Babel

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. ...

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 strategically place themselves in relation to their prey; then, upon setting the proper calibrations via tracer rounds or test shots, they frame their target and fire; the volley, the mortar, the snapshot, then consumes the ...

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 so successfully and subtly harness the body and make it governable, discipline it and regulate it as to form and perpetuate a general welfare, a common well-being, a collective mind, body, and spirit—a body politic ...

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 God for whom Nietzsche wrote an obituary. It is that that God figure, after all, that impossible Real father, we now halfheartedly transcribe into our now celebrated friend-foes, the Natives, the dead noble savages ...

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. ...

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 hegemonic profane: the politics of the Zombie ...

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 the Exodus/Jesus/Armageddon/the Old Testament] all embody modernity's obsession with the alluring products of chaotic mystery's tempering by the rational, steady hand of science. ...

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 pipe, so does Ford's A Single Man depict sexuality—as an image not of homosexuality, but of sexually proper, a love of body—in the most cleverly silent manner, free of the crass verbose silence that makes ...

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, intend to excavate just that. ...

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. ...

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 it is to be cat; or perhaps the dangerous cat for which it is to be mouse. It has made crime, serious crime, a sport for celebrities; only the wise, the stealthy, the meticulous, after ...

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 drips are started to ascertain that the connections are clear. The condemned is allowed a final statement and the execution commences. ...

The cult of the shaheed is in Sakhnin, in the narrow corridors of al-Quds, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in France, and on the web: on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Wordpress and Google. The cult's spaces are united as spaces of broader commemoration, as cemeteries of hope and symbols of the transubstantiation of Loss into curvy Arabic script, desert slate and concrete. ...

One interesting paradox embedded in the heart of liberal-republicanism, particularly that of the United States, is that it works to create a reality it claims already exists—a reality of freedom, of 'free' autonomous agency, of 'free' markets, et cetera. In other words, freedom is always there, its always said to be present, it is—yet it is always never quite there, its always becoming; we always need it, ...

In the most famous scene of Buñuel's Viridiana (1961), Handel's Messiah gives rhythm to an arrhythmic bestial orgy: a burglary turned bourgeois banquet held by a motley group of beggars. Though the village paupers broke in and commandeered the estate of their benefactor ex-novitiate Viridiana with the intention of just "looking around," their quick survey, their quick step out of the proletarian realm quickly turns into a drunken, hedonistic feast of destruction, rape and chaos. Before ...

The fascist makes a throne out of the cult of rationality--a decadent palace whose bricks and mortar are his truths--and on this throne he sits, like our tragic Heidegger, dreaming of Gemeinschaft and völkism, of grandiose fusions and nationalist mobilization. This fascist throne owes its foundation to Apollo unmediated, to the radicalization of reason, the concentration of reason to the point of Dionysian toxicity. Perhaps ...

“And say to the believing women that they should lower their gaze and guard their modesty; that they should not display their beauty and ornaments except what must ordinarily appear thereof; that they should draw their veils over their bosoms and not display their beauty except to their husbands, their fathers, their husbands' fathers, their sons, their husbands' sons, their brothers, or their brothers' sons or ...

Below is a relevant sample from Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish (Part III: Panopticism). Emphasis is mine. "Bentham's Panopticon is the architectural figure of this composition. We know the principle on which it was based: at the periphery, an annular building; at the centre, a tower; this tower is pierced with wide ...

History lives not in dusty books or timelines. Rather, it dwells outside of us -- in a dimension riddled with twisting halls and corridors, complex junctions and disjunctions. For thousands of years, though, to no avail, man has attempted to transform into words the rapidness of the event, the moment of its sudden eruption, that precise instant the event peaks in random fury and newness. We call these monumentalizations written on papyrus, parchment, and now ...

Our political frame of reference, as taught in classes, written in the most popular books and seen on television is a now global one – "a world without borders." This globalization movement, this mass movement towards neo-liberalism, towards political and economic liberalization, plays a large part (if not the largest) in what I have come to see as a the construction of a new 'globalized' politics. ...

As the Leftist (and here, it should be made clear, by Leftist I mean the modern ‘revolutionary,’ the ambitious Marxist, the leftist ideologue) lusts for revolution, for change, he binds himself in the chains of his own truth. Enslaved, he affirms himself through the disaffirmation of the other (the scabs, the blacklegs, the capitalists, the fascists, the gusanos) [...] ...

Though German slang for 'fare-dodger,' Schwarzfahrer literally means 'black rider' and it is this dynamic Schwarzfahrer—a joke, a film, and political statement all in one—plays with until its punchline. When a black man enters a public tram, the viewer remains unsure as to whether or not he is the title's 'Schwarzfahrer' in both ...

“The problem of Islamic world is, as is well known, that, since it was exposed to Western modernization abruptly, without a proper time to 'work through' the trauma of its impact, to construct a symbolic-fictional space/screen for it, the only possible reactions to this impact were either a superficial modernization, an imitated modernization ...

"The sleep of reason produces monsters" -- this is the theme of Francisco Goya's controversial series of etchings Los Caprichos. Macabre, dark, and sharply satirical, Los Caprichos is an indictment of Spain as Goya saw it: socially repressed, rationally etherized and riddled with monsters. The subhuman ghouls, anamorphic animals and lifelike humans of Caprichos problematize Goya's present, and serve as witty critiques of the monsters that rule as reason sleeps — the social, religious, and ...

Poems by Mahmoud Darwish and Jose Marti are shared as to highlight their common themes of longing. ...