Qatsi & Crisis as Balance
Like its contemporary Akira, Koyaanisqatsi sheds light on something different: the freakish balance of mechanized life, its life-likeness, its symbiotic relations with disciplinary society, biopolitics, and crisis culture.
Featured Posts
The Camera Kills Twice
The camera is a weapon like any other: "ready, set, fire," as the film DDR/DDR formulated, is not unlike "lights, camera, action." In both cases the scene is controlled with a profound aesthetic militancy: the shooter and the photographer
The Public Service Announcment
Given this day and age, with its acute understanding of birth rates and death rates, crime rates and demographics, it is indeed no surprise that there are such tools as the public service announcement, such tools that are able to
A Future Fixation (2)
Like Johnny, we're all poseur prophets ruled by micro-manias foretelling grand visions of the end of history. We want to be BIBLICAL again. Just like the Jews longed for the Freudian Moses they killed, so do we, perhaps, long for
The Coptic Martyrdom Cult – شهيد
It seems that this modern shaheed culture is not unique to Islam—it appears with shockingly similar aesthetics in the commiseration-commemoration pieces of Egypt's marginalized Coptic populations.
Recent Posts
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Posted Mar 06, 2010 by Alexander de la Paz
Like its contemporary Akira, Koyaanisqatsi sheds light on something different: the freakish balance of mechanized life, its life-likeness, its symbiotic relations with disciplinary society, biopolitics, and crisis culture.
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Posted Feb 17, 2010 by Alexander de la Paz
The camera is a weapon like any other: "ready, set, fire," as the film DDR/DDR formulated, is not unlike "lights, camera, action." In both cases the scene is controlled with a profound aesthetic militancy: the shooter and the photographer [...]
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Posted Feb 09, 2010 by Alexander de la Paz
Given this day and age, with its acute understanding of birth rates and death rates, crime rates and demographics, it is indeed no surprise that there are such tools as the public service announcement, such tools that are able to [...]
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Posted Jan 23, 2010 by Alexander de la Paz
Like Johnny, we're all poseur prophets ruled by micro-manias foretelling grand visions of the end of history. We want to be BIBLICAL again. Just like the Jews longed for the Freudian Moses they killed, so do we, perhaps, long for [...]
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Posted Jan 15, 2010 by Alexander de la Paz
It seems that this modern shaheed culture is not unique to Islam—it appears with shockingly similar aesthetics in the commiseration-commemoration pieces of Egypt's marginalized Coptic populations.
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Posted Jan 07, 2010 by Alexander de la Paz
In the wake of the post-apocalyptic towns' biopolitical failure to preserve the pure, there is indeed power, there is hierarchy, there is hegemonized politics—but it is not the politics of struggling pure, rather it is the politics of the now [...]
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Posted Jan 03, 2010 by Alexander de la Paz
PART 1: We're a culture obsessed with both constructing and deciphering glyphs—deciphering the constructed and constructing the deciphered. The X-Files, The Da Vinci Code, Angels and Demons, National Treasure, and the countless biblical documentaries titled Secrets of [Whatever: be it [...]
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Posted Dec 27, 2009 by Alexander de la Paz
Fashion designer Tom Ford said the following of his directorial debut : A Single Man "is not a gay film." And he's right. Just as René Magritte's La trahison des images depicts not a pipe, but an image of a [...]
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Posted Dec 25, 2009 by Alexander de la Paz
Partaking in an archeology of Satan's depictions in film entails excavating man and his fears, man and his passions, wants, dreams and temptations. The freeze-frames and digital clips complied here, showing Satan the powerful, Satan the sexy, Satan the crafty, [...]
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Posted Dec 19, 2009 by Alexander de la Paz
Just as today's market is flooded with over-priced 'exotic' gastronomical and recreational oddities—that are, despite their faux-exoticness, simply sweeter, crispier, 'Coca-Cola' variants of their counterparts—today's market too is flooded with reified religion.
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Posted Dec 11, 2009 by Alexander de la Paz
Unbeknown to itself, the justice system has bred (and still does breed) a stock of warriors that live and die to challenge its mettle, grit and gut. By constituting objects to correct, justice has made the clever mouse for which [...]
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Posted Dec 07, 2009 by Alexander de la Paz
The condemned is laid down and strapped onto a gurney. His arms are swabbed with alcohol before two sterilized intravenous cannulaes are inserted—one primary line in one arm, one backup line in the other. With the necessary connections made, saline [...]