A Gilded Planet

F: Dear H, I don't care what happens as long as I get to kill shit. Sincerely, F H: Dear F, Typhoon Harridan! don't hawk out at me – H F: Dear H, I'm not. I'm with you on this one. Just tell me who to split. Sincerely, F H: Let's be real for a moment. I used to be just like you, full of apples and kanger. Then I learned how to cook stir-fry, sew backpacks and fix motorcycles. Have a good one. - H F: I need your sayso before I gogo on these cholos. I don't even know what that means, F. Take yourself down a peg, it'll do you a world of good. - H H - Maybe you forgot what you owe me and what it means to not even want anymore. Peg yourself down a take and throw out the rice cooker while you're add it. F - H, upgrade your attitude. You know how to make Powerpoints, that doesn't equip your for life in killing fields, trust me, okay. F. H. Con your way up the food chain all you like but sooner or later you're going to find the ...

Continued from Part I . The problems of the U.S. Tax Code are almost innumerable, but I will describe only the most inimical flaws that this proposed overhaul will address. These can be categorized broadly in three groups: problems of unfairness, problems of inefficiency and problems of complexity. The tax code is unfair when it derives revenue in a needlessly regressive manner as in the case of the funding source for Social Security and Medicare. The FICA Tax that raises revenue for those programs is flat and thus by definition regressive. An individual earning $20,000 annually is in the same income bracket as a person earning $90,000 in the same year as far as the FICA tax is concerned. To make matters worse, only the first $106,800 of wages is subject to Social Security portion of the tax while investment income is not subject to the tax at all. This means that for three fourths of Americans, the FICA tax represents a majority of their tax liability. But for the wealthiest peopl...

People tend to overestimate the level of control they have over events, understanding their contributions as important even when they are actually inconsequential. People stand by their belief that they can affect the results of random systems and even when a relationship exists between actions and outcomes, people still reliably overestimate the importance of that relationship. For wealthy people, this tendency is much stronger than among ordinary people.  This may explain the existence of such absurd social phenomena as aristocracies and hereditary monarchy. When you have so much money , this may distort your perception of the world in such a way that you could actually start to believe it makes sense for your children to inherit the extremely powerful position you hold simply by virtue of them being your children.

The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans 2009.  122 minutes. USA. Directed by Werner Herzog. Watchdate: 3/27/2011. An odd duck of a movie that novelly spoofs the police detective story by roiling up such an absurd concoction of unhinged wildness that it skewers conventions and upsets expectations seemingly without any effort expended whatsoever. This is exactly the kind of movie I love - contemptuous of genre, hilariously impulsive, aware of its self-indulgence but unwilling to apologize for it. In fact, it fulfilled my desires too much - at a certain point it was so enjoyable that it ceased being at all challenging. Therefore it can't quite rise to the top of the pile. Or can it? On first viewing it felt too good to be true, but in retrospect I can't stop loving its drunken audacity and hallucinatory liveliness. In any case, this is exactly the way Nicolas Cage can be utilized effectively for high entertainment - waving a huge gun around in order to threaten old ladies,...

Leaves of Grass 2009.  105 minutes. USA. Directed by Tim Blake Nelson. Watchdate: 3/24/2011. An odd duck of a movie that novelly attempts to use the delicately promising premise of Edward Norton playing mismatched twin brothers - one an Apollonian academic, the other a Dionysian drug dealer - to combine the utterly modern subgenre of a stoner action comedy (ala Pineapple Express ) with the most ancient of genres, the Greek Tragedy (ala Antigone ). The result, as one might expect, is very uneven. But it deserves some attention for the curiosity of its storytelling impulses. Oscillating between ruthlessly violent Jewish gangsters and loving tributes to Walt Whitman, satiring the pretensions of cloistered academia alongside the antics of troglodyte rednecks, the movie virtuously tries to arbitrate the idiosyncrasies of the diverse ways people choose to live their lives. It's a valiant effort, worthwhile as much for how it fails as how it succeeds.

This section is rambling and weird. Please fix this nonsense. (You cannot fix it through a purchase or a password, its just something that burns in your chest.) Miskimin is said to have been raised inside a globe of video glands. He fought the populace for points, which he would trade in for a toothbrush and other tools in order to acquire more points. I. Depending on who Miskimin really was, you may have different objectives. If you want to see the highlights of development, you can do that by building Banana Republic-type stores on a lake of lava in order to conquer or the world or blast off into space. This will be addictive fun, but you will find that you torture yourself with the allure of “just one more turn.” II. If Miskimin was an alchemist, the likelihood is that he does not live in this century. In that case, you will have to fight your way through each shared space. Along the way, you will kill enemies like Ghenghis Khan and Alexander the Great by laying railroad t...

The Tree of Life 2011.  138 minutes. USA. Directed by Terrence Malick. Watchdate: 8/15/2011. This movie is the most conspicuously arty movie I have watched since Wings of Desire . It left me feeling conflicted. I want to call it pretentious garbage, but I got too caught up in it and found it too emotionally and intellectually stimulating to really believe that it's that. No doubt it is pretentious, and finds itself more profound than it actually is, but as with Wings of Desire I admire rather than ridicule its soaring ambition. I found both the second section and the third section of the movie to be superb. The second section is a journey through space and time to discover the origin of life and rhythms of birth and death. This section is packed with great images. On that basis alone, I rate it highly but I also like that it connects human tragedy to the larger canvas of the cosmos. As portentous as it is, I wish more storytellers were daring enough to make that leap from the c...

The United States tax code needs a complete overhaul. An overhaul is necessary not simply because a wide variety loopholes, exemptions, and carve outs have infested the system with unfairness, complexity and inefficiency. Even more importantly, the United States needs a tax structure that will help it confront the economic and environmental challenges of the 21st century in a sophisticated, effective way. Closing loopholes and eliminating special interest giveaways, while appealing and worthwhile, is just not enough good enough in a world of staggering economic imbalances and looming climate catastrophes. We must pursue a more ambitious approach. We should eliminate the federal income tax and the payroll (or FICA) tax and replace them with more sensible revenue measures to fund the bulk of government expenditure. Basic economic principles indicate that governments should tax activities in order to reduce their incidence. For this reason, governments have so-called ‘sin’ taxes on alco...

Live Flesh 1997.  103 minutes. Spain. Directed by Pedro Almodóvar. Watchdate: 5/22/2011. Shall we gasp at the lively energy of this uninhibited soap opera that brings only graceful honor and boundless imagination to a once scorned storytelling form? Javier Bardem accomplishes wonderful acts in the fields of wheelchair basketball and cunnilingus, playing against type as a nerdy paraplegic. A storm of jealous misbehavior swirls around him, alternately uproarious and moving, engulfing his seemingly untouchable goodness as Almodóvar upsets expectations with ease and memorably weaving emotional conjuring. The puzzle snaps into place just before we are ready to say goodbye.

5. The Pimps of Joytime 4. Kapowski 3. Beep 2. The Deadly Gentlemen 1. In One Wind

No place to live No place to work I can't help feeling like a shiftless jerk So I'm stealing from Santa Claus Santa Claus, Santa Claus I'm stealing from Santa Claus Bank account's empty Credit is shot Don't even own all the junk that I got But I'm stealing from Santa Claus Santa Claus, Santa Claus Stealing from Santa Claus I know it's my fault I know I fucked up Just drop some coins in my novelty cup Cuz I'm stealing from Santa Claus Santa Claus, Santa Claus Stealing from Santa Claus I got a friend Pancho's his name Had no idea he's playing this game Stealing from Santa Claus Santa Claus, Santa Claus Stealing from Santa Claus We maque all the villains While Pancho, that turk studied supraneous neural networks We're all stealing from Santa Claus Santa Claus, Santa Claus Stealing from Santa Claus Santa Claus, shame! What have you done?

"Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." - J. Robert Oppenheimer The bust of J. Robert Oppenheimer that sits prominently in the Physics-Astronomy Library of the University of California, Berkeley includes a biographical blurb on a plaque beneath the head: The plaque makes no mention whatsoever of Oppenheimer's most (in)famous invention: the atomic bomb. How curious. It's almost as if the University of California isn't proud of its role in inventing the atomic age and engineering the proliferation of the most dangerous weapons in the history of world. As if the school doesn't want to draw attention to the fact that two of its campuses are dedicated to designing the next generation of thermonuclear weapons.

Biutiful 2010.  148 minutes. Spain. Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu. Watchdate: 2/28/2011. You will have already guessed how easily my way of evaluating can split from the critical and then continue to evolve into its opposite. Such a evolution receives an incredible jolt each time a movie has forced me to try to find out who I am—how could it happen that one day I'd discover myself in the reflection of the shadows playing upon the silver screen? The critical judgments of value have as their starting point a need for dramatical verisimilitude, a blooming, rich, even overwhelming vein of emotional realism, together with those aspects required to maintain these qualities—fine actorly performances, a throbbing plot, children or a yearning in their absence, nudity of some sort or another, and, in general, everything which involves adults qua adults feeling their oats yet feeling guilty about it. My method of evaluating has, as you might imagine, other preconditions. Therefo...

The Undulating Earth  by Yekaterina Lazarova Cosmocrat by Darwin Fallon The Autobiography of Hoover Framingham by Hoover Framingham The Butterfly Auction by Li Shao Adam's Fictions by Ray Pinchot Internal Travel by Alexander Williams Oliver A History of Snakebites by  Frances Perlmutter Nostalgiac  by Hamish Dohr The Perpetual Fortune by Tia Tula Unusual Contraption by Eric Tertius Intention by Tsung-dao Liang Directions to an Unknown Road  by Fox DeMoisey Season of Amnesia by Zülfü Erdogan Eddie Notorious  by Katherine Eastwick This Moon's Labyrinth by Jônatas Gusmão The Dioramic Dynamic by P.C. Bentley Blair

UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert J. Birgeneau announced he was resigning yesterday and I know I speak for a fair number of students, faculty and staff in saying "Good riddance." But you would never know that faculty had debated a vote of no confidence in Birgeneau's during recent months or that student government was presently having a similar discussion if you read the Los Angeles Times : Birgeneau, whose annual salary is $436,800, presided over the highly political campus during an uptick in protests over tuition hikes. In November, the Occupy movement erected a tent city on campus and student demonstrators contended that UC police brutally used batons to evict them. There is no need to frame the UC police brutality as an unproven allegation. There are lots and lots of videos of what happened : police beat up students and professors before a tent city was ever even erected (and they beat students the same way two years before in 2009, it's a pattern). One ...

Cockfighter 1974.  83 minutes. USA. Directed by Monte Hellman. Watchdate: 2/27/2011. That's not Warren Oates, but yeah that guy is putting a live chicken's head in his mouth. Oh - here is that hero of our regrets, that stoic of unfought battles past - Warren Oates , a man for his time in a movie of its time. When images capture the mood of a hungover people, we can breathe easy for there is no fabrication of anger, disappointment, inadequacy, even betrayal. There is a genuine worthiness in the expression of these sentiments. In the intimations of skill and sport in the insular world of cockfighting, one can read the thoughts of entire culture. The time during which I held away the movie at arm's length has now passed and I am ready to fully embrace this perfect example of that certain 70s Americana feel, the sullen working class bourgeosie ready to be kicked in the knees for the next forty years, all of it encapsulated in the petty robberies, the money hidden amongst r...

Kahuna Lacuna! This deadly chamber await Unjumble your face to hear Libidinal Kibitzers Colossal Academic: the difference is youth "She fall, she fall," he begrudges Adhesive C-sections Retina Patina...his latest plan come early Gruyere, you big bear let Paginated Regiments commence Fructose Bubbler: Gruyere's gone home Midgewest! "To the house of yore," dances Barrister Furtively Umberto Dudley never met her in life Now gone just as Gruyere & University Depopulated Had you listened to those Juiced Whiskers Just Wait! She alive Gruyere out newborn provosts -- A Kahunal Lacunal Paradiso

I failed all of my February Resolutions . My failures came in varying degrees: I did not read a poem each day at all really after the first handful of days, I only read the first third of Heart of Darkness , but I did post on this Betamax every day in February except the last few. So let's try this again with some wildly unreachable resolutions for March: 1. Line up a solid job prospect for after I graduate 2. Write a total of 20,000 words 3. Read The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge 4. Really finish reading Heart of Darkness  this time I'll check back in April to see how I did.

Circus of Horrors 1960.  88 minutes. UK. Directed by Sidney Hayers. Watchdate: 2/27/2011. These cinephillic curators whom we have to thank for the best attempts up to this point to direct our attention to lively trash normally consigned to forgotten gutters - they torment us with a persistent problem. In uncovering a potential treasure in the beehives of Netflix, am I simply elevating a low-rent imitation Hitchcock, perverse but uninspired, beyond its proper station? Certainly there are divine moments embedded in Circus of Horrors , but this symphony of mutilation almost seems to court a cult following with its curious bodily obsessions. Perhaps it can be best described as a garishly grim public service announcement about the dangers of hubris in the field of reconstructive surgery.

I’m the jackass who died on a sunny day A hot Saturday steeped in solar radiance Dogs broke free of their leashes Ladies wore their biggest hats Everyone laughed with mucho gusto And I had to go and die Next day, they started digging and it rained Not a heavy rain Just enough to soak the backs of their shirts A warm, August rain A rain that aspired to be tropical On Sunday, they dug my grave and it rained 24 hours later it snowed Frozen flakes steamed down in furious heaps from above Layer after layer of dirty vanilla enveloped the sweaty world Children stayed home from school Spiders came in from the cold Men threw shovels up chimneys Charm bracelets and earthworms adorned my wrists I consider myself the luckiest jackass in the earth

Plastic Planet 2009.  95 minutes. Austria. Directed by Werner Boote. Watchdate: 3/14/2011. Here is a documentary that deadens the world historical importance of its subject matter with unnecessary speculation, effective gimmicks turned idiotic by overuse throughout the running time, and most of all a real creep of a director/"star" in form of the odiously mannered Werner Boote. Just go watch Tapped instead.

Privatize your emotions in the wetware of your braingus. Your mind is a gated community of alchemical magic. Outsource your empathy to the charity of your choice. Tax benefits exist to reward you for your benevolence. Deregulate your sociopathy to let undead unborn demons out. Zombie banks will help you to recoup any losses. Securitize your myopia! You don't want to kill the biosphere... ...just shrink it 'til it's small enough to drown in a bathtub...

Never Let Me Go 2010.  103 minutes. UK. Directed by Mark Romanek. Watchdate: 3/23/2011. While watching Never Let Me Go , I got caught up in it somber dissection of the meaning of love and affection. Its dystopian trappings seemed to exist mostly to further dramatize the choices of its three romantic leads. As Shakespeare knew, young love only becomes tragic when the lovers never get a chance to really grow up. So yeah, as a dystopian vision, it was just another take on The Giver or what have you, but the romance at its center succeeded remarkably. Therefore it was a Very Good Movie. But looking back on it now, all I can remember is extremely attractive people with bad hair cuts pouting for what seemed like the entire duration of the movie.

B: We used to listen to "The Adventures of Blasto McGee" and imagine him cleverly foiling the dastardly machinations of Astro W. Chandler. N: I remember it was Ralph Dannigan as Blasto McGee - I really have to credit him for everything in my life because he made me want to be an astronaut, that was my interest in space initially. B: We imagined. We visualized, that's what we did - because you could only hear. I think that's where it started. That writerly tendency. So why didn't you become a visual artist? Like a painter? B: Well you got me there. I suppose I was trying to create a God code and you broke it up. Well now, I think... textualization isn't the write word though. It's visualization... but it's visualization of text. Do you dream in text? N: Of course I didn't become an astronaut, but then if I did I couldn't tell you much about millisecond pulsars. And I actually didn't stay with the astronaut space adventu...