Category Archives: Media Criticism

Education, Humor, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, Weird

From Social Upheaval

5 Comments

…is great art made:

It is with the velocity of a giant squid and the sprawl of its erogenous arms that with water-wheels the leverage in any musculoskeletal appendage can move into positions within the time it would take the engine of filaments to accelerate the psychic mass of bodily understanding and construction for such a displacement to continue in different venues and as multiple in purpose as the simple machine of our vessel will allow toward the disappearance of a nexus like in infinite mirror games but with the ability to count each movement of the progression as it acts in mechanical, yet organic, jerking behind the dreamlike animals with their pink illusions that roll their wet bodies into our delicate systems

Yes, those college degrees were totally worth the money. Though I suspect that pharmaceuticals may have played a role.

Media Criticism, Popular Culture

Thoughts On The Wreckage Of The Franchise

16 Comments

From Lileks:

It’s unnerving to see Darth Maul’s glaring face everywhere again, as if it’s 199-whatever again and our hopes are so very high, right up until the moment we read the opening crawl, and think – tax dispute? – and then see the guys who are obviously wearing crude ASIAN ALIEN masks, and then someone has to say “I have a bad feeling about this,” and so on. From the very beginning, in other words. Realizing you’ve waited all these years, and you’re getting a kiddie movie. Robot soldiers who talk and say Roger-roger. My God. If only someone had shot a time-lapse movie from the perspective of the screen, capturing the faces of the audience as they went from rapture when the Star Wars logo crashes on the screen, and stayed with the same fixed smile gradually fading away as all hope leached from their bodies.

I guess it would have bothered me more if I’d ever been a big fan. But I’m a 2001 man.

This always fascinates me:

For the entire book I’ve been mashing together two plots, making #3 a sequel of sorts to #2. (It’s not, but they’re tied together, like they’re all tied together, by the Casablanca Bar.) The two plots would not blend. There was nothing to make them mesh, at least nothing I knew. A while ago I got the idea that the main character would meet up with one of the protagonists of the late-40s noir novel, and he’d be a spry old bird who could set a few things straight. Imagine Bogart at 80, showing up in a sequel to “The Maltese Falcon.”

Well, he got to talking, and holy. Crow. He explained it all. He wove them both together, provided the motivation I’d been missing, and provided a theme and subplot for the sequel to the 40s-noir novel, “Band Box.” It’s just a bombshell. I looked at the page, walked away, came back, looked at it again, went to bed to chew it over, woke thinking: yes. That’s it.

It’s the best part of the job: you’re not writing. You’re just taking dictation.

Once in a while, someone asks me why I don’t write fiction. It’s because no one ever dictates to me. I have no idea where one would come up with character, plots or dialog. It’s a form of creativity and genius that I simply do not possess.

Media Criticism, Philosophy, Political Commentary

The Screwed Generation

17 Comments

Libertarian, not liberal. Actually libertarians are the true liberals. Most people who call themselves “liberal” are leftists who stole the term.

[Update a few minutes later]

OK, I just read through the whole thing, and this is a pretty confused and incoherent paragraph:

We still vote with our heart; it’s just in a slightly different place. We’d rather bring home our troops from overseas and save those lives while spending that money to establish a universal healthcare system that will save even more. This isn’t necessarily because we believe the government should take care of us, it’s because everyone deserves to be healthy and the powers that be before us mangled the system so badly that it’s becoming impossible to afford. This is an example of our generation trying to take care of our own as much as it is trying to create change. While the concept of universal healthcare may be defined as “liberal,” it’s a fairly libertarian approach of non-interventionism and personal rights that brings us there.

There is no way to do universal health care without a massive violation of liberty and personal rights, as we’re seeing already with ObamaCare, even before it goes into effect. This is a utopian fantasy, and there’s nothing libertarian about it.