M-L-M Mayhem!

So the Seth Rogen and James Franco film, The Interview , will not be released in the theatres this December because hackers .  Boo-fucking-hoo.  The popular, common sense narrative is that this hacking was a DPRK job, but so what?  The film is some asinine comedy about two Americans travelling to North Korea to assassinate Kim Jong Un, replete with the requisite "chinaman" racism (as the trailer made it very clear with its yellow peril "ching-chong-strawhat-buckteeth" chauvinism), and what existent nation would ever tolerate a mainstream and international film promoting it dissolution as a nation?  Can you imagine a film comedically celebrating the assassination of the US president?  You should, because it would be awesome, but the moment you imagine it you would also have to imagine its non-existence, the feds showing up at your door if you were part of such a project, or the country guilty of making such a movie being subjected to sanctions.  Which are far worse,

What is up with all of these leftist reviews of the new Batman movie?  I could be remembering things wrong, but I cannot recall the previous two Christopher Nolan Batman films generating as much fascination amongst lefty film critics as The Dark Knight Rises .  It seems like there has been a new critical review of this movie every week since its release.  First there were all those reviews that complained that it was an attack on the #occupy movement.  Then, perhaps realizing that the screenplay was completed and the movie entered pre-production before #occupy , some reviewers soberly decided (and I felt that this, at least, was correct and interesting) the movie was more of a general representation of ruling class angst over possible revolutionary sentiments amongst the masses.   The reviews did not stop here, however, because every internet leftist wanted to write about Batman ––more than we even wanted to write about Avatar it seems––and soon lefty websites and blogs were cl

Over the past year and a half this blog, which has always pretty eclectic, has developed an audience that is less interested in my posts about movies and books and art.  Interestingly enough, in the first year of my blog the only posts that garnered any traffic beyond my friend and comrade circles were those posts about movies and books.  Indeed, the first post that was ever reblogged was my long analysis of Pascal Laugier's Martyrs .  Now my reviews and analyses of art and literature and film generate far less traffic than other posts, so I stopped blogging about the cultural sphere of the superstructure about a year ago. (This is not to say that I am interested in only blogging about those subjects that garner the most traffic.  If that was the case, I would blog only about obituaries of people I disliked.  After all, my posts about the late Jack Layton and the late Vaclav Havel are so far my most popular. [The latter received over 1000 hits on the first day of its posting!  

After so many "serious" blog posts (most of which degenerate, as usual, into rants) I figure that it is time to write something not-so-serious––or, at the very least, less contentious [maybe].  Since I have not blogged about films and books for awhile (and since I used to have the odd film or book review peppered throughout this blog), I'm going to spend this post gibbering on about what I have been reading, watching, and listening to this week.  This will perhaps give people an insight into the strange landscape of my interior life: no I do not only read Marxist/Leninist/Maoist literature, or only watch "political" movies, dismissing everything else as "bourgeois" and hardly worth my notice.  So, in no particular order, I will describe the cultural products (some of them crap some of them not crap) that are not specifically marxist that I have been shoving into my brain over the past seven or eight days. 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami (novel):  I'm hal

Actually, there is a lot I dislike about Slavoj Zizek.  I have never seen him as either a rigorous/useful marxist academic, let alone a principled and committed communist.  As much as I respect the fact that he is partially responsible for the repopularization of Lenin in academia, his "hipster marxism" (as one of my good comrades calls it) has generally offended my political sensibilities.  His lack of respect for actual historical materialism (such as his willingness to promote a rightist analysis of Mao in his introduction to the most recent Verso release of Mao's   writing) demonstrates a serious failing for a supposed marxist scholar––without investigation there should be no right to speak.  And his seeming disdain for political economy (as judged by a somewhat recent interaction he had with Samir Amin) demonstrates a strange refusal to engage in a concrete analysis of a concrete situation.  Generally I find, when it comes to any of Zizek's writing, that there i

Recently I've been reading J. Smith and André Moncourt's The Red Army Faction: A Documentary History (Volume 1: Projectiles for the People) , which is probably the best book on the RAF ever produced.  [You can purchase it here , at the excellent Kerspelebedeb site that puts out many great lefty books.]  Not only do the authors provide a leftist gloss and breakdown of the history surrounding the RAF, but the book is truly the promised "documentary history"––it contains communiques, pictures, debates, and a host of material never before available in one book and in english.  Since I used to be obsessed with the RAF, especially in my MA years of graduate school, I had been meaning to read this book since it was released.  As much as I understood that the RAF made serious strategic and tactical errors––as much as I now understand the focoist problem of their approach––I could not help but respect the conviction of their anti-imperialist politics, the willingness to die fo

The excellent blog Speed of Dreams just posted a news article pertaining to the most recent colonial intervention in Kanehsatake .  For those readers who are unaware of the history of Canadian anticolonial struggles, Kanehsatake has been a site of radical resistance for a very long time.  Most significantly it was the site of the 1990 Oka Crisis (Oka being the name of the nearby settler town), a stand-off between Mohawk revolutionaries and the Canadian state that forced the issue of indigenous liberation into the national consciousness.   The Oka Crisis was an event that threw the colonizer-colonized contradiction into stark relief and forced politically aware Canadians to choose sides: either you supported the Mohawks on the barricades and opposed colonialism, or you supported the armed forces of the Canadian state and thus colonialism.  Whatever side one chose, at that moment in time no one could claim that a significant divide between settler and native did not exist. It has bee

Ayn Rand's monumental and insufferably reactionary novel Atlas Shrugged was recently turned into a film and, despite all the hooplah of insufferably excited libertarians, tanked at the box office.  Of course, in truly hypocritical libertarian style, the film's producer, John Aglialoro, chose to blame the critics and some nebulous and collective "fear of Ayn Rand."  Obviously when libertarians fail to maximize their liberty then it must be the fault of some collectivist conspiracy. The idea that there is some pernicious and collective fear of Ayn Rand and her ideas––in North America at the heart of world capitalism––is patently absurd.  Libertarian ideology is the wet dream of capitalism, the fantasy of every capitalist and everyone who wants to be a capitalist.  The hatred of taxation, redistribution, and the "slavish" masses––the belief that history is made by strong, maverick individuals and not by the people at the bottom propping up the whole damn sys

I have always disliked Hollywood war films, especially World War 2 films.  They generally strike me as exercises in masculine heroism, macho boy stories that reify certain ideological understandings of war and the military.  Even those supposedly "critical" Vietnam War movies are suspect, all about American soldiers traumatized by an amorphous landscape of asians––and no, I really do not care if the most acclaimed of these films is an adaptation of a Joseph Conrad novel. But mainstream World War 2 films are the worst.  There is a narrative of WW2 that has become part of North American, and most specifically USAmerican, consciousness that is promoted by such movies.  A narrative I briefly critiqued in a previous post , a narrative that is still the dominant North American understanding of this war: "we fought fascism because it was evil and we are good."  This is an ahistorical comprehension of fascism as an evil menace abstracted from its concrete circumstances th

Recently the students in one of the classes I teach had to watch Justice at Nuremberg  and use it, in their essay assignments, as a method of discussing legal theory.  Since the course curriculum did not present this movie in a proper historical context, using it mainly as a way to explain competing schools of the philosophy of law, my students, at least according to most of their papers, treated it like an objective historical document about fascism and America as "anti-fascist."  After reading fifty papers discussing this film, I was again struck with the realization that current North American and European ideology about World War 2 prevents a concrete understanding of fascism.  Movies like Justice at Nuremberg , and other films that treat the US army as some sort of moral and liberating force, support those false and banal definitions of fascism that prevent people from being able to recognize contemporary fascist dangers.  Fascism is vaguely defined as "totalitarian

This post was initially inspired by friend and comrade blogger Xtina 's suggestion, from the Sophia Coppola post, that I write something about our mutual dislike of the Coen Brothers.  And then, when my closest comrade of all time wrote a post about True Grit (along with the Coen Brothers, queerish things, and general awesomeness) in her new and what will prove to be amazing blog All Killer , I got all riled up to rant about these dudes and their dudish films. When it comes to critically acclaimed American cinema, the movies of the Coen brothers are most often cited as contemporary examples of excellent film-making.  Critics love these boys and there is more than one unofficial fansite dedicated to their supposed brilliance.  And yet it is telling that the Coens' biggest fans––those who go on and on about their supposed genius––are male and those who do not enjoy their films, or at the very least just find them boring and annoying, are female. I remember years ago, when I