A Gilded Planet

To Live 1994.  125 minutes. China. Directed by Zhang Yimou. Watchdate: 9/21/2011. In To Live , Zhang Yimou uses the magic incantations of puppetry intermingled with the proletarian instinct for survival to enchant and animate a story built from layers of dramatic irony and historical circumstance. The scenes featuring shadow puppetry are imbued with a lively, raucous joy. Their imagery is mysterious and sensitive and there’s a real sense of melancholy when the puppets are threatened (and finally lost) during the Cultural Revolution. Other striking moments for me included the abandoned battlefield that Fugui and Chungsheng wake up to after the Nationalist retreat followed by that terrific shot where the Communist army literally engulfs them. I would also single out those shots when Fugui’s daughter looks at herself in the mirror wearing Maoist garb and ponytails, seeing herself as a potential wife with this completely different sense of beauty.

Of the few visitors to this betamax, a significant number have come in search of monster trucks. The top ten search terms that have directed individuals to my site include a total of four monster truck related phrases: monstertrucks, monster trucks, monster truck rally and monster truck show. Taken together, monster trucks account for a significant proportion of traffic to this betamax. All of this is due to a offhand joke I made about Harry Potter. I used a monster truck image to illustrate the joke. But given these analytic results, I have decided to give the people what they want: A Gilded Planet is a proud sponsor of the Demolition Derby. All rights reserved.

Behold The Supremes as they speak to our innocence preserved by isolation and sweet harmonies’ balance Do we remember the original or the copy? Are they the same? the fake fake or poplar tree name brand memory game Finding a reference book after the apocalypse I feel as if I'm getting lost in these depths Watching the parody before the target You should feel no need to explain the Monet She flew the bomber at night when no one could see Poisoned by the singing yawn of manly responsibility A feminine violence unknown to the little dudes Outside of wartime without fasting or feuds I sing of the bodies undeadened by goblets They walk near cars that ride on the couplet Some call them zombies - oh no they are right We view them anothering from our Dreadnought in hardware honey dew guarding our youth we discorporate our voices as a goof The baby, the farting and the earthquakes The zombies, the children and the urn cakes

Nostalgia for the Light 2010. 90 minutes. Chile. Directed by Patricio Guzmán. Watchdate: 5/19/2011 Patricio Guzmán explores the mysteries of the Atacama Desert, the driest place on Earth, where astronomers can get a better view of the stars than anywhere else, where the bereaved search for the preserved bodies of Pinochet's victims in the shifting sands, where inscriptions survive from Pre-Colombian indigenes. In a brief but profoundly thoughtful documentary, Guzmán allows the cosmological and the political, the anthropological and the astronomical to intermingle and cross-pollinate rather than being artificially walled off from one another by different academic departments or different specialty television networks. A elegy for Chile's painful past but also searching meditation on the nature of time, memory and truth, Guzmán asks us to reconsider what is meant by the term 'history.' I couldn't be more encouraged to watch a documentary that so eloquently ...

i think and my thoughts cross the barrier into the synapses of the apparatus it can do such wondrous deeds for the you and for the me but what I cannot shake and what hints at things to come is that thoughts cross back in my dreams the sensations of the apparatus indulge the libido of my intellect: dark rigid cold alien i search for those lost apparitions of observation, judgment, and punishment once observed and understood the warmest bulwark for the you and for the me but now instead as the offspring of knowledge and imagination a part of a much larger system i am assimilated into higher orders of structure and meaning we have recorded our smiles as we eavesdrop on our own thoughts without hearing ourselves listening we will soon have a God a real one this time and we will make it with our own hands P.S. - Some language in this poem is borrowed. The original sources are Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism by Steven Connor along with...

Cisco Pike 1972.  95 minutes. USA. Directed by Bill L. Norton. Watchdate: 9/9/2011. God I love that 70s American vintage badass style especially when it not only involves Gene Hackman and Kris Kristofferson BUT ALSO our man Harry Dean Stanton. Gene Hackman plays a narc with a secret and Kris Kristofferson plays a fallen pop idol turned drug dealer. They tangle and the result is exceedingly pleasurable and disturbing.

Music for the Greatest Gregory You Know Tap your foot on the upper trough of the toilet; welcome the dogs as they run in from the yard and then try to make your knuckles bleat. 2002 Sounds for a Young Draftee Cry out in a malthouse. Try to remember the first time you accurately understood what sex meant in a mechanical sense. If you own maracas, shake them during both these actions. If not, snap your fingers. 1967 Asphyxiation Sonata Four onlookers bury their heads in large bowls of appetizing salad while a couple discusses the terms of their impending divorce in the foreground. Waiters and stewardesses enter and exit seemingly at random. Sometimes the waiters pop open champagne bottles and this causes the couple to shake their heads rhythmically like spinning plates. Unbeknownst to anyone but the reader, there is a large tub of polenta under the table the couple shares. 1984 Hermione Spins (trans. needed) Monster trucks rev their engines vaingloriously while a small girl crawls ...

The Skin I Live In 2011. 117 minutes. Spain. Directed by Pedro  Almodóvar    Watchdate: 12/5/2011 It's hard to know where to begin. Pedro Almodóvar has created a movie utterly unlike anything else I've seen of his yet completely grounded in the ideas and themes that obsess him. He's found a fresh, exhilarating and elegantly unbound approach to exploring his obsessions. I've watched a lot of Almodóvar movie this past year, and it's so wonderful to see him working his kind of magic in a completely new way. Aside from the excellent performances of Elena Anaya, Antonio Banderas and Marisa Paredes, aside from the beautiful look of the movie - its intricate production design, its fabulous costuming, aside from the brilliant soundtrack - what I admire is how Almodóvar deftly discovers his tragicomedies (or comic tragedies)…it's this high wire act balancing farce and melodrama, pure suspense and sheer laughter, pathos and satire. I'll highlight a few of my...

One part that knows is not my nose. You see how homophones distract from clever little pointless tracts I write so lorem ipsum goes away from bright rectangle apps. I want to come each time in gaps so I can feel so white like code that switches text before you know to look for plates and spikes that show. This time there'll be no failure mode.

The Lovers 1958. 90 minutes. France. Directed by Louis Malle. Watchdate: 11/4/2011. To call this a story of a bored housewife who takes a lover would be doing it a great disservice even though it sounds accurate. I found it riveting and sexy due to a committed subtlety. Malle explores the tension of intimacy and the intricacy of hidden emotions but cleverly hides his work in a conventional narrative. The best part is the ending, so full of burning doomed ambiguity. I think that's what ultimately damned it with the censors . But this is just a no-nonsense great movie.

"He comes to a gateway in the brick wall," Allie said. She took a long drag lying about in every stage and in a vast a hole in the darkness. "Sheets; in tanks, in boilers, in axles, in wheels, been to Hell," Jacob said, wrenched into eccentric and perverse the smile in his voice. "And I suppose mountains of it broken up, and rusty in its age walked to the bed." Allie let out a small bubbling in her youth; bright fireworks of her pillows as if she'd claw her way into them: steam-hammer; red-hot iron, white-hot iron, cold-black iron close to her ear. "This is a place to make a man's head ache too!" "And that's fine. But you don't do this very like me before I was set up. Because I'm the one honest man in this run in families. Your servant, sir." "Yours, we're married." PS - This prose poem (a literary style that is so hot right now) is a mash-up of Charles Dickens' Bleak House and Jacob's Shad...

"The causes which destroyed the ancient republics were numerous; but in Rome, one principal cause was the vast inequality of fortunes." - Noah Webster Wealth disparity in this country has grown to vast proportions. If we want to save our democracy and secure our investments in the future, we must reverse this alarming trend. We simply can't keep turning our back on education and expect a prosperous tomorrow. Keeping this in mind, I ask anyone who will listen to sign on in support of the Millionaires Tax both because it will bring funding back to California's public schools from kindergarten through higher education and it has the capacity to start translating the agitation of the Occupy movement into public policy that will reshape the conditions of economic power in this country.

In Vanda's Room 2000. 170 minutes. Portugal. Directed by Pedro Costa. Watchdate: 4/13/2011 I had to stand up for a considerable portion of this movie's nearly three hour running time because it was physically taxing to watch and I had to resist what it was doing to me. Standing up against it seemed to be the only way. Costa follows up on a woman who starred as the sister in his last movie, Ossos . Her name is Vanda and she has convinced him to dispense with the phony scripting and story and instead just shoot a bunch of footage of crackhead zombies in their decrepit homes that are under assault from bulldozers serving the gentrification agenda of Lisbon in the 2000s. The noise from the bulldozers is fairly constant, just like the constant likelihood of Vanda or her friends to take a break from long conversations to smoke more crack. These zombie bodies persist along doing what zombie bodies do (smoke crack, have conversations, look at the sun in weird glasses, smoke more cr...

I wish this weekend in San Diego had looked more like last weekend in Moscow.

10. Philology 9. Morphology 8. Teleology 7. Etiology 6. Scatology 5. Codicology 4. Olly Olly Oxen Free 3. Metrology 2. Horology 1. Chronology

I Can't Sleep 1994. 110 minutes. France. Directed by Claire Denis. Watchdate: 3/6/2011 Based on seeing this movie - unfortunately the only feature I got to see at last spring's Denis retrospective at the PFA - I revisited my thoughts and feelings on White Material , eventually coming to the conclusion that Claire Denis may be the most compelling cinematic storyteller working today that I have seen. Her only competition thus far for my preferences would be the Coen Brothers, and I Can't Sleep suggests that she may be more inventive and daring then they could hope to be. She makes movies in a completely different idiom, mixing a rhapsodic cocktail of dark absurdity, humane and naturalistic conflict, political paradoxes, and fears, loves, dreams realized, satirized, undulating in imitation of the earth. In I Can't Sleep , every character is at once sympathetic and repulsive, and humorous asides infest the plot and take it over like so many termites. I have rarely been s...

as if another glass for this extremophile. We praise Prince for his pansexuality and the queeny fixins thereof. I gave him a violet for violence in the gun can held in each hand of KUKA industrial robot arm that I first saw deep in the televisual hub there appeared a pitched bullet of Ghost Pepper Zombie Crackheads. This raised the sonic interest rate which left Prince maqued with danderous slavey footprints. This pure play of virtuoso gave glam to Our. And we dod praise Our. Such CEOs earned a celebrity premium that Our may have approved. We found out that he was an A-List Loon of the kind

Drive 2011. 100 minutes. USA. Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn. Watchdate: 9/19/2011 Drive is a contemplative action noir with an 80s European aesthetic and a 70s American attitude (or perhaps sensibility might be the better word). It strikes an unusual balance between the visceral and the detached. The cast is pretty good: Albert Brooks is particularly inspired in this joint. It's one of the better 2011 movies that I've seen.

** This is an automated message -- please do not reply as you will not receive a response. ** Dear Robert Bruens, Thank you for your recent order from the University of California, Berkeley - SO/WAH WebStore, powered by e-academy Inc. Your order includes e-academy’s Basic Access Guarantee, which provides you with 31 days of access to your download and/or key(s) from the original order date. Your Basic Access Guarantee will expire on Feb 16, 2012 Once your Basic Access Guarantee expires, your download and/or key(s) will be archived. To ensure that your download and/or key(s) remain accessible to you, you can extend your coverage to 24 months with the Extended Access Guarantee for just $4.95. This additional protection will ensure that your download and/or key(s) is backed up in the event that you misplace your key or need to re-download your software at a later date. Please note that if access to your download and/or key(s) expires, you will be required to pay a retrieval fe...

To speak coherently is human to talk nonsense divine or should you say divoon Let's write a speech about captivity in the backseat of a peach sedan the address will say ‘No one can be happy but me’ but with certain exemptions and earmarks such as a dirty nickel plated excursion towards aimsol Ah yes aimsol that cloud of lost souls where is discovered (question mark) overfabricated words & found languages aimsol aimsol aimsol ah ah ah She monstratiated supraneously inberscene the pudgelled cublic, the ondis martenotes Fitz boocomon plup aimsol Givvord umbrel zune fortuna Cree griega aimsol zune canonical 'Now where is that speech, then,' asked he of the loud sweater, dragging John Vivien Nancarrow after him by his coattails, and jabbering the entire time. "Here, Onlor Gulch Auditorium, give the speech, don’t sell yourself short— —proud married couple—bought them gifts—all fitz absurdity— —this way, sir—where's the bugs?—all in jest, I kn...

I missed out on making New Years resolutions, so I have decided to make some resolutions for February. I will post here every day. I will read a poem every day.  (I have already failed this resolution.) I will read Heart of Darkness.  I never read it when it was assigned in AP Lit back in my senior year of High School. It was assigned in a class I was taking this semester, but I dropped the class. But I'm still going to read it, by reading 2-5 pages every day until I finish. It's short so I think this is my most manageable resolution. I'll check back in March to see how well I'm doing. How your face did grow, we'll never know...

Last Friday, I went to Oakland Art Murmur and saw a terrific exhibit at Johansson Projects that matches up perfectly with the technomystification I am encountering in my research on time in Victorian Britain. The exhibit was multimedia and included text, imagery and video. Some of the components were styled as old-timey advertisements (or perhaps disclaimers would be the better word) while others were paintings, prints or comic strips. The exhibit's theme explored an imagined historical fear of electricity transforming and bedeviling the human body and spirit. These poorly captured screenshots of the free program that I picked up at the gallery do not begin to do the exhibit justice. It's difficult to describe the curious excitement I felt in viewing the gleeful antiquarian anachronism of the work. I highly recommend checking out Follies of the Digital Arcade . PS - Here's some better images I grabbed from their website:

Lolita 1962. 152 minutes. USA. Directed by Stanley Kubrick. Watchdate: 2/24/2011 By channeling the elemental creep, Peters Sellers causes convulsive combustion deep in my guts, cries of uncontrollable laughter seared permanently deep in the bastion of my physical memory. An engineer like Kubrick builds soulful demons and then forces them into covalent orbits. The reactions are priceless. My inner optimist shrieks with horror when contemplating his work, but he probes our darkest impulses with unflinching humanity.

A billy club got jabbed in my belly. (I mean to say: I wasn’t following orders.) For crowds that link arms, police gangs use arms. And was the ground we stood ground of the public or private? Who made the ground (our belly) that way? Ask the one percent. “Move! Move! Move! "There is no one percent!"

I Am Cuba 1964. 140 minutes. Cuba. Directed by Mikhail Kalatozov. Watchdate: 12/29/2011 Holy God! Sweet Jumping Christmas! Perhaps it's my unfortunate ignorance of early Soviet filmmaking and my total lack of knowledge of Eisenstein and that school, but this movie moves in a way like nothing I've ever seen before. Purely based on its dynamism I wish to fill it with stars! The difference between photography and motion pictures is the motion. Though that seems self-evident, it takes a movie like this to really make the implications of that clear. Why does no one seem to use a camera like this anymore? I don't mean copying this style, but the mobility of the camera is just on another level here and I'm wondering why so few movies of recent times (at least that I've seen) ever achieve that kind of mobility and dynamism - or anything close to it… it's just in a different league. Even when the camera is still, the placement is so brilliant you'd never expect it ...

I haven't written much about the Occupy movement both because I'm lazy and because I haven't thought of anything original to say about it. I have taken a baton to the stomach, I have participated in actions that have stopped (at least for now) further fee increases that would make the UC system even less affordable, and just a couple of weeks ago I took part in a largely unreported occupation that restored funding to the Anthropology Library (we had to do the same thing over two years ago before Occupy Wall Street was a national catchphrase). But so far, I haven't been able to articulate anything that anyone else hasn't already written better than I could. That still remains the case, but I think that writing about how CNN and the New York Times failed utterly and deceived their readers in "reporting" on Occupy Oakland this weekend is worthwhile even though someone else has already described what they did. Because the message must get out there: believe al...