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doorjamb

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Posts posted by doorjamb

    Now That Trump's President... (not any more!)

    in General Banter

    Posted

    I actually just last night had a conversation about the Twin Peaks-y vibe of this year’s election media circus. Like, on the surface it’s just a numbing, sensational wash of loudmouthed name-brand pundits & politicos running their show biz as usual, but below the hyperbolic, over-emoted “journalistic” melodrama lurks a very real, if shapeless, inescapable evil. The result being that same TP sleep paralysis effect, where you’re hypnotized by the alien words & glowing eyes of the approaching predator, & your own inaction soon becomes the scariest part of the whole spidery mess.

    Films Recently Watched

    in General Banter

    Posted

    Scanners is black plastic treasure. Personally I'm less a fan of Videodrome than most; sure it's cryptic & edgy, but on the whole it just doesn't deliver (like Cosmopolis, come to think of it).

     

    Naked Lunch and eXistenz are is underrated IMO

     

     

    Caught the last showing at a local theater of The Lobster & was entirely satisfied, even as a profoundly unsociable individual who often fails to grok narratives around romantic connections & deep friendships.

    4 compulsory lapdances / 5

    Now That Trump's President... (not any more!)

    in General Banter

    Posted · Edited by doorjamb

    I sure hope somebody’s TiVoing this GOP convention, because I’m getting a kind of detached, nauseous pleasure from it all. No doubt the Dems’ shindig will run equally thick with flamboyant preening, self-righteous vilification, extremist hyperbole, & doublespeak propaganda brain-worms, but this is nonetheless a gut-turningly spellbinding show. Especially Orwellian was yesterday’s succession of speeches steadily chanting “Make America Safe Again” (i.e., “You Are Not Safe, But Make No Trouble For Us & We Will Protect You”), not to mention Trump's sporadic surprise manifestations via Jumbotron to drone a few slogans & reassure folks that he will indeed show up to party with them once they've been tickled & paddled into an adequate frenzy. Watching the crowd in their clown costumes take it all in stride is absolutely unreal. Meanwhile the news coverage switches back & forth between awkward, worthless commentary & incestuous interviews with other news crews.

     

    This guy, for instance. What the fuck.

     

    [youtubehd]SFRmKTtE4lU[/youtubehd]

     

     

    What’s maybe weirdest of all is waking up this morning to discover that the supposedly liberal media expending all its investigative resources, its opportunity to be outraged, & its audience’s patience, not deconstructing the chilling police-state sermonizing or the conspicuous shortage of substantial reasons to want Donald Trump for president, but instead gossiping about whether his daughter’s ghostwritten speech was plagiarized. No wonder the staffer who took the fall wasn’t terminated (even by a boss whose most famous fucking slogan was "You're fired!")—hell, she probably got a bonus.

    Now Reading

    in General Banter

    Posted

    608820.jpg

    Nice! I find Baudrillard most compelling when (as here) he's on about language/linguistic representation in particular (rather than broad "simulation ≥ reality" musings).

    Now Reading

    in General Banter

    Posted

     

    wow, what an odd reaction to The Trial… Did you like it at least? I avoided Kafka for years after the ubiquitous high school experience of having The Metamorphosis utterly ruined with vapid classroom overanalysis. When I finally gave him another shot I fell in love, & I'd definitely rank the Trial among his better long-form works.

     

    I just reread Joyce's Portrait of the Artist & now I want to run away from home to write poetry & be a dick to people by only speaking in Latin.

     

    I must say I did enjoy it. Not sure it'd be high on my list to read again straight away but maybe in years to come. What else would you recommend, I'd like to read another of his and compare.

     

    The Castle is likewise excellent. Also hard to go wrong with pretty much any collection of his short stories you run across. Come to think of it, Kafka's probably an author whose individual pieces really benefit the fuller your familiarity with his other work.

     

    I am now reading something called Modern Dogma & the Rhetoric of Consent wherein dude keeps denying the incompatibility of… uh… reasonable and unreasonable reasoning… So far has done nothing but scapegoat and nitpick Bertrand Russell for no especially compelling reason.

    Cheetah EP

    in Aphex Twin

    Posted

     

     

    INTERESTING:

     

    Cheetah ep is a little over 33 minutes.

     

    RDJ album (an LP) is a little under 33 minutes.

     

    Well said!

    RDJ is really an album on my point of view.

    Let's hope this Cheetah is as well, although i'm afraid it will be an EP (based on 2015 AFX experiences)

     

     

    I didn't even learn until embarrassingly recently that Come to Daddy wasn't an album (Also around the same length at 32:54)

     

     

    What are you all on about? "EP," "LP," "album," etc. are just holdover vinyl terminology. They were only useful because they let you know roughly how long the thing would run. These days they tell you literally nothing (except that they give corporate music and radio a great excuse to manufacture the illusion of product diversity and sometimes maybe sell you the same thing twice). If you know the Cheetah run-time, great, fuck the extra letters. This is idm, for wagonchrist's sake, these dudes practically invented adding meaningless numbers and letters to track titles for the lulz. Debating whether RDJ Album or Come to Daddy are EPs or "albums proper" is sophistic wankery.

    Now Reading

    in General Banter

    Posted · Edited by doorjamb

    wow, what an odd reaction to The Trial… Did you like it at least? I avoided Kafka for years after the ubiquitous high school experience of having The Metamorphosis utterly ruined with vapid classroom overanalysis. When I finally gave him another shot I fell in love, & I'd definitely rank the Trial among his better long-form works.

     

    I just reread Joyce's Portrait of the Artist & now I want to run away from home to write poetry & be a dick to people by only speaking in Latin.

    stupid first world achievements and successes

    in General Banter

    Posted

    turned in my bachelor's thesis...presented it in february, procrastinated and heard on monday that the deadline was today...so i did the finishing touches and turned it in....now i am at a loss on what to stress about this summer...the upcoming master's thesis..going to enjoy this little victory a little while

     

    Well done, comrade. Did my own oral thesis defense last week; in a few weeks I'll finally have earned an MA.

     

    Bit anticlimactic though, as I've not a clue where to go from here… :fear:

    Now Reading

    in General Banter

    Posted

    Second the e-reader comment: reading footnotes through an url link is much quicker and neater than flipping pages in a huge book.

     

    You guys gotta be kidding. The sheer physicality of the book, and the formal structure of its text, is half the joke. It's supposed to be a hassle. You can't lampoon the highbrow literati with an ebook.

     

     

    My most recent reads (thesis-writing procrastination in full swing, now) are Maurice Blanchot's Aminadab, a collection of mostly-new-to-me Tommaso Landolfi, and I just started in on Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo (mainly picked it up because I read Angel Heart by William Hjortsberg awhile back and have been jonesin' for more inner-city voodoo ever since).

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