russian leader goes on to say: “Then it’s not going to be anything new, because you’re going to suffer for what you’re about to do.” “No, I know,” says Stone, “but it’s worth it. It’s worth it to try to bring some more peace and consciousness to the world.”

Stone has been pilloried in the US media, by all usual suspects, but what’s very telling is that none of his critics delve into the content of the interviews: they simply accuse Stone of being a “useful idiot,” a phrase from the lexicon of the cold war that’s being revived by the liberals who used to be labeled as such.

And yet when you get down in the weeds, as I have tried to do in this series, one begins to realize the enormity of the hoax that’s been perpetrated on the American people. Putin is routinely described in our media as the principal enemy of the United States: our military brass has been pushing this line, for budgetary reasons, and the Clinton wing of the Democratic party has been pushing it for political reasons. And yet the lasting impression left by “The Putin Interviews” is of a man who greatly admires the United States, and sees the vast potential of détente between Moscow and Washington, a potential he would like very much to bring to realization.

What we have witnessed in the past few months, however, is that this potential benefit to both countries is being denied by some very powerful forces. The entire “Deep State” apparatus, which Putin is very much aware of, is implacably opposed to peaceful cooperation, and will do anything to stop it. But why?

There are many factors, including money – the military-industrial complex is dependent on hostility between the US and Russia, as are our parasitic “allies’ in Europe – as well as cultural issues. Russia is essentially a conservative society, and our “progressive” elites hate it for that reason. Which brings us to the real reason for the Russophobia that infects the American political class, and that is Putin’s commitment to the concept of national sovereignty.

Nationalism in all its forms is bitterly opposed by our elites, and this is what sets them against not only Putin but also against President Trump. Their allegiance isn’t to the United States as a separate entity, but to the “Free World,” whatever that may be. And their foreign allies are even more explicit about their radical internationalism, bitterly clinging to transnational institutions such as the European Union even as populist movements upend them.

This is the central issue confronting the parties and politicians of all countries, the conflict that separates the elites from the peoples they would like to rule: it is globalism versus national sovereignty. And this is not just a foreign policy question. It is a line of demarcation that puts the parties of all countries on one side of the barricades or the other.

In his famous essay, “The End of History,” neoconservative theorist Francis Fukuyama outlined the globalist project, which he saw as the inevitable outcome of human experience: a “universal homogenous State” that would extend its power across every civilized country and beyond. But of course nothing is inevitable, at least in that sense and on that scale, a fact the elites who hold this vision recognize all too well. So they are working day and night to make it a reality, moving their armies and their agents into this country and that country, encircling their enemies, and waiting for the moment to strike. And Putin, the ideologue of national sovereignty, is rightly perceived as their implacable enemy, the chief obstacle to the globalist project.

That’s why they hate him. It has nothing to do with the annexation of Crimea, or the alleged “authoritarianism” of a country that now has a multi-party system a few short decades after coming out of real totalitarianism. Even if Russia were a Jeffersonian republic, and Putin the second coming of Gandhi, still they would demonize him and his country for this very reason.

As to who will win this struggle between globalism and national particularism, I would not venture a guess. What I will do, however, is to remind my readers that if ever this worldwide “homogenous State” comes into being, there will be nowhere to go, nowhere to hide, no way to escape its power.

Editorial note: This is the third and last part of a three-part series on Oliver Stone’s “The Putin Interviews.” The first part is here, and the second part is here. You can get the book version – which contains some material not included in the film – here.

#justin raimondo #antiwar.com #the putin interviews

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vanimy · 7 years

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So it’s about time I talked about the French elections, right?

So the first round of the French Presidential elections takes place this Sunday. And I’m kinda anxious because the latest polls indicate that 4 of these people can qualify for the second round and 2 of these people are Evil Incarnated and could basically be called French Trumps. So not really enthusiastic about it.

But I let John Oliver explain this :

youtube

This vid almost made me die of laughter I swear. I wish I could say some of these things were made up, but nope, there’s a candidate who’s a walking French cliché, one who confuses Chewbacca with a weird bear and wants to colonize Mars, another who likes to appear in holograms, yet another who’s married to his former teacher and started dating her when he was still in high school and a minor, one who’s so imbedded in corruption he’s become a bad running joke and of course the One Who Shall Not Be Named and oozes hatred at every turn. But this vid made it all funny and that’s.... actually not so much of a feat now I think about it because I never noticed how much material there was for a good laugh. And John Oliver managed to make it funy without even having to mention two candidates who run.... not to be elected because they don’t believe in politics and want one big Communist Revolution instead. I kid you not.

The way I see it about the 4 main candidates who have an actual chance of winning :

-Marine Le Pen AKA the Original French Trump : she’s disgusting and vile and will probably manage to qualify for the second round. And that prospect takes me back 15 years earlier when her father (the vile old man shown in the video) managed to qualify for the second round (mainly because the main candidate on the left made a very bad campaign so the votes were divided between a lot of small left parties) and everyone was so shocked and disgusted people demonstrated in the streets between the two rounds. So my younger self was equally disgusted by the results and proud by the kneejerk reaction of everyone around me. And the guy running against him ended up getting 82% of the votes in the second round (I kid you not, could’ve been a sovietic score! :P) even though he was the President in Office and everyone hated him back then (that was before Sarkozy was elected obviously).

There will be none of that this year if she qualifies for the second round. People are no longer ashamed to be racist assholes and the media really helped build a good image of this racist party.

-François Fillon (the suit guy) AKA The New Trump lookalike : disgusting and vile and one of the main running jokes of this campaign. Just when you think he can’t lie more he manages some. Was Sarkozy’s Prime Minister back then. Has become even more disgusting since then with a core of Catholic integrists around him who want to ban abortion and haven’t gotten over the 2012 Act that legalized gay marriage. Oh and these nice people called the Justice Minister who helped make this Act pass and who happened to be a Black woman... a monkey. I wish I were kidding. This was... I have no words. I didn’t agree with everything this Minister did but I had actual tears of pride in my eyes when she put up with all this with more dignity than I ever saw.

What disgusts me the most is the fact that Fillon managed to remain a candidate at all. John Olived forgot to mention that judges are investigating on him as we speak, that he was indicted with many offenses linked to corruption. Marine Le Pen too now I mention it, she even refused to go to the judge’s office even though she was summoned. Ugh.

My worst nightmare obviously is getting a Le Pen-Fillon second round. I just couldn’t vote for Fillon even against Le Pen. I would stay at home and put my head into the oven.

-Emmanuel Macron AKA the guy who slept with his teacher back in high school AKA an empty shell AKA the younger and male version of Hillary Clinton. He goes to the left then the right, tries to content everybody. Was responsible for Hollande’s (President in Office) disastrous economic politics. Manages to make everyone think he’s CHANGE incarnated when the guy was in power for the last 5 years. Is the reporters’ favorite.

I will vote for him only if I have to, meaning if he’s up against Fillon or Le Pen in the second round.

-Jean-Luc Mélenchon AKA the Hologram guy AKA the French Bernie Sanders. Has a program, one that was elaborated in part thanks to thousands of contributions from voters on the Internet. Is wrongly accused of being anti EU. He’s not anti EU, he wants out of THIS EU, he wants to negotiate new treaties and for that to happen, he threatens to get out if he can’t negotiate anything better. The EU is going downhill anyway. I don’t want to leave the EU, I think it’s a wonderful thing but the way it’s going, especially after the Brexit (not that I’m particularly sad the UK left, were they ever IN the EU? but it made leaving possible), the EU is going to die if it can’t change.

Wants institutional change through a new Republic that gives more power to the people. His program is also really based on ecology. One of the rare well-educated politicians running for the election.

Negative traits? He has a temper, is often accused of being a Chavez supporter (at least he used to be before it went donwhill in Venezuela). Is a little too much on the populist side for my taste sometimes.

My vote will go to him, definitely, in spite of some of his negative traits. Everyone has been discarding him from the get go yet he’s been steadily going up in the polls for two months now and is now a serious contender.

We’ll see next Sunday. Fingers crossed.

#real life #French politics #France #elections #french elections #politics

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lodelss · 5 years

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Amos Barshad | An excerpt adapted from No One Man Should Have All That Power: How Rasputins Manipulate the World | Harry N. Abrams | 17 minutes (4,490 words)

In the lobby of a heavy-stone building in central Moscow, I’m greeted by a friendly young woman in a pantsuit who, she explains, is working “in the field of geopolitics.” She takes me to the security desk, where my passport is carefully, minutely inspected before I’m granted access. As we head upstairs the woman slowly whispers a joke: “This is what will save us from the terrorists.”

We walk down a long, high hallway that looks or bare or unfinished or forgotten, like maybe someone was planning on shutting down this wing of the office but never got around to it. There are linoleum floors, cracking and peeling, and bits of mismatched tile in the style of sixties Americana. Rank-and-file office clerks shuffle through, and no one pays attention to a faint buzzing emanating from somewhere near.

We stop in front of a heavy wooden door. Inside is Aleksandr Dugin.

The man is an ideologue with a convoluted, bizarre, unsettling worldview. He believes the world is divided into two spheres of influence — sea powers, which he calls Eternal Carthage, and land powers, which he calls Eternal Rome. He believes it has always been so. Today, those spheres are represented by America, the Carthage, and Russia, the Rome. He believes that Carthage and Rome are locked in a forever war that will only end with the destruction of one or the other.

In Western media, he’s become a dark character worthy of obsession. He quotes and upholds long-forgotten scholars with anti-Semitic leanings like Julius Evola, who critiqued Mussolini’s Fascism for being too soft. (Evola is a deep-cut favorite of Steve Bannon’s as well.) He’s been linked with ultra-right movements internationally, from supporters of Marine Le Pen in France to supporters of Viktor Orbán in Hungary. Some read his writings hoping to suss out some linchpin of Russian domestic and foreign policy.

As the Russian American journalist Masha Gessen wrote in The Future Is History, her celebrated 2017 examination of modern Russia, “Dugin enjoyed a period of international fame of sorts as a Putin whisperer — some believed he was the mastermind behind Putin’s wars.” Others called him “Putin’s brain,” or even “Putin’s Rasputin.”

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He sits at a plain desk, thick texts piled up in the bookcases behind him. His hair is brown and streaked with gray and parted floppily down the middle. He wears a dark-blue suit, no tie, and a lightly pinstriped shirt. There is a mole just to the left of his nose. His lips are buried in a big, bushy gray beard that, as Bloomberg once happily noted, “gives him a passing resemblance to the Siberian mystic who bewitched the last Tsar’s family.”

As the manifesto from one of the many political organizations he’d founded over the years once put it, Dugin’s worldview is “built on the total and radical negation of the individual and his centrality.” As one of his young followers once said, “Obedience and love for one’s leaders are traits of the Russian people.” And as Dugin himself once said, “There is nothing universal about universal human rights.”

From the second I walk in the door, he is locked and ready to engage. “Western Christianity and Western modernity and Western global elites try to oppose artificial intellect over the natural human liberty — that is a kind of a doom of the West that we rejected always.” He speaks in entrancingly accented, rapid English full of strange, unlikely phrasings rooted equally in the language of academia and his own far-flung and oblique obsessions — the occult, black magic, the hidden forces of history. He’s also really hung up on the West’s promotion of artificial intelligence. (Looking back now, I like to imagine that he was trying to tell me, if I’d only listened, that Skynet — the evil sentient world-destroying computer network from the Terminator series — was real.) If I let him, he’ll go on all day.

But I’m not here to get the stump speech, the full spiel. I want to know: How has he spread his message? How has he infected President Vladimir Putin — and Russia at large — with this worldview?

Aleksandr Dugin believes his influence is of a divine kind. And so he happily accepts the accusation of influence.

When I first ask him the question on influence he cuts me off, brusquely. I worry at first he’s going to end this conversation prematurely. Instead, he immediately monologues on the topic; it turns out he was cutting me off so that he could get to his turn to speak faster. “I could recognize that I am responsible for imposing my world vision over others,” he tells me. “And what excuse do I have for that? My excuse precisely exists in my own philosophy. I am not creator of the thought. It is a kind of angelic or demonic dialect that I’m involved in. I am but transmitter of some objective knowledge that exists outside of myself — beyond myself.”

The arc of Dugin’s life has been unlikely. In the eighties, he was an obscure, mild anti-Soviet dissident. In 1983, USSR authorities noted the trifling incident of Dugin playing the guitar at a party and singing what were, in his own words, “mystical anti-Communist songs.” He was deemed a real threat by no one. But in the nineties, after the fall of the USSR, he became a national figure.

His writings began to gain currency, primarily his major work, The Foundations of Geopolitics, which became particularly popular with military elites. In 1993, he hosted the television program The Mysticism of the Third Reich, during which, as Gessen writes, he “hinted at a Western conspiracy to conceal the true nature of Hitler’s power.”

In The Future Is History, Gessen charts the rest of Dugin’s rise. How Moscow State University’s sociology department brought Dugin on board, implicitly legitimizing his theories with an elite institution’s stamp of approval. How every one of Russia’s national and international crises seemed to bolster him further.

Dugin believes his influence is of a divine kind. And so he happily accepts the accusation of influence.

In the summer of 2008, Russia invaded neighboring Georgia. Ostensibly, they were supporting South Ossetia and Abkhazia, two Russian-leaning Georgian enclaves with long-held dreams of independence. Effectively, Russia had invaded a sovereign state. For years, government officials had been issuing Russian passports to Abkhazians and South Ossetians; now Russian forces had advanced deep into Georgian territory. This was the real deal, the Dugin-encouraged expansionist destiny. Russia once again had its guns cocked.

Dugin shined. Photos of him in South Ossetia circled. He stood in front of a tank, an AK-47 in his hands. As Gessen writes, that summer also “marked the first time he had seen one of his slogans catch on and go entirely mainstream, repeated on television and reproduced on bumper stickers. The slogan was Tanks to Tbilisi,” the Georgian capital. “Dugin had written ‘those who do not support the slogan are not Russians. Tanks to Tbilisi should be written on every Russian’s forehead.’”

From 2011 to 2013, the “snow revolution” — a series of peaceful protests against Russian election fraud — burbled in Moscow. The Russian government’s position was that the activists were paid agitators being supported by the US State Department. (As Putin declared in the early stages of the protests, “We are all grownups here. We all understand the organisers are acting according to a well-known scenario and in their own mercenary political interests.”) In the winter of 2013, Dugin spoke at a massive government-organized counter-protest in front of a crowd of tens of thousands.

“Dear Russian people! The global American empire strives to bring all countries of the world under its control,” he bellowed. “To resist this most serious threat, we must be united and mobilized! We must remember that we are Russian! That for thousands of years we protected our freedom and independence. We have spilled seas of blood, our own and other peoples, to make Russia great. And Russia will be great! Otherwise it will not exist at all. Russia is everything! All else is nothing!”

Internally, Putin answered the snow revolution with a crackdown. Externally, he answered with a show of force.

In 2014, again ostensibly answering the call of popular will, so-called “little green men” — Russian soldiers with no identifying insignias — took over the Crimean peninsula in the name of the Russian government. Crimea was a quasi-independent entity of Ukraine with a prominent ethnically Russian population. In the eyes of the international community, it was a brazenly illegal act. Once again, Russia was practicing expansionism.

Dugin was overjoyed. He had been pushing for a Crimean takeover since the nineties. He believed that it was just the beginning. Russia should go further and co-opt Eastern Ukraine (the traditionally Russian-speaking half of the country) as well. But for now, it augured great things. He saw it as a bolstering of the Russian sphere of influence. Eternal Rome was again strengthening itself.

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During one major televised interview, Putin explained the Crimean invasion by saying “a Russian person — or to speak more broadly, a person of the Russian World — thinks about the fact that man has a moral purpose. These are the deep roots of our patriotism. This is where mass heroism comes from in war.”

Now even Dugin’s literal phrasings were being echoed back to him. As Gessen writes, “The phrase ‘Russian World’ — the vision of a civilization led by Russia — was Dugin’s.” This was, effectively, the real-life execution of Dugin’s worldview.

Dugin did not talk to Gessen for her book. Possibly, he was familiar with Gessen’s place as an outspoken Putin critic and decided to stay away. I can only assume that Dugin agreed to an interview with me because he’d never heard of me before. I assume that he felt comfortable he would dominate the interaction.

“I believe in ideas that could well exist without man,” Dugin tells me. “Angels are ideas without bodies. I’m a believer. I believe in angels. I believe in God. I believe in Revelation. I’m Christian Orthodox. And for me, the existence of angels, as well as the existence of ideas, is the fact of experience — not only narrative.”

As Dugin sees it, he has stayed put, espousing these ideas that were given to him by the Lord. It’s the world that has moved around him. Sometimes it’s drawn to him. Sometimes it’s repulsed. “I put myself in the center of all the society of history. It’s not egocentric. It’s completely opposed to egocentrism. I put myself in the center of the world by precisely liberating myself from the individual. It is some other in myself that is the center.”

Are you following? He is at the center because his truth is the true truth. But he is also opposite the mainstream. He stands, alone, against a great force. “Mass media, education, politics, social relations, class, economy — that is society,” he says. “It is mechanicalized. A kind of social mechanics.”

Dugin, however, is part of something else — the “revolutionary elite that is coming to replace the elite.” He is counter-elite. And not only in Russia, but “on a global scale — I awaken these peoples. I’m awakening these collective consciousnesses. Using the term of Carl Gustav Jung, I transform these peoples from the sleeping mode to the waking mode. From the drunken mode to the sober mode.”

(He really does say the whole name: “Carl Gustav Jung.” In the course of our conversation, he also name-checks Vilfredo Pareto, Louis Dumont, Hegel, Heidegger, and Charles Krauthammer, almost always quoting them directly, almost always prefacing said quote with some variation of the phrase “In the words of . . .”)

He goes on: “That is the operation that I am leading. My influence is very special. I would say, a revolutionary kind. That is why I am called, by some American figures, the most dangerous man in the world. I would gladly accept that as labeled. I hope that it is true.”

His power and influence, he says, are of a slippery kind. “We could not measure for example, who is more popular, Michael Jackson or myself,” he says, chuckling softly.

I begin to believe that if I stay here long enough, he’ll keep inventing ways to emphatically gesticulate forever.

Because Michael Jackson, or pop music as a whole, exists in the mainstream — inside the traditional flow of information. And despite his history of television appearances, Dugin claims that “the traditional ways to promote ideas are completely closed” to him “and were closed from the very beginning.” Therefore, “in order to exercise, to fulfill this influence, I am obliged to seek, to search new ways. So I’m a kind of a, mmmm, metaphysical hacker. I try to find the backdoors of the program of globalization in order to make it explode.” His work, he says proudly, is a “a kind of terrorism.”

And despite this self-perceived singular place in the center of history, he says, “I’m not lonely Russian stranger. I am the most Russian man that we could imagine. I am Russia spirit. I am Russia!”

In conversation, as he makes his points, Dugin’s hands move constantly. Not just one or two swipes; it’s a wild, unceasing symphony of gestures. He swings an open palm, slams fingertips straight down on the tabletop, points an index finger in the air and his other hand’s middle finger straight down. The fingers and palms move in synchronicity and also alone, every single one on a mission. He interlocks and breaks apart and throws out his hands and brings them back together. Some of the moves he repeats. Some come just once. I begin to believe that if I stay here long enough, he’ll keep inventing ways to emphatically gesticulate forever.

His is a kind of intimate, anti-charisma. I realize that it’s the surety of his purpose that compels. As in so many other situations, pure, unadulterated bluster is carrying the day for Dugin.

“People like myself reflect the liberty of mankind. Man is an entity that always can choose. It can say yes to globalization and to this artificial intelligence, to the so-called progress, to the individualization — yes to the global agenda. But the man can say, ‘No, no! It’s not me!’ And that is the salvation of mankind. We need to liberate everybody. We need a global revolution. And I am conscious that I am fulfilling this role.”

I ask Dugin about a man he’s friendly with, to whom he’s often been compared: Steve Bannon. Is it correct? Are they some kind of analogs?

“As long as I understand Bannon, I think that the comparison could be legitimate,” he says. “Bannon suggested to Trump how to find the backdoor in the system. Absolutely, to be a kind of revolutionary — not from the right or the left, but a revolutionary against this world.” But “Bannon is a PR specialist dealing in ideology. I am a philosopher, trying to transmit through art, special art, my historical mission in front of Russian people.

“Maybe the difference exists precisely in the different nature of our societies. American society is much more based on public relations. Pragmatism. If something works, it is already accepted. Technical efficacy is much more appreciated than, for example, ideological coherence or truthfulness. In the political public relations, the propaganda is a means to trick people. I am not using ideology. I am used by ideology.”

Dugin is skeptical that Bannon ever had the mandate to be a true, pure ideologue. He recalls Trump once, way back on the campaign trail, skewering Bannon for reading too much. “I think that you cannot read too much. If you understand the weight of ideas, this accusation is a proof of some limited mind.”

Arguing his point, Dugin falls into a minor reverie. “So many beautiful texts!” he says. “So many profound authors and philosophers . . . so many languages! The real richness, the real treasury of human wisdom amassed is infinite. The only blame should be, you are reading not enough. If you always, reading, reading, reading, it’s nothing at all. Everybody of us should read more. More and more! If you think you read enough, you’re wrong! You don’t read nothing!” Before his fall from relevance, Bannon and Dugin did have interesting parallels. Like Bannon’s now-squandered power, Dugin’s lies in his ability to portray all world events as part of a plot he’s already seen. The sheer grandiosity of his speech is calculated to overwhelm. I know it all, he insists again and again, until the listener either accepts him as ridiculous or sublime.

But Bannon never had Dugin’s air of historicity. Intentionally or otherwise, Dugin has been able to cloak himself in dark mystery. Perhaps Dugin would prefer an example closer to home, then — Grigori Rasputin?

He’s not offended. Not in the slightest. Soberly, he analyzes the pairing.

“So. The figure of Rasputin is misunderstood. He had influence over our tsar, personal influence. He was against the modernization and Westernization. He was in favor of Russian people instead of the corrupted Russian elite.” So far, more than a few points of overlap between Aleksandr and Grigori. Certainly, Dugin is Rasputinesque.

But! “Rasputin wasn’t philosopher. He didn’t conceptualize anything. He’s a kind of hypnotizer, a kind of a trickster, something like that. So the comparison is a little bit limited. He built his influence on the personal charm and on his individual influence on the tsar. That was a very special case. This was person-to-person, without some ideology. Some philosophy.”

Who, then, is a closer peer or antecedent? For an answer, Dugin has to go beyond contemporary politics, beyond Russian history — and into the realm of the fantastic. “I compare myself much more to Merlin.” The great wizard Merlin, the mythical one, the son of an incubus. King Arthur’s advisor. “The image of the intellectual that is engaged in supra-human contemplation, in the secrets, that tries to clear the way for the secular ruler to create the great empire. “Merlin. The founder of King Arthur’s empire. That is my archetype, I would say.”

I ask Dugin, “What comes next?”

“Some of the ideas that I defended from the ages — they have won. They are accepted by the government and realized in the Eurasian union and Russian foreign policy and military strategy. The anti-modern, anti-Western, anti-liberal shift of Russian politics and ideology has been realized.”

But “the other half is not yet fulfilled. That is the problem. The second part of my ideas, of my projects, of my visions of the Russian future is still waiting. It is suspended, I would say. It waits it’s own time.”

The problem, says Dugin, is that Putin has not institutionalized the bits of Dugin that he’s borrowed. The Dugin worldview has not reached the point of “irreversibility.” Here, Dugin is critical of Putin: “He pretend to be the ruler, pragmatic and not controlled by nothing, including ideology. He pretend to be the absolute sovereign instead of being the sovereign fighting for the mission.

“It is a kind of simulacrum,” he says. “It is a kind of imitation. It seems more and more that it is a kind of very dirty play. A game they try to hijack. The real tradition, the real conservatism — they try to use that as tools and means for their rule.”

Where does the Rasputin end and the Rasputin’s subject begin?

He’s careful not to point fingers too directly. This is modern Russia, after all. “Maybe not Putin himself,” he says, “but the people around Putin.”

Fundamentally, Dugin’s disappointment is that Putin did not go far enough. That he did not push past Crimea and into Ukraine with the Russian Army. That he is not creating a “Russian world” beyond the borders of modern Russia — that he’s not birthing a new Russian empire. In Gessen’s analysis, this revealed the true nature of Dugin’s influence. Putin wasn’t being manipulated by Dugin’s ideology; Putin was borrowing it, for his own ends.

So was Dugin influential? Or was he a stooge? Again, that old question: Where does the Rasputin end and the Rasputin’s subject begin? Where do Putin’s own volitions end and where do Dugin’s prophecies begin?

One neutral observer might observe that Dugin’s dark influence was great once, but has waned now. Yet another might observe that it was always transactional.

But Dugin doesn’t have to control Putin, only and directly, to have influence on the culture. Igor Vinogradov, the editor of the magazine Kontinent, once said of Dugin and his disciples, “They are undertaking a noisy galvanization of a reactionary utopia that failed long ago — for all their ineptitude, they are very dangerous. After all, the temptation of religious fundamentalism . . . is attractive to many desperate people who have lost their way in this chaos.” That was in 1992. Since, Dugin has published endlessly and spread his missives incessantly. Both in English and in Russian, the Internet is rife with his manifestos.

Andreas Umlaund is a Ukrainian political scientist who has studied Dugin at length. Perhaps inevitably, Umlaund’s research into Dugin made Umlaund a target. As he explained to me in an interview from his home in Ukraine, Dugin’s minions write articles that allege that he is “an anti-Russian agent paid by the [US] State Department” and that he’s been “kicked out of universities for [sexual] harassment.” According to these reports, Umlaund says, “German officials were looking for me because I was involved in child pornography. Allegedly, I’m a pedophile!”

Umlaund’s greatest sin, in Dugin’s supporters eyes, was exposing Dugin’s explicit Nazi leanings. “I digged out these old quotes where he praises the SS and Reinhard Heydrich, the original SS officer responsible for the organization of the Holocaust. And they didn’t like that, because by that time Dugin had already become part of the Russian establishment. And these old quotes, from when he was still a lunatic fringe actor, were an embarrassment.”

I ask Umlaund what it’s like, being targeted as the number one nemesis of a man like Dugin. With historically informed equanimity, he shrugs it off. “This is not an unusual campaign,” he says. “Also in Soviet times, they were using pedophilia allegations against dissidents and of political enemies. It’s from the KGB playbook.”

Umlaund has continued his work, writing that the explosion of Dugin content, which begins around 2001, “has become difficult to follow. The number of Dugin’s appearances in the press, television, radio, World Wide Web, and various academic and political conferences has multiplied.” Dugin’s aim, Umlaund argues, is to “radically transform basic criteria of what constitutes science, what scholarly research is about, and to permit bodies of thought such as occultism, mysticism, esotericism, conspirology, etc. into higher education and scholarship that would bring down the borders between science and fiction.”

There’s a classic Simpsons episode that I love, “Homer vs. Lisa and the 8th Commandment.” It’s from 1990, the early golden era of the show. It starts off with Homer spotting Flanders fussily rejecting a cable guy’s illegal, tantalizing offer: fifty dollars for bootleg cable. Sensibly, immediately, Homer drags the cable guy over to his own home and readily accepts. But as the man is finishing up his installation, Homer has a twinge of morality.

“So . . . this is OK, isn’t it?” he asks. “I mean everybody does it, right?” Coolly, the cable man hands him a pamphlet full of justifications for his actions (“Fact: Cable companies are big faceless corporations”). The evocative title: “So You’ve Decided to Steal Cable.”

It’s a wild oversimplification, to be sure, but the danger of someone like Dugin (and Bannon before him) is wrapped up in that pamphlet. You can make someone hate. But it’s easier to find someone who already hates, and to give them justification — historical, epic justification — for their hate. People naturally drift toward doing bad things. But they’d also love a pamphlet explaining why it’s all OK.

As Bloomberg has pointed out, in 2014, Dugin lost his place at the Moscow State University “after activists accused him of encouraging genocide. Thousands of people signed a petition calling for his removal after a rant in support of separatists in Ukraine in which he said, ‘kill, kill, kill.’” But he no longer needed an institution like Moscow State to have influence — he’d already become a prominent enough member of the establishment on his own.

During his time in the center of Russian politics, while the vagaries of the real world turned, Dugin tended to the ur-mission. Now, perhaps, he’s back on the outs of his country’s mainstream political thought. But his words have left his mouth and have been received. And he will continue talking and talking because he is playing a long, long game. “Some things are being realized that I have foreseen and foretold thirty years ago,” he tells me. “Now I am foretelling and foreseeing what should come in the future.”

As Dugin sees it, “The most highest point of American influence as universal power is behind us. Because America tries to go beyond the normal and the natural borders and tries to influence Middle East, Africa, Eurasia — and fails everywhere. America export chaos, bloody chaos. Everywhere America is, there is corpses. They have turned into a nihilistic force. The real greatness of America is not in continuation of this exporting of this bloody chaos.”

Dugin suggests that America ask itself some hard questions. Like “What is victory? What is glory? What is real highest position in history?”

Dugin’s vision is clear: America for Americans, Russia for Russians. And while Russia builds itself back up, it stays a closed society. “Being weak, we should stay closed from any influence,” he says. “From the West, from the East, from China or Islam or Europe or America or Africa, we should stay closed” — he bangs a fist on the table — “in order to return to our force.”

Through an open window, gray daylight pours in. Behind us, two women walk back and forth, mugs of coffee in hand, consulting texts and each other. They, presumably, are in the “field of geopolitics” as well. Here, in this room, in this massive building, Dugin quietly plots Russia’s revival and sends out his warnings to Russia’s enemies. The grand project rolls on.

America, declares Dugin, must follow the way of Trump into cynical and callow isolationism and avoid its once-upon-a-time fate as a shining beacon on a hill. Otherwise, Carthage and Rome will do battle. “When the United States tries to be unique, to be universal, a norm for all humanity — that creates the basis for inevitable conflict,” Dugin says. “Then the final war is inevitable.”

* * *

Amos Barshad was raised in Israel, the Netherlands, and Massachusetts. He’s a former staff writer at The FADER and Grantland and has written for The New Yorker, the New York Times, and Arkansas Times. This is his first book.

Longreads Editor: Dana Snitzky

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thisdaynews · 5 years

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'Not particularly radical': Sanders previews major socialism address in POLITICO interview

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'Not particularly radical': Sanders previews major socialism address in POLITICO interview

“We have made real progress in making millions of Americans understand what socialism is about,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders. | Scott Olson/Getty Images

2020 elections

In a POLITICO interview, the 2020 hopeful previews a major speech Wednesday defending democratic socialism.

Bernie Sanders wants to change Americans’ minds about socialism.

The Vermont senator is set to deliver a full-throated defense Wednesday of democratic socialism — a label that has helped inspire a movement to elect him president while at the same time raising persistent doubts about his electability. In an interview with POLITICO, Sanders said his goal for his speech at George Washington University is to explain “what democratic socialism means to me, and in fact what democratic socialism means to me is a continuation of what Franklin Delano Roosevelt talked about.”

Story Continued Below

Sanders will argue that it’s time to complete the “unfinished business” of the New Deal and ensure economic rights for Americans. Those include, he said, the right to a decent job, affordable housing, and dignified retirement. He’s also expected to echo Dr. Martin Luther King’s famous remarks that the United States has “socialism for the rich” and “rugged individualism for the poor.”

“What I’m talking about tomorrow is not particularly radical,” Sanders said. “But we have to put it on the table and make sure everyone appreciates why economic rights are human rights.”

The address comes as Republicans are attacking Sanders as a communist sympathizer and planning to make socialism a centerpiece of the presidential campaign regardless of who the Democratic nominee is. The Republican National Committee is issuing a series of news releases titled “Bernie 💚commies.” And POLITICO and other outlets have scrutinized Sanders’ diplomatic visits to the Soviet Union and Nicaragua in the 1980s, which are being weaponized by his critics.

But far from distancing himself from the controversial term, Sanders intends to own it. His aides said the speech is the opening gambit of an effort to upend the conventional wisdom about Sanders. His unapologetic liberalism, they say, is precisely what makes him the best candidate to beat Trump in a general election.

“It’s important not only for the senator explain what his philosophy is and what he believes to be the major social ills in this country,” said Faiz Shakir, Sanders’ campaign manager, “but also the fact that he strongly believes that when you fight the oligarchy in the ways he’s going to lay out, that people respond to it and it’s good politics.”

Sanders’ biggest hurdle is persuading older voters — people who lived through the Cold War and have a far less benign take on socialism. According to a 2018 Gallup poll, only 28 percent of Americans over the age of 65 have a positive view of the term.

“I don’t think it’s a productive direction for him to take,” said a Pennsylvania Democratic elected official who requested anonymity. Referring to some of Sanders’ recent campaign moves in the state, the official added: “Going to Bethlehem, I thought, was great. Going on Fox News and killing it on Fox News was good. But this leftward push … is not going to pick up any new voters in Pennsylvania. You’re only going to lose that way.”’

But the address could potentially bring more younger voters into the fold, some of whom have recently strayed from him, according to polls. A majority of young Americans have a positive view of socialism, and a recent survey for Axios found that 55 percent of women between the ages of 18 and 54 would prefer to live in a socialist country. Since Sanders’ 2015 speech, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has become a dominant figure on social media, and democratic socialists have won seats in state legislatures and city councils throughout the country, including in Pennsylvania.

“We have made real progress in making millions of Americans understand what socialism is about,” said Sanders, reflecting on what has changed since his address in 2015.

Sanders’ speech comes as he’s getting squeezed by two rivals — frontrunner Joe Biden from the center and fellow progressive Elizabeth Warren alongside him on the left. Biden has defied predictions he’d quickly implode and Warren, who calls herself a “capitalist to my bones,” has nipped at Sanders’ heels by improving her standing in national and early-state polls.

“While Elizabeth Warren has been rising in the polls and releasing plan after plan, I think Sanders is trying to go back to the base and say, ‘Here’s how left I am,’” said Rebecca Katz, a progressive consultant who advised Cynthia Nixon’s gubernatorial campaign. “And maybe the part unsaid is, ‘This is where I differ from Warren.’”

Asked if their view of democratic socialism is something that differentiates him from Warren, Sanders wouldn’t bite: “Elizabeth Warren will run her campaign. Elizabeth is a friend of mine, so I’m not going to comment on Elizabeth’s campaign.”

Sanders, in the interview, blamed the media for propagating a misleading perception of democratic socialism by equating it with “authoritarian communism. And if you know my record, I have been a fierce opponent of all forms of authoritarianism whether it existed in the Soviet Union, whether it exists in China, whether it exists in Saudi Arabia, wherever it exists. I believe in a vibrant democracy.”

“I must tell you that I find it a little bit hypocritical for people to try to suggest that I don’t believe in a democracy at the same time as you have Trump supporting and loving, apparently, Mohammad Bin Salman, a dictator of the worst kind in Saudi Arabia, and Putin in Russia,” he added.

The speech is a coup for socialists, who were once written off as fringe players in American politics. Sanders is far better known now than when he gave his last big speech on socialism four years ago, ensuring more people will watch.

“Sanders is giving this speech at a time when Trump and the Republicans are trying to paint all Democrats as socialists. I wish that were so!” said Maria Svart, the national director of the Democratic Socialists of America, which has endorsed Sanders. “Sanders knows what too many people inside the Beltway don’t care to know — that the Democratic politicians calling for Medicare for some and middle-of-the-road climate policy will lead us right into the jaws of authoritarianism.”

David Duhalde, political director of the Sanders-founded Our Revolution and a former deputy director for the DSA, added that the fact that Sanders is dedicating a second speech to democratic socialism “is really energizing for the thousands of DSA members who are working to elect him.”

Sanders will also use his speech to accuse Trump of loving “corporate socialism” and to bash his favorite boogeyman: Wall Street.

“In 2008, after their greed, recklessness and illegal behavior created the worst financial disaster since the Great Depression — with millions of Americans losing their jobs, their homes and their life savings — Wall Street’s religious adherence to unfettered capitalism suddenly came to an end,” reads a copy of Sanders’ prepared remarks provided by his staff. “Overnight, Wall Street became big-government socialists and begged for the largest federal bailout in American history — over $1 trillion from the Treasury and even more from the Fed.”

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theconservativebrief · 6 years

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Mad Men, the TV series that made Matthew Weiner one of the most famous, most powerful showrunners alive, obeyed the time-honored tradition of using a story set in the past to tell a story about the present.

It was a show about changing social customs and mores that lulled you into complacency with big sight gags about how much things had changed since the 1960s — hey, we don’t let kids put plastic bags over their heads anymore! — in order to quietly nudge viewers to realize how much things hadn’t changed. In particular, Mad Men contained ample storylines about how little the world had evolved for women butting their heads against the seemingly unbreakable walls of workplace sexism.

In the three years since Mad Men went off the air in 2015 and this week’s Amazon Video debut of Weiner’s follow-up series, The Romanoffs, the lessons of Mad Men’s treatment of workplace sexism have more than come home to roost, including for Weiner himself, who in 2017 was accused of sexual harassment by former Mad Men writer Kater Gordon. (Weiner’s “Who … me?!” response to these accusations in a Vanity Fair profile wasn’t terribly convincing.)

And even beyond Weiner, The Romanoffs’ original studio — The Weinstein Company — was toppled in the wake of the exposure of its co-founder and namesake Harvey Weinstein’s long string of sexual assaults.

But while sexism and gender relations are a part of The Romanoffs’ tapestry — and the three episodes sent out to critics burble with nods both knowing and unknowing to the past year of #MeToo reckoning — Weiner is once again using the past to inform the present. This time, however, he’s also using the past to predict the future.

And the revolution is coming.

Just look at the scope! Look at the sweep! Justina Mintz / Amazon

Everything about The Romanoffs is massive. The show filmed on location across multiple continents. (The first three episodes alone were shot in three different countries.) It boasts an all-star cast, including everybody from Isabelle Huppert to Diane Lane to old Mad Men favorites like Christina Hendricks and John Slattery.

Every episode approaches 90 minutes in length, with opulent production values that practically drip off the screen. And even though Amazon typically drops full seasons of its series all at once, the better to binge, new episodes of The Romanoffs will be released week to week (though the first two are both out Friday).

(Note that I’m also going to use the anglicized spelling “Romanoff” to refer to the actual Romanov family throughout this review, so as to maintain continuity with the show’s title. My apologies, Russophiles.)

The show is probably the biggest blank check in TV history, only really approached in scope by properties that were already established hits, like the later seasons of Game of Thrones. And what’s more, it has a decidedly noncommercial premise: an anthology series of small, character-driven TV films about people all around the world who either are or believe they are descended from the Romanoffs, the final monarchs of Russia who were killed in a hail of gunfire in 1918. (Though the whole royal family was executed, many of their relatives lived on, and there’s even a putative Romanoff heir to the Russian throne alive right now, though good luck getting her on it.)

All of this money is up there on screen, as it were. Weiner directed all three if the episodes sent to critics for review, and he creates beautiful, watercolor-esque images — like the soft, wintry light of a purple morning drifting through an ice-covered window in Paris, or the surreal image of an opulent cruise liner at night, or a streak of fake blood smeared on the floor of a movie set meant to evoke a tumultuous moment in history.

(If you think I’m being a little vague, I am. Weiner’s famous hatred of spoilers — which leads him to regularly send out long lists of things critics are not to reveal — has manifested itself here again, despite the relatively thin plots of the three episodes I’ve seen. Better safe than sorry, I guess.)

The most salient detail I can share about all of these episodes is that they’re all at least 15 minutes too long. Even the one I liked best — the third episode, “House of Special Purpose,” which will debut October 19 — might have been better off with a solid quarter-hour cut out of it. Weiner occasionally uses this additional length well, to create haunting silences, or to hold on an actor’s face longer than you might expect him to, or to drink in a moment of sublime beauty. But sometimes he just uses it to fit everything he can think of into an episode, even when it’s not all that clever.

Still, the qualities that made Mad Men so good are present here, if buried a bit beneath all the excess. Weiner maintains his knack for getting terrific performances out of actors. (His use of Hendricks in episode three feels like a deliberate mission to convince Hollywood of how poorly she’s been used in post-Mad Men projects.) And though his scripts might be too bulky, they certainly boast dialogue that cuts to the quick when he gets out of his own way.

And yet the weird thing about The Romanoffs is that, as an anthology drama, it’s somehow better when taken as a whole than as a set of individual episodes. Any given episode of the show can disappoint with its bulkiness and its inability to zero in on the ironies inherent in its storytelling. (Especially the second episode, which sometimes feels like Weiner flagellating himself in public and sometimes feels like Weiner asking for our love and approval despite his bad behavior.)

But the more episodes you watch, the more The Romanoffs starts to feel like a story about the instability of our modern moment, a story about class consciousness, a story about the guards knocking on the door to point guns at all of our heads, maybe even Weiner’s.

The world might be ending, but at least there are still dogs. And Aaron Eckhart. Chris Raphael/Amazon

The thing I find most fascinating about Weiner’s work when taken as a whole is that he’s simultaneously drawn to white male supremacy and horrified by that quality within himself. Mad Men could only have been as good as it was if Weiner had both wanted to be Don Draper and gaze at the emptiness in the man’s soul. He seems taken by the opulence of lost eras, of ’60s America, of pre-communist Russia. But it’s likely no mistake that in those worlds, the dominance of people who looked like him, or like me, went largely unchallenged.

But in every episode of The Romanoffs, Weiner finds some way to reenact the death of the titular family, sometimes as tragedy and sometimes as farce. It’s an echo that his characters can’t escape, a rhyme of the past they are doomed to repeat, even if they might believe otherwise.

And that doesn’t even count the bulk of the opening credits, in which the 1918 execution of the Romanoff family at the hands of Russia’s new rulers is dramatized to the strains of Tom Petty’s “Refugee.” You can’t escape what’s coming, the knock at the door, the gun to the head, and we’ve all got something to pay for.

The revolutions within The Romanoffs are smaller ones, within families or marriages or friendships, but they presage some justice over the horizon, a sense that the world has become so imbalanced that it will greenlight anthology dramas about people who believe they’re descendants of the Romanoff family that will cost millions upon millions of dollars to produce. The divide between poor and rich only grows, and in The Romanoffs’ very first episode, a character notes that the middle class has largely disappeared.

And yet these characters cling to an aristocracy that ceased to exist a century ago. They are convinced of their own royalty. They display a confidence that, because of their heritage, because of their regality, because of their class, they are somehow more than, even as they are in the same boat as so many of the people who see their charade for the false front that it is. The aristocracy disappeared. So will you.

In The Romanoffs’ second episode, “The Royal We,” an older man addresses a bunch of other older people to say that maybe in 50 years, the world won’t exist anymore, or at least humans won’t, or at least this particular social order won’t. Everybody laughs, because we have to go on believing that death isn’t at the door.

After the massacre of the tsar and his family happens in the opening credits, the sequence revisits the idea that one of the Romanoff children escapes the slaughterhouse, then morphs into a young woman exiting the subway in our present, looking at her phone. It’s a nod to the pervasive idea from the mid-20th century that Anastasia Romanoff escaped that basement room, living on into the late 20th century and animating plenty of stories about the Russian aristocracy in exile.

It wasn’t true, of course. The bodies of all of the Romanoffs have been found and accounted for and DNA tested. But the idea that the lost aristocracy might still exist in you, in me, in somebody, is a powerful one. The Romanoffs knows that someone will have to pay the piper eventually, that this modern lifestyle has become unsustainable, that we have all done terrible, terrible things we must be held accountable for. But the series holds out hope that it, too, might be the one to escape. Or maybe its creator holds out that hope.

After watching the second episode, I jokingly told my wife that The Romanoffs is the sort of series I’d be inclined to give three-and-a-half stars right now, then declare a misunderstood masterpiece in six years. Well. Here are the three-and-a-half stars.

The Romanoffs debuts its first two episodes today on Amazon. New episodes will be released every Friday from now until the end of November.

Original Source -> The Romanoffs, from Mad Men creator Matt Weiner, feels like a period piece about the present

via The Conservative Brief

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oldguardaudio · 7 years

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Joan Swirsky Explains 🔥 Obama’s Bunker Festers in The Swamp

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Obama’s Bunker Festers in The Swamp

By Joan Swirsky —— Bio and Archives—February 4, 2018

Once upon a time, a seasoned political operative ran for President of the United States against a candidate who had virtually no political experience.

She––Democrat Ms. Hillary Clinton––former First Lady of Arkansas, former First Lady of the United States, former U.S. Senator from New York, former Secretary of State under the faux “president” Barack Obama, was clearly the favorite.

Her opponent––Republican Mr. Donald J. Trump––the billionaire builder who lived in the American version of the Palace of Versailles in Manhattan and in several other resplendent homes around the country and the world, who hosted two wildly successful TV shows, who owned casinos and built golf courses and was a favorite of tabloid magazines, and who had been lionized and courted by the Hollywood crowd, the media whores, and both Democrats and Republicans for his generous contributions, was the clear loser.

Ha ha ha sputtered the political experts. The idea that this neophyte, this (pardon the expression) capitalist could go up against a representative of the outgoing Big Government regime––which brought us socialized medicine (Obamacare) and socialized education (Common Core) and 94-million unemployed Americans and strangulating regulations and horrific trade deals and a foreign policy that bowed deeply to our enemies and spit in the faces of our faithful allies––well that just struck the experts as preposterous.

With the powerful Clinton Machine behind her, the endorsement of the outgoing faux “president,” the immense help of rigged-election experts like ACORN, the incalculable assistance of a bought-and-paid-for leftwing media, and with the good-old-reliable votes of feminists and blacks and Hispanics and gays and all the other groups that stupidly believe Democrats have helped them over the past 60 years, Hillary had no competition at all.

THE BEST-KEPT SECRET

The cocky Hillary supporters believed that millions of deplorable Americans failed to notice their candidate’s frequent coughing fits, the help she needed simply to ascend three stairs, her peculiar head-bobbing spasms, the cringe-producing effect of her strident voice, and her frequent absences from the campaign trail, not to mention her promising more of the same socialist-cum-communist policies that had failed so miserably for the previous eight years..

They also failed to realize that her opponent had hired an extremely savvy pollster.

That pollster told candidate Trump, on a daily and sometimes hourly basis, how Americans throughout the country were responding to his America First message. And it was all good. And it was a secret that the entire Trump Team kept to themselves.

Or so they thought. But the information that was so damning for Hillary’s candidacy apparently reached the corrupt upper echelons of Obama’s Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Department of Justice (DOJ), and scared them enough to hatch an illegal, seditious, unconstitutional plot to derail the Trump candidacy and, failing that, the Trump presidency.

For months on end, fake polls, as reported by fake news shills, told us that Hillary was a slam-dunk. Right up to 8 p.m. on the night of November 8, 2016, when the entire leftwing media started to wipe the avalanche of egg yolks dripping down their faces.

TRYING TO BRING DOWN A PRESIDENT

To those of us who supported Mr. Trump from the beginning––I wrote an article back in 2011 entitled “Trump is Already Running the Country”––it was clear that every now and then in American history, someone comes along to save our country from those who hate it.

FDR is in this category, bolstering America’s spirits through the worst Depression in our history and a devastating World War (although I personally revile Roosevelt for condemning six-million Jews to annihilation when he could and should have bombed the concentration camps in Germany and Poland to which Hitler condemned his defenseless victims).

Abraham Lincoln is in this category, miraculously uniting our country after the ferocious Civil War that almost tore it apart.

President Trump belongs in this category, accomplishing more that is good for America in one year in office than any chief executive in our history––all while the clinically hysterical liberals in the media and among the populace continued to beleaguer, hound, protest, vilify, insult and harass him, and when ill-intentioned actors from Obama’s DOJ and FBI put their malevolent plot into action, a plot that accused both candidate and President Trump of colluding with Russians to swing the election his way.

To this malicious end, they did the following:

Hired British spy Christopher Steele (who admitted in writing that he “hated” candidate Trump) to create a phony story about the Republican candidate being in a Russian hotel engaging is raunchy acts with a prostitute;

Hired the political opposition-research group Fusion GPS to distribute the phony info.

Paid for this sham scenario with multimillions of dollars from both Hillary’s campaign coffers and the Democratic National Committee’s monies;

Went to the judges of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to apply for a search warrant without informing the judges about (1) the Trump-loathing spy’s bias, and (2) who paid for the warrant. By the way, who are these judges and exactly who appointed them???

Obtained the warrant which allowed the partisan hacks from Obama’s DOJ and FBI to conduct a more than year-long collusion investigation which produced NOTHING!

Oops… make that something. It produced hard, cold, concrete, irrefutable, and to my mind indictable evidence that the people who were in collusion were––ta da––the corrupt upper echelon of the DOJ and FBI who lied to the FISA judges, as well as Hillary Clinton who as Sec. of State gave 20 percent of U.S. uranium to the Russians (similar to her husband Bill giving nukes to North Korea and their ideological clone Barack Obama giving nukes to Iran!).

WHAT’S MISSING FROM THIS PICTURE?

For well over a year, we’ve had the fishy FISA memo, former FBI director James Comey being accused of covering up Hillary’s crimes, the witch hunt of President Trump by another former FBI director Robert Mueller, CA Democrat Adam Schiff’s manic attempts to impeach the president, the media’s narcotizing anti-Trump talking points, and the few lone voices––vox clamantis en deserto––in the conservative media, but what do they all have in common? What is missing?

Not outrage…they are all outraged.

Not accusations…the right blames the left and the left blames the right.

Not plain talk…conservative Sean Hannity has been clear as a bell, as are the leftist bought-and-paid-for shills on every leftwing news outlet, both electronic and print.

While all of them pointed fingers, cast blame, railed against the “system” they thought was crooked or biased or partisan, the elephant in the room––the subject they never raised, the person they never mentioned as the arch architect of the entire illegal corrupt plan to derail the Trump presidency––BARACK OBAMA!

Does anyone really believe that FISA warrants can be submitted or obtained by any underling in the American government? Of course not! That request has to come––or at least be approved––directly from the Oval Office.

Does anyone really believe that the anti-Trump talking points, rallies, vigils, disparaging articles, and orchestrated hatred is spontaneous? Of course not! They come directly from groups like Organizing For America, which was formed by the former community organizer Barack Obama with the express intent of dismantling traditional American institutions and converting them into the socialist and communist regimes they most admire.

According to journalist and author Paul Sperry, Obama sent a message to his “troops” saying that he “was heartened by anti-Trump protests. Yes,” says Sperry, “Obama has an army of agitators — numbering more than 30,000— who will fight his Republican successor at every turn of his historic presidency. And Obama will command them from a bunker less than two miles from the White House.”

Ah… the bitterness.

A FEW EXCEPTIONS

To their credit, a few people––so far––have cited Obama as a central player––probably the central player––in the Russian-collusion fiasco. As CanadaFreePress.com editor Judi McLeod has written, “One day after the release of the Memo, we should all be asking, `Where is Obama?’ Why is he so stonily silent…? The answer is that the scurrilous Obama, just like Steele, went into hiding. The Memo proves that the FBI is not just part of a USA intelligence apparatus that systematically spies on its own American citizenry, it paid…for filth completely made up by a foreign agent with whom they were in tight ‘Hate Donald Trump’ league.”

Daniel Greenfield, in an article entitled The Memo Reveals the Coup against America, writes that “the Democrats and the media spent a week lying to the American people about the `memo’”…claiming its release would be damaging to America’s spying and even treasonous. But “they didn’t mean American spying methods––they meant Obama’s spying methods.”

“The memo isn’t treasonous,” Greenfield continues. “It reveals a treasonous effort by the Democrats to use our intelligence agencies to rig an election and overturn the will of the voters. Today, the media and Dems switched from claiming that the memo was full of `classified information’ that might get CIA agents killed by insisting that it was a dud and didn’t matter. Oh, what tangled webs we weave when first we practice to deceive.”

And the other night the Fox News moderator Jesse Watters called out Obama for his significant role in this orgy of corruption.

But where are the other voices to identify the virulence––and jealousy––of the anti-Trump minions? And particularly Barack Obama’s role?

As I wrote in a former article, “James Comey and the Stinking Fish Factor”––“Whether it’s in industry or the military or sports or show business, if a failure occurs, it’s always the top dog who is accountable. Not the assembly line worker or the buck private or the third baseman who calls the shots, but the one who occupies the ultimate seat of power. Look at what happened at the Democratic National Committee…the Chief Executive Officer, Chief Financial Officer, Chief of Communications, and Chairwoman all resigned because of the hacking that proved the DNC to be both crooked and racist.”

So it is with the putative head of the Democrat Party, Barack Obama. And it’s not just jealousy or ideology that drives his obsession––it’s fear! All the honchos under Obama––John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, James Comey, Loretta Lynch, John Podesta, Obama himself, the list is long––quake with dread that their own scandals, acts of malfeasance, controversies, and possible illegalities will be unearthed and come to light during the Trump years and they will all be frog-marched straight into Leavenworth…hence the mad quest to frame the president and get him out of office.

They should be afraid. And they should be remorseful for their shabby tactics and constitutional violations. But if Hillary Clinton is an example of the left’s craven sociopathy––and I think she is the prime example––the American public can expect no apologies and no regrets but rather the same evasions, deceptions and lies that the Obama gang raised to an art form during his ignominious eight years in office.

In fact, not only is Hillary credited with creating the Russian-collusion fakery but as writer Mark Tapscott so thoroughly documents, the Clintons have been using the FBI against their enemies for years.

It is doubtful that when candidate Trump promised to “drain the swamp,” he had even an inkling of the vast number of slithering, predatory, reptilian creatures who inhabited that toxic environment. But being the smartest guy in the room, and a quick study at that, you can bet that he will decontaminate the place as swiftly as he pushed through the biggest tax and jobs bill in history.

For that, he will gain the eternal gratitude of the American people, a huge majority of the candidates he endorses in the midterms, and a thunderous reelection in 2020.

Joan Swirsky Explains 🔥 Obama’s Bunker Festers in The Swamp Joan Swirsky Explains 🔥 Obama’s Bunker Festers in The Swamp Joan Swirsky

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lodelss · 5 years

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Putin’s Rasputin