Nick Land,
Robin Mackay, Ray Brassier (Editors)
Theory as cyberpunk fiction: Land‘s machinic theory-poetry parallelled the digital intensities of 90s jungle, techno and doomcore, anticipating ‘impending human extinction becoming accessible as a dancefloor’.
— Mark Fisher
Land had the most brilliantly seductive and meteoric mind, endlessly imaginative and capable of adopting, inhabiting and discarding any philosophical position. With him—and rightly so—philosophy infected every area of life.
—Simon Critchley
During the 1990s British philosopher Nick Land’s unique work, variously described as ‘rabid nihilism’, ‘mad black deleuzianism’ and ‘cybergothic’, developed perhaps the only rigorous and culturally-engaged escape route out of the malaise of ‘continental philosophy’—a route that was implacably blocked by the academy. However, Land’s work has continued to exert an influence, both through the British ‘speculative realist’ philosophers who studied with him, and through the many cultural producers—writers, artists, musicians, filmmakers—who have been invigorated by his uncompromising and abrasive philosophical vision.
Beginning with Land’s early radical rereadings of Heidegger, Nietzsche, Kant and Bataille, the volume collects together the papers, talks and articles of the mid-90s—long the subject of rumour and vague legend (including some work which has never previously appeared in print)—in which Land developed his futuristic theory-fiction of cybercapitalism gone amok; and ends with his enigmatic later writings in which Ballardian fictions, poetics, cryptography, anthropology, grammatology and the occult are smeared into unrecognisable hybrids. Fanged Noumena gives a dizzying perspective on the entire trajectory of this provocative and influential thinker’s work, and has introduced his unique voice to a new generation of readers.
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The veteran actor has lost a considerable amount of weight
Weird times for Johnny Depp. At nearly 55 years old, the veteran star still makes the big bucks — Disney keeps sending him on more voyages as Captain Jack Sparrow; Warner Bros. brought him into the wizarding world of Harry Potter; and he’ll soon solve Tupac and Biggie’s murders — but most of his commercial successes have been mired in personal controversies (see: his not-so-amicable relationship to Amber Heard).
Those controversies carry on as many people are now concerned over his current health. As Billboard reports, Depp took some photos with fans while performing in St. Petersburg, Russia with his band, Hollywood Vampires. As you can see in the photos below, the blockbuster star has certainly lost a substantial amount of weight, which has led many to speculate whether he’s “sick” or “weak.”
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On June 10th, at the Sheffield Doc/Fest in England, director Arwen Curry will premiere Worlds of Ursula K Le Guin, the first feature film about the revolutionary science fiction writer. The film's website notes that "Curry filmed with Le Guin for 10 years to produce the film, which unfolds an intimate journey of self-discovery as Le Guin comes into her own as a major feminist author, opening new doors for the imagination and inspiring generations of women and other marginalized writers along the way." Starring Le Guin herself, who sadly passed away earlier this year, Worlds of Ursula K Le Guin trait appearances by Margaret Atwood, David Mitchell, Neil Gaiman, Samuel R. Delany, and Michael Chabon. You can watch the brand new trailer for the film above.
The former actor was one of the first to indict producer Harvey Weinstein of sexual assault. Now she wants to change the entire industry’s attitude towards women. ‘I know I’m on the right course,’ she says
The day we meet, the sky is black and the rain comes fast and heavy. Rose McGowan had walked into the hotel bar looking slight, but as she sits in an armchair, her back to the window, streaks of lightning flash outside behind her head and she looks, instead, like some sort of avenging angel. “I wanted to show people around the world that you can strike at the head of power and not just bite at the ankles,” she says. “Because they can shake you off when you bite at the ankles.”
When allegations of sexual assault started to surface about the film producer Harvey Weinstein late last year – he has denied all allegations of nonconsensual sex – McGowan added her voice, early and loudly. The former actor had collaborated with Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, the New York Times journalists who broke the story in October, passing on information about the $100,000 settlement he paid her in 1997 after an alleged assault. When Weinstein turned himself in last week, McGowan tweeted: “We got you, Harvey Weinstein, we got you.” This week, a grand jury indicted Weinstein on rape and criminal sex act charges, which he denies. “I cried the other night, finally,” she says. “I was asked a lot when he was arrested: ‘How does it feel?’ And I hadn’t really had time to process how it felt. I went to Central Park – it was around midnight – and I just cried. I cried for the girl I was, I cried for her. But today I smile for me.” The aftermath of the story breaking has been “extreme” says McGowan, although she says she had been living through a strange and nightmarish time long before the articles came out. She alleges that, when he heard about her tell-all memoir, Brave, Weinstein hired investigators, including former agents from the Mossad, to follow her and infiltrate her circle. It sounds like an outlandish claim, but a New Yorker story corroborates it. (A Weinstein spokesman told the magazine: “It is a fiction to suggest that any individuals were targeted or suppressed at any time.”)
Everyone knows "My Favorite Things." Most know it because of the 1965 movie version of the Broadway musical for which Richard Rodgers originally composed the song. But many jazz enthusiasts credit the one true "My Favorite Things" to a different musical genius entirely: John Coltrane. The free jazz-pioneering saxophonist's version of Rodgers' show tune (a filmed performance of which we featured here on Open Culture a few years ago) first came out as the title track of an album he put out in 1961, two years after The Sound of Music's original Broadway debut. Clocking in at nearly fourteen minutes, it gave listeners a tour de force demonstration of dramatic musical transformation.
"In 1960, Coltrane left Miles [Davis] and formed his own quartet to further explore modal playing, freer directions, and a growing Indian influence," says the documentary The World According to John Coltrane. "They transformed 'My Favorite Things,' the cheerful populist song from 'The Sound of Music,' into a hypnotic eastern dervish dance. The recording was a hit and became Coltrane's most requested tune—and a bridge to broad public acceptance."
If Coltrane's interpretation of the song brought it toward the East, what would an Eastern interpretation of his interpretation sound like? Now, thanks to Pakistan's Sachal Jazz Ensemble, you can hear, and see, Coltrane's "My Favorite Things" itself transformed dramatically again.
The actor talks about solitude, big families, his temperamental reputation – and why he loves to live in the moment
The last time I met Bill Murray things got rather physical rather quickly. It was the 2014 Vanity Fair Oscars party and I was about to leave, bloated with celebrity sightings and starting to suffer from indigestion. But as I walked out I saw a man arrive who made me turn around and go right back in.
By now, Bill Murray has long bypassed mere celebrity status to become something close to a spiritual symbol, a guru of zen, and his frequent appearances among the masses (in a karaoke bar! In a couple’s engagement photo!) are reported on the internet with the excitement of sightings of the messiah. Ever since his pitch perfect performances in 90s classics Groundhog Day and Rushmore, he has enjoyed a career renaissance, shucking off his well-hewn 80s comedy persona to become one of the most delightful dramatic actors around in films such as Lost in Translation and The Royal Tenenbaums. But to me, he will always be the wisecracking rumpled cynic he played in the early comedies I grew up with: Scrooged, Stripes, Tootsie, Meatballs and, of course, Ghostbusters. Watching him stride past was like watching my childhood walk by. I failed to play it cool.
“Mr Murray, my name’s Hadley Freeman –” I began, expecting him, at most, to nod, say hi and walk away. I was wrong.
“Oh, there, there, nobody’s perfect,” he bellowed. “Come here, you look ill.” He then picked me up and, while giving me an enormous bear hug, swung me around the room. “This woman’s very ill! She needs a doctor! She’s ill!” he shouted. Eventually he put me down, rumpled my hair and disappeared into the party. As I walked towards the bar for a steadying drink, I thought how my encounter with Murray had felt weird, unforgettable, unique and surprisingly aggressive. Just like, in fact, the 30-year-old comedy performances I still love him for. 'I grew up in total ruination': Irmin Schmidt of Can on LSD, mourning and musical adventures5/31/2018
The last founding member of the visionary German band left alive, the 81-year-old recalls how he refused his Nazi father to find freedom in music
In the dining room of his rambling farmhouse in Provence, Irmin Schmidt pours a glass of rosé in preparation for being interviewed. At 81, he is twinkly, genial company, a little at odds with the image he projected as the keyboard player in Can, the Cologne band once described as “the most influential and revered avant-garde band of the late 20th century”. While his bandmate Holger Czukay used to play up for the camera, Schmidt tended to stare sternly down it from between a pair of immense sideburns, every inch the serious musician who had trained under Karlheinz Stockhausen.
Since the band split up in 1979, he has made solo albums, conducted, written film scores, penned an opera. He says he doesn’t much concern himself with the past. He is dismissive of Can’s brief late-80s reunion on the grounds that it “sounded too much like Can” and balked at a suggestion that he should join an all-star Can tribute group at the Barbican’s 2017 celebrationof the band’s 50th anniversary: “It was a wonderful performance they did, but I mean, playing a Can piece as a song, having to learn the fucking piece and remember it …” He laughs. “We never cared about what people expected. I always imagined if one day we would go onstage again, people would think: ‘No, this isn’t Can. This is another group – we are in the wrong place.’”
But, of late, he has been dwelling on the band’s history. For one thing, 2017 left him the sole survivor of Can’s original four-piece line-up. Guitarist Michael Karoli died of cancer in 2001, while drummer Jaki Liebezeit and bassist Holger Czukay both died last year, the latter in the disused Weilerswist cinema that had once housed Can’s Inner Space studio, and where Czukay had continued to live after the band broke up. And then, at the urging of Hildegard, his partner of 51 years and Can’s manager since the early 70s, he has co-authored, with Rob Young, a definitive biography of the band, All Gates Open.
It is a fascinating book, not least because Schmidt’s life was extraordinary even before he formed Can. Born in Berlin in 1937, he can remember seeing Allied planes strafe a German military train with gunfire while he was an evacuee in Austria; returning to Germany in 1946, he found it “absolutely flattened by bombing. I grew up in these total ruins. That was an experience that is still deeply within me: growing up in this town, this land, where everything was devastated, all the buildings, all the culture.” His teenage years were marked not just by the usual adolescent surliness but by an obsessive fury over his homeland’s recent history: he was expelled from school for using its student magazine to expose his teachers’ Nazi pasts, while his relationship with his father – another Nazi supporter who had done nothing to intervene when their Jewish neighbours were taken to Auschwitz – was “pure war”. “Always asking, ‘Why did you do this?’, ‘Why didn’t you do that?’, ‘How could you? How could you?’ I think there is this kind of … mourning within me which I can never get rid of.”
We think we are super ‘woke’,” says playwright Polly Stenham, “yet in reality we rely on a whole cast of modern slaves. On the one hand, we are reading the Guardian and on the other, we may be paying the cleaner cash in hand.”
Stenham is at the National Theatre in London working on her fifth play, Julie, an adaptation of August Strindberg’s Miss Julie. Her lead, played by the Bafta-winning Vanessa Kirby, is a rich, thirtysomething Londoner while Jean, a Ghanaian immigrant, is her driver. Katrina is a Brazilian maid and like Jean, a victim of the zero-hours economy.
“It becomes really intersectional and really fucking political,” says Stenham. “I wanted to show the dark heart of liberalism, especially in this building which is populated by the liberal elite, and to go for the jugular. I’m part of it: Julie is not a million miles off me as a character.”
Solo: A Star Wars Story box office results are a crossroads moment for the space saga. Here is what Disney must do to move the justice forward
When the dust finally settles on Solo: A Star Wars Story, long-term acolytes of George Lucas’s space saga may be reasonably content with it. Although this latest episode may have finally emerged, as AO Scott of the New York Times memorably put it, as “a curiously low-stakes blockbuster, in effect a filmed Wikipedia page”, its muted nature is unlikely to affect audiences for future Star Wars films. Nor will it send Alden Ehrenreich’s chances of retaining the role of Han Solo spinning into the nearest asteroid field.
As a shallow exercise in establishing Solo’s backstory, it ticks all the relevant boxes – even if it does so in workmanlike fashion. It is off screen, in areas that rarely find their way into critical reviews or fan verdicts (but that matter so much to industry watchers), that there is reason for concern.
If there were ever an exhibition of artistic “one-hit-wonders,” surely Edvard Munch’s The Scream would occupy a central place, maybe hung adjacent to Grant Wood’s American Gothic. The ratio of those who know this single painting to those who know the artist's other works must be exponentially high, which is something of a shame. That’s not to say The Scream does not deserve its exalted place in popular culture—like Wood's stone-faced Midwest farmers, the wavy figure, clutching its screaming skull-like head, resonates at the deepest of psychic frequencies, an archetypal evocation of existential horror.
Not for nothing has Sue Prideaux subtitled her Munch biography Behind the Scream. “Rarely in the canon of Western art,” writes Tom Rosenthal at The Independent, “has there been so much anxiety, fear and deep psychological pain in one artist. That he lived to be 80 and spent only one period in an asylum is a tribute not only to Munch’s physical stamina but to his iron will and his innate, robust psychological strength.” Born in Norway in 1863, the sickly Edvard, whose mother died soon after his birth, was raised by a harsh disciplinarian father who read Poe and Dostoevsky to his children and, in addition to beating them “for minor infractions,” would “invoke the image of their blessed mother who saw them from heaven and grieved over their misbehavior.”
by Will Knight
No one really knows how the most advanced algorithms do what they do. That could be a problem.
Last year, a strange self-driving car was released onto the quiet roads of Monmouth County, New Jersey. The experimental vehicle, developed by researchers at the chip maker Nvidia, didn’t look different from other autonomous cars, but it was unlike anything demonstrated by Google, Tesla, or General Motors, and it showed the rising power of artificial intelligence. The car didn’t follow a single instruction provided by an engineer or programmer. Instead, it relied entirely on an algorithm that had taught itself to drive by watching a human do it.
Getting a car to drive this way was an impressive feat. But it’s also a bit unsettling, since it isn’t completely clear how the car makes its decisions. Information from the vehicle’s sensors goes straight into a huge network of artificial neurons that process the data and then deliver the commands required to operate the steering wheel, the brakes, and other systems. The result seems to match the responses you’d expect from a human driver. But what if one day it did something unexpected—crashed into a tree, or sat at a green light? As things stand now, it might be difficult to find out why. The system is so complicated that even the engineers who designed it may struggle to isolate the reason for any single action. And you can’t ask it: there is no obvious way to design such a system so that it could always explain why it did what it did.
The mysterious mind of this vehicle points to a looming issue with artificial intelligence. The car’s underlying AI technology, known as deep learning, has proved very powerful at solving problems in recent years, and it has been widely deployed for tasks like image captioning, voice recognition, and language translation. There is now hope that the same techniques will be able to diagnose deadly diseases, make million-dollar trading decisions, and do countless other things to transform whole industries.
But this won’t happen—or shouldn’t happen—unless we find ways of making techniques like deep learning more understandable to their creators and accountable to their users. Otherwise it will be hard to predict when failures might occur—and it’s inevitable they will. That’s one reason Nvidia’s car is still experimental. Already, mathematical models are being used to help determine who makes parole, who’s approved for a loan, and who gets hired for a job. If you could get access to these mathematical models, it would be possible to understand their reasoning. But banks, the military, employers, and others are now turning their attention to more complex machine-learning approaches that could make automated decision-making altogether inscrutable. Deep learning, the most common of these approaches, represents a fundamentally different way to program computers. “It is a problem that is already relevant, and it’s going to be much more relevant in the future,” says Tommi Jaakkola, a professor at MIT who works on applications of machine learning. “Whether it’s an investment decision, a medical decision, or maybe a military decision, you don’t want to just rely on a ‘black box’ method.”
This BBC adaptation cuts the play to two hours, adds helicopters and mixed martial arts, and splurge fab performances all over the place
London at night, the capital’s priapic new edifices – the Shard, Gherkin etc – sparkle and thrust proudly skywards, something to do with the lusty stealth of nature perhaps. It looks a bit like the start of The Apprentice but it’s King Lear. “Nothing will come of nothing” … you’re fired.
Just along the river, Gloucester and Kent (Jims Broadbent and Carter) arrive at the Tower in a black Range Rover. The king presumably will land at City airport in a Learjet. He doesn’t. They missed a trick there. Anyway, he’s already here at the Tower. In Richard Eyre’s TV adaptation, Lear (Anthony Hopkins) is a military dictator in the present, gathering the troops – and the family – for the division of the kingdom.
The north, and its powerhouse presumably, goes to Goneril (Emma Thompson). The West Country to Regan (Emily Watson, this is a seriously sparkly cast). The prosperous south-east is due to be Cordelia’s, until she fails in her filial flattery and is disinherited, disowned and sent to France (boo) instead.
A week ago, Björk came back to TV without precedent for a long time, a pair of predictably (and delightfully) off-kilter performances on Later… with Jools Holland. It was awesome! Far and away superior, she came back to the greenery secured organize only a couple of days after the fact for another match of exhibitions and a drawing in talk about how composing a collection resembles fathoming a murder riddle, woodwinds, and the significance of the Paris Climate Accord.
The primary execution, "Blissing Me", sees the Icelandic lyricist singing the ethereal tune in front of an audience plant heaven, encompassed by veil wearing flute players. In the second, an unpleasant execution of "The Gate", Björk and her instrumentalist wood fairies make a sonic scene that proposes she's summoning a type of extraordinary soul from inside a universe made of pixie clean and Disney motion pictures and passing, or something. It's astonishing. Björk has beforehand communicated a craving to release live version of Utopia featuring more flutes,, a prospect that is considerably all the more alluring at this point.
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Roland Barthes
Translated by Jody Gladding
Album provides an unparalleled look into Roland Barthes's life of letters. It presents a selection of correspondence, from his adolescence in the 1930s through the height of his career and up to the last years of his life, covering such topics as friendships, intellectual adventures, politics, and aesthetics. It offers an intimate look at Barthes's thought processes and the everyday reflection behind the composition of his works, as well as a rich archive of epistolary friendships, spanning half a century, among the leading intellectuals of the day.
Barthes was one of the great observers of language and culture, and Album shows him in his element, immersed in heady French intellectual culture and the daily struggles to maintain a writing life. Barthes's correspondents include Maurice Blanchot, Michel Butor, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Georges Perec, Raymond Queneau, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Marthe Robert, and Jean Starobinski, among others. The book also features documents, letters, and postcards reproduced in facsimile; unpublished material; and notes and transcripts from his seminars. The first English-language publication of Barthes's letters, Album is a comprehensive testimony to one of the most influential critics and philosophers of the twentieth century and the world of letters in which he lived and breathed.
Melbourne’s contemplative indie rock star addresses the trials of squaring love with life on the road on her direct and downbeat second album
Courtney Barnett makes lackadaisical-sounding music about being uptight. More often than not, her breezy, sung-talked tunes sweat the small stuff, carrying those underlying anxieties with a strolling gait, a cock-eyed grin and a two-guitar wig-out.
Avant Gardener, the song that introduced this extraordinary Melbourne artist outside the local scene in 2013, told the tale of Barnett going into anaphylactic shock while weeding. Naturally, she blamed herself for being bad at breathing. She worried about the hospital bill. The conclusion to this gem of a slacker-pop tune? She should have stayed in bed. A recent single, City Looks Pretty, finds Barnett pulling off a similar trick. Her fine band motors along blithely, with just a few guitar effects dissociating in the background to alert you that all is not peachy. In the lyrics, a plaintive Barnett contemplates the ironic lot of the touring musician. “Friends treat you like a stranger and strangers treat you like their best friend,” she notes. “One day, maybe never, I’ll come around.” It’s a mark of Barnett’s skill that she makes this most cliched of themes not only fresh but somehow universal. We all have someone we’re neglecting, some sort of affective jet lag. In a similar vein, Need a Little Time is another grunge-pop classic whose buoyant tune drags some very well-reasoned, considerate misery along behind it.
It is no wonder Barnett has new best friends wherever she goes.
Spike Lee and Jean-Luc Godard were also among the prizewinners at the 71st annual film festival
In a surprise verdict, the Japanese film Shoplifters, directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda, has been awarded the Palme d’Or for main feature at the close of the Cannes film festival. “The ending blew us out of the cinema,” said jury president Cate Blanchett.
Beating a field of 21, including two or three titles that had been hotly tipped for the top by the critics, the film took the prestigious prize on Saturday night ahead of the screening of the final film of the festival, Terry Gilliam’s long-awaited adaptation of Cervantes, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. Cannes 2018 verdict: sombre brilliance wins day despite Von Trier's unwelcome return
The Danish provocateur, back at Cannes after a seven-year ban, is on maddening form with a dreary, nasty serial killer thriller partly redeemed by its spectacular finale
Lars von Trier, the giggling charlatan-genius of world cinema, has returned in a kind of triumph to the Cannes playground of provocation from which he was temporarily exiled in 2011, having miscalculated a Nazi gag at a press conference, and proved unable or unwilling to walk it back. He has reappeared to give the finger to all America’s liberal complainers, with a film that casts Uma Thurman – yes, the male-auteur-nemesis Uma Thurman – as the very, very stupid victim of a serial killer, a film that also mocks the sexual politics of grievance and for good measure makes light of tightening up America’s gun laws.
His latest tongue-in-cheek nightmare The House That Jack Built is two and a half hours long but seems much longer – longer than Bayreuth, more vainglorious than Bayreuth. It is an ordeal of gruesomeness and tiresomeness that was every bit as exasperating as I had feared. But it concludes with what I also have to concede is a spectacular horror finale that detonated an almighty épat here in Cannes. The film ends with a colossal but semi-serious bang, an extravagant visual flourish and a cheeky musical outro over the closing credits to leave you laughing in spite of yourself as the house lights come up. But there is silliness and smirkiness where Von Trier believes the delicious black comedy to be.
As ever, this is a pseudo-American Psycho, set in an America that looks heartsinkingly like the forests of Denmark or perhaps Germany, locations in which the appearance of American automobiles and American actors look almost surreally out of place. There is supposedly a place called “Carlson’s Supermarket” near one of these very remote chalets, and although we don’t see this store, we see its brown bag with its logo. I don’t think I have ever seen a more obviously faked artefact in a film in my life.
The veteran auteur returns to Cannes with his latest essay film, a mosaic of clips and fragments lent the urgency and terror of a horror movie
The Image Book is a work that reprises many of Jean-Luc Godard’s familiar ideas, but with an unexpected urgency and visceral strangeness. It’s an essay film with the body-language of a horror movie, avowedly taking Godard’s traditional concerns with the ethical status of cinema and history and looking to the Arab world and indirectly examining our orientalism – Godard cites the Conradian phrase for a culture held “under Western eyes”.
Appropriately there are some amazingly fierce images, and the screen of Cannes’s Grand Theatre Lumiere is a colossal canvas over which to spread them.
As so often in the past, Godard churns the dark waters of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Image fragments are dislodged from the deep, and come floating up to the surface: paintings, news headlines, classic Hollywood clips, often digitally distorted or bleached out or suffused with a snow-blind white glow. These are juxtaposed with brutal news footage and Isis YouTube propaganda. Here are the alienations and macroaggressions of the contemporary world.
The Image Book is the signature Godard irony-mosaic of clips and fragments, with sloganised, gnomic texts, puns in brackets, sudden fades-to-black, unpredictable, unsynchronised sound cues which appear to have been edited quite without the usual concern for aural seamlesness, and vast, declamatory orchestral chords.
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by Roar Høstaker // Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences //
In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari launched the concept of rhizome as a critical alternative to the ‘root-book’. However, the environment in which we now cultivate our reading habits is not the printed book, but the rhizomatics of the World Wide Web, which according to some leads to distracted ways of reading. Due to the plasticity of the brain, new habits of shared attention make it physiologi- cally more difficult for us to do a deep reading of books. Are Deleuze and Guattari, who simply wanted to open the way to more experimentation, victims of the irony of history? Has the concept of rhizome finished its task? The article discusses the tortured relationship between the rhizome as a philosophical concept and its success as a way to describe the Internet. The Internet, however, only conforms to what they called the ‘canal-rhizome’: the rhizome in its despotic form. Herein lies the concept’s continued relevance.
Roar Høstaker: The rhizome, the net and the book
Published in Empedocles: European Journal for the Philosophy of Communication, Volume 8, Number 2. Download PDF
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“If the factory oscillates between pre-inscription and the unsayable, this is because it is caught in the trappings of its function as a machine and subtracted from its true essence, which is to be a political place, a production of truths.” – Alain Badiou
Two-time Oscar winning Czech chief Milos Forman has died at 86 years old as per Reuters and reports. Forman's significant other Martina educated Czech news organization CTK that the movie producer go after a short sickness in the U.S.
Some portion of the Czech new wave, Forman moved on from the Prague Film Faculty of the Academy of Dramatic Arts, and got worldwide consideration with so much titles as Black Peter (1964), The Loves of a Blonde (1965) and The Firemen's Ball(1967), the last two Oscar chosen people for best outside film. In 1968 he fled Czechoslovakia amid the Prague spring for the U.S. The Fireman's Ball, around a doomed occasion in a commonplace town, was a thump on Eastern European Communism and drummed up some excitement in his country with the administration. His 1971 parody, Taking Off, his first American title, won the 1971 Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival and featured Buck Henry and Lynn Carlin as guardians whose little girl flees. They soon start to bond with different guardians whose children have additionally fled from home. Before becoming famous in highlights, Forman cut his teeth in docs with one prominent title being Audition around two contending artist
Forman was known for his furious shows, getting both hazardous and nuanced exhibitions out of his performing artists, particularly Jack Nicholson, Louise Fletcher, Will Sampson, a youthful Danny DeVito and Brad Dourif in his component adjustment of Ken Kesey's One Flew Over a Cuckoo's Nest about a psychological patient played by Nicholson who challenges the healing center's the present state of affairs led by Fletcher's Nurse Ratched. The Movie earned five Oscar wins for best picture, executive, performing artist, on-screen character and adjusted screenplay; the initial five premium breadth since 1934's It Happened One Night. Notwithstanding being an Oscar victor, Cuckoo's Nest was a hit in the cinematic world in 1975 making near $109M.
Pauline Kael in her New Yorker audit expressed, "Milos Forman appears to have recognized the strong realistic material within Kesey’s conception. We all fear being locked up among the insane, helpless to prove our sanity, perhaps being driven mad; this fear is almost as basic as that of being buried alive. And we can’t formulate a clear-cut difference between sane and insane…the story and the acting make the movie emotionally powerful." Forman fan Baby Driver executive Edgar Wright tweeted today "“He had a tremendous filmography that documented the rebel heart and human spirit.” Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive
The challenge of this book is thinking critically about media practices in a setting where they are fast, fun, and ubiquitous. As an avowedly engaged and political approach to thought, critical theory of any sort encounters challenges. Attempting to analyze and intervene in the present, it nonetheless adopts a backward gaze, an idea G.W.F. Hegel figures with the owl of Minerva flying at dawn, Michel Foucault practices through his historical methods of archaeology and genealogy, and Slavoj Žižek conceptualizes with the notion of “retroactive determination.” A problem specific to critical media theory is the turbulence of networked communications: that is, the rapidity of innovation, adoption, adaptation, and obsolescence.1 The object of one’s theoretical focus and critical ire quickly changes or even vanishes. The time of theory is over-taken, even taken over, by ever-morphing, interlinking, media.
Since books can easily be surpassed by events, they appear particularly ill chosen as a medium through which to present a critical media theory. A theory that is current, if it is possible at all, seems confined to presentation within the forms and circuits it analyzes. It can be presented in face-to-face conferences, workshops, or meet-ups; it can be posted on discussion lists or blogs. It can be visualized, videoed, shared and distributed, critiqued, amended, sampled, and forwarded. Thought can be made immediate, an element of its moment or, more precisely, of the fantasy that attempts to delimit a moment out of the present’s rush to the future and absorption into the past.
A book that makes critical-theoretical claims about blogging thus encounters a double problem of its object and its form of presentation. Each side of the problem entraps theory in its setting. To address its object in a timely fashion, the book has to be new, fresh, up-to-the-minute, fashion-forward, bleedingedge. It needs to predict or at least hazard a guess as to where things are going, what’s going to happen. The book is pushed to adopt, in other words, the entrepreneurial expectations of the venture capitalist, racing to be the first out of the block. This side of the problem highlights one of the specific ways communicative capitalism captures critique and resistance, formatting them as contributions to the circuits in which it thrives.3 The temporal take-over of theory displaces sustained critical thought, replacing it with the sense that there isn’t time for thinking, that there are only emergencies to which one must react, that one can’t keep up and might as well not try.
he second side of the problem, the form of theory’s presentation, likewise highlights how communicative capitalism fragments thought into ever smaller bits, bits that can be distributed and sampled, even ingested and enjoyed, but that in the glut of multiple, circulating contributions tend to resist recombination into longer, more demanding theories. It’s like today we can have and share insights, but these insights must not add up to something like a theory that might aid us in understanding, critically confronting, and politically restructuring the present. Theodor Adorno’s criticism of the passion for information in mass culture applies more to contemporary communication and entertainment networks than it did to film and radio, the mass media he has in mind when he writes, “However useful it might be from a practical point of view to have as much information as possible at one’s disposal, there still prevails the iron law that the information in question shall never touch the essential, shall never degenerate into thought.”4 As multiple-recombinant ideas and images circulate, stimulate, they distract us from the antagonisms constitutive of contemporary society, inviting us to think that each opinion is equally valid, each option is equally likely, and each click is a significant political intervention. The deluge of images and announcements, enjoining us to react, to feel, to forward them to our friends, erodes critical-theoretical capacities – aren’t they really just opinions anyway? Feelings dressed up in jargon? Drowning in plurality, we lose the capacity to grasp anything like a system. React and forward, but don’t by any means think.
read the book below:
(Picture: Reuters)
The blaze, which started at around 4pm on Saturday, spread over multiple floors in the apartment block on Joiner Street in the city’s Northern Quarter. Smoke spread to several floors of the building via external wooden balconies. Images posted on social media showed firefighters battling the huge flames billowing from the building while crowds of people watched on from below.
A 23-year-old was taken to hospital suffering from smoke inhalation but there are not believed to be any other casualties, Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Service (GMFRS) said.
At around 6pm, GMFRS tweeted: ‘The fire had spread to multiple floors but we have things well under control here.
‘Firefighters along with colleagues from the Police and Ambulance service have done an amazing job to tackle this difficult incident!’ Residents told of the moment they realised the block was on fire, when they heard neighbours shouting in the hallways and banging on doors.
Megan Baxter, a resident on the second floor of the Lighthouse apartment building, told the Manchester Evening News: ‘I heard a knock on the door, but I thought it was just a postman so I didn’t answer at first.
‘Then I could hear people shouting in the hallway. About five or ten minutes later, next door came and knocked on the door and I answered. ‘He said: “There’s a fire, you need to get out”. I was only in a dressing gown, so I threw some pyjamas on and slippers. ‘I tried to get my hamster out of her cage, but she wouldn’t get out so I had to leave her.
‘I came downstairs and looked up and the sky was covered in smoke, with fire engine. Six or seven fire engines pulled up, there was firemen running everywhere, and about a hundred people in the street.’
She added: ‘It was stressful. I felt awful about leaving my hamster. Church Street was closed eastbound due to the incident between High Street and Tib Street’s junction with Dale Street. Witnesses applauded firefighters as they worked to douse the flames, which billowed from the balconies of the apartment block.
Witnesses applauded firefighters as they worked to douse the flames, which billowed from the balconies of the apartment block. (Picture: MEN)
Andrew Hirst, who who lives in the Northern Quarter, said crowds could be heard cheering as the fire was extinguished.
‘You could hear the crowd’s cheers as it was going down and you could see the torches from the firemen searching the burned out apartments right next door to the other apartments that were still frighteningly ablaze,’ the 36-year-old said. The businessman said the firefighters ‘controlled it well’ but described the incident as ‘pretty scary’. A spokeswoman for the North West Ambulance Service (NWAS) said resource were sent to the scene as shocking footage showed the spread of the fire.
The eighth floor was damaged by the smoke and floors 10 and 11 were affected externally, the fire service said.
A number of people were evacuated from the building and have been offered temporary accommodation.
text is taken from:
An Interview with Ewa Majewska
University of Warsaw © llee_wu | Flickr
In October the Polish Minister of Higher Education and Science announced a plan to erase Cultural Studies (among other disciplines) from the Polish register of scientific disciplines. This shift is billed as part of a general reform of the university system in Poland, supposedly directed at making the system of education more effective. While it is unclear how it accomplishes this objective, it threatens to weaken the critical humanities or even dismantle cultural studies altogether. Polish scholars launched a petition to request support for the continuation of Cultural Studies. The conversation below provides more details of the situation from Professor Ewa Majewska from the Artes Liberales Department of Warsaw University in conversation with McKenzie Wark from Eugene Lang College at The New School.
Ewa Majewska, could you first sketch out for me a little about your own work?
I am a feminist philosopher who is currently working on theories of subaltern counter-publics in the peripheries, weak resistances, and the avant-gardes. I am also interested in the resistance to fascism, and for this some Habermassian belief in institutionalized politics might be inevitable. Perhaps institutions of the common, but still — public, accessible and shared, and not owned. The universities should be one of them — institutions of the common, not just state run or private factories of knowledge.
This proposed erasure of cultural studies from the list of registered disciplines in Poland — what was the official reason, and what do you suspect might be other kinds of motivation ?
The official reason for the erasure of cultural studies from the list of registered disciplines in Poland was that it constitutes an element of a more general restructuring of the Polish academia. For some unknown reason the Minister of Science and Higher Education in Poland, Mr. Gowin, declared that the Polish academia should mirror the OECD system of disciplines, which is confusing and different from what we have and what is currently applied in other countries in the EU. This adjustment does not follow the logic of the evolution of the Polish disciplinary division towards the EU. Some 40 disciplines would be erased. What seems most troubling is the general negligence of the OECD towards the humanities — it is a system clearly favoring more technically oriented sciences and therefore unsuited and risky as a model of transforming humanities. The same applies to anthropology and art history.
His response was criticized by many scholars. In the monograph University as a Common Good, a brilliant analysis of the university as an institution of the common, Dr. Krystian Szadkowski makes the point that while the restructuring might actually open even more ways to fully include the diverse interdisciplinary cultural studies curricula into the measurable academic records, everything hides in the details of such a change. For example, whether the changes will create empty gaps in the developments of particular careers, departments, and journals.
I think that the main issue now is therefore to demand more clarity and exact answers to the details of this transformation, or to withhold it until we develop a clearer method of its execution. The Ministerial reform of the academia has already been criticized for its size, and perhaps the reshaping of the disciplines should be postponed, since it neither seems to be ready, nor necessary for the general reform.
Do you think this is part of a general movement towards a more conservative or restrictive approach to culture and scholarship in Poland? Are there other instances to which you think it is related?
For many scholars here this supposition sounds plausible. The majority of critical, progressive humanities scholarship is produced within the cultural studies disciplinary field– in our departments, journals, conferences, and other events. However, this field is not monolithic — the departments of cultural studies at Polish universities are diverse, and heterodox, particularly if you look at their programs and faculty. We have legitimate fears that the interdisciplinary character of the cultural studies will be torpedoed. However, as I emphasized above, the main problem is perhaps the negligence and carelessness of this proposition, not its explicitly political aims.
Cultural studies in the Anglophone world has a reputation for asking difficult questions, about class, race, gender, authoritarian populism, and so on. Does Polish cultural studies have any of those features or commitments?
Well, yes we do. We do all of that, to be precise. While in philosophy departments former Marxists almost all became conservative preachers after the political changes of 1989, within the cultural studies material cultures and histories, gender and ethnicity issues have always been at the core, recently joined by the problems of class, privilege and habitus, also the studies of rural populations and cultures often have some critical axis, as well as the research work on artistic production, naturally critical of neoliberal productivity and precarity, as well as the art histories, which — especially if developed within the cultural studies — bring critical responses to the ideological reproductions of privilege within various fields of cultural production.
What would Anglophone scholars recognize within Polish cultural studies, and what would you say are some unique theoretical or practical aspects of how this work is done there?
Our cultural studies offer several journals, which work internationally and are also produced in English, such as:
Widok
Praktyka Teoretyczna (philosophy, social sciences and cultural studies; interdisciplinary) Interalia (queer and feminist studies) Cultural Studies Review Polish Theater Journal and Kultura Współczesna, the oldest journal in the field, only published in Polish.
There are several developments within cultural studies which might be of interest, such as Holocaust Studies; The analysis of popular culture and feminism; Feminist and queer studies (within aesthetics); Aesthetics and theory of the image.
There’s analysis of cultural production — aesthetics as a matrix of the neoliberal production and forms of resistance. Of the university as the commons and of institutions of the common. Analysis of popular classes. Of resistance, messianism and popular cultures. There is also work on Intercultural and interspecies cultures. Just to name a few topics.
How has the reaction been from other Polish academics? Are you getting support from your colleagues?
We collected some 4700 signatures of support for our petition. This might give an impression of the support; it seems quite large I think, as the academic disciplines might not be the most important topic for most people. Some scholars openly say that this change is nonsensical. Regardless of this, we only get signs of support.
The Polish Sociological Association (Polskie Towarzystwo Socjologiczne; a professional organization) as well as The Citizens of Science (Obywatele Nauki , a general lobby for science, including scholars of different disciplines in Poland,) issued critiques of the ministerial reform project and, in support, letters for our cause. We also have the support of the Crisis Committee of Polish Humanities (Komitet Kryzysowy Humanistyki Polskiej). Their statement is here.
Ewa Majewska is at the Artes Liberales Department of the Warsaw University.
McKenzie Wark is at Eugene Lang College, The New School.
The interview is taken from:
Domestic betrayal … Julianne Moore as Margaret and Matt Damon as Gardner in Suburbicon. Photograph: Hilary Bronwyn Gay/Paramount Pictures For his latest directorial outing, George Clooney has given us a macabre comedy noir: watchable, lively, intricately designed, but with exotic plot contrivances and parallel storylines that don’t fully gel. Clooney and longtime producing partner Grant Heslov have rewritten an unproduced script by the Coen brothers, set in a satirically picture-perfect 1950s American suburb. Like the manicured locations of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet or Todd Haynes’s Far from Heaven, this is a place where ugly realities hunch behind the picket fence and the Colgate smiles: racism, deceit, murder. The Coens’ original screenplay was about a intimately horrible act of violence and domestic betrayal that goes farcically wrong. Clooney and Heslov have added a separate strand, making this drama work a double shift, attacking America’s postwar prejudice. It takes as its starting point the real-life case of the black family who tried moving to Levittown, the notorious whites-only development established by real-estate mogul William Levitt – praised only this summer in a rambling speech by President Donald J Trump to a baffled audience of boy scouts (and I have to admit that the bizarre juxtaposition of subject matter and audience fits rather well with this film). read more on: |
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