Monday, October 29, 2012

Make the call

How are we getting out of here?

1) Submarine
2) Experimental teleporter
3) Let's leave by the front door.

Sunday, October 28, 2012

Wednesday, October 24, 2012

The smartest show on television

10:35 PM VHomeland is the smartest show on television
10:37 PM V: I'm actually too tired right now to go into why this show is so offensive
  Not just intellectually offensive
  I'll just give you an example
10:38 PM The first few episodes are all about this is-he-or-isn't-he-a-terrorist for Damien Lewis's character.
  This is a Showtime show, so it's hour-long episodes forming a season-long arc.
10:39 PM Viewership is driven by cliffhangers.
  So the cliffhanger at the end of one of this episodes is that Lewis's character, a recently returned POW whose motives are suspect, goes into his garage, takes out a prayer mat... and prays to Allah.
10:40 PM How offensive is that?
  OMG, he's a MUSLIM... THAT answers it: he MUST be a terrorist
10:41 PM Additionally, the season-long arc is that there is this incredibly detailed and complex terrorist plot to target senior political figures.
  Now, recall that this show is trying to be `The Wire' of the technothriller terrorism genre
  So we, as an audience, are supposed to believe that what we're seeing is real
10:42 PM So the aesthetics are out of `The Wire' but the sensibilities are straight out of `24'
  Again, extremely offensive (intellectually)
  In the newest episode, it turns out that Damien Lewis (who we now know to be a repentant terrorist) has become a congressman is being put on the vice presidential ticket
10:44 PM I can't tell if this is intellectually offensive (lazily ripping of `Manchurian Candidate') or offensive to our sensibilities (I seem to recall a certain political figure subject to such accusations as a result of little more than peurile racism)
10:46 PM Even the political scenes are like watching CNN political coverage
10:48 PM The writers are way too impressed with their ability to present thoughts that would be controversial and counterintuitive if they weren't already so mundane and so hackneyed
  `Veep' is a better look into the political process than `Homeland' and it's a comedy!
10:49 PM You should watch this show to see modern, post-colonial racialism at work
10:50 PM The entire cast is this supposedly hyper-competent white CIA analysts who are experts on intelligence and the middle east
10:51 PM Also, what a bad actress, Claire Danes

6 minutes
10:58 PM V: Her only acting mode is bitchy high school girl

17 minutes
11:15 PM V: hahahaha
  So Damian Lewis's character, candidate for vice president, is a secret muslim
  hmm
  Not quite offensive enough yet

Friday, October 05, 2012

From myths to national self-appraisal

I nearly broke down altogether when I entered the lofty gallery where the blessed goddess of beauty, Our Lady of Milo, stands on her pedestal. I lay prostrate at her feet for a long time, and I wept so bitterly that it would have melted a heart of stone. And indeed the goddess did look down pitifully upon me, yet at the same time so hopelessly as if she were trying to say: But don’t you see that I have no arms and that therefore I cannot help you.
Hölderlin ‘grew up in the arms of the gods’; Heine’s goddess didn’t have any. The Greeks, Heine said, were of no use to Europe’s revolutions; genuine political reform required a much more mundane form of national self-appraisal.
Thomas Meaney: Germany Imagines Hellas

Tuesday, October 02, 2012