David Graeber, the brilliant thinker and activist, passed away on September 2nd, 2020. Words from Jason Hickel on Twitter capture the sense of his work and life, and what the loss of David, in his thoughts and ideas and actions and presence, means for his readers and friends.
The singular quality of Harlan Ellison's writing was in prose that sings with eloquence and wit and burns with edge and passion; a passion for what is right and good; for the strength and necessity of kindness and intellect and reason; for the continual unwillingness to be meek in the face of injustice everywhere, big and small, personal and political.
Alan Moore has explored darkness often in his career, from the gothic horror of Swamp Thing, to the unredeemable life of Rorschach in Watchmen, to the Victorian underworld of From Hell, to the imaginative landscape of Poe in Neonomicon. In His Heavy Heart, his film in collaboration with director Mitch Jenkins, we encounter a vision as dark as anything he has ever done.
C.G. Jung was a master explorer and deep observer of the dynamics of the psyche, working to articulate the meaning at its core. This essay is a look at his 1932 seminar on the Kundalini Yoga, providing a glimpse of how he interpreted seemingly esoteric material through the matrix of his psychology.
Using the “Twitter Essay” format, this is a brief look at the first two seasons of the Danish political drama Borgen, a show that attempts to confront the fundamental conflict between the personal and the professional.
A short post about deeply embedded imperial conceptions. “The job of the progressive movements is precisely to convince the population of imperial powers that they have no right whatsoever to determine things for anyone else.” – Noam Chomsky
A social read of Book 1 of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s epic, 6-volume series My Struggle. Existence, in all its emotional resonance and mysterious complexity, resides somewhere in the space between accumulated bits of experience and the stoppage of thought. We vacillate from one pole to the other, back and forth, ceaselessly.
A short conversation with Jerry Seinfeld from The Howard Stern Show. “Find the torture your comfortable with and you’ll do well.”
Arirang, Kim Ki-duk’s 16th film, is an oddity, a break from the string of purely fictional provocations that have challenged and moved his viewers over the last dozen or so years. Instead, it is a film about the filmmaker, a hybrid fantasy-documentary covering three years in which Kim lived in a cabin and made no films.
On two films from 2005 (Sympathy for Lady Vengeance and Sophie Scholl) and how the characters at their centre embody a deep fidelity to justice in circumstances both fantastically and brutally dark.
An LA Review of Books social read (10 pages a day) of William Gaddis’s 1975 book JR. The world of JR is often an unpleasant place; but here and there a good thing happens; there is a moment of hope or joy; a scintilla of light emerges from somewhere in the muck.
A celebration of the sheer comedic perfection of J.B. Smoove (Leon Black) and Chris Williams (Krazee-Eyez Killa) in the absurd world of Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm.
“How does one establish the true worth of a person, or an object? Take me for example. If I were to ask you to estimate my value, what would you say?” 13th century philosopher Nasruddin has an answer.
A review of Alan Moore Storyteller by Gary Spencer Millidge. Bill Sienkiewicz on Alan Moore: “Alan’s a genius, an absolute gentleman. Plain and simple. Yes, his scripts are dense. They’re brilliant, layered, nuanced, variegated, textural, beautiful and daunting.”