Arts and/or Entertainment

It is time to get Oscar Lopez Rivera out of prison.  He has been unjustly locked in prison for 33 years and is the subject of my most recent collaboration.

About Oscar López Rivera

There seems to be a small yet vocal core of maniacs bafflingly resistant to the notion that women should have any say in the games industry at all.
— Charlie Brooker, The Guardian, October 20, 2014

Is America’s folk image of itself derived from a cinematic narrative that defines its national character as one representing a ‘can-do-force’ fostering trade in the world for the common good?

Can we make anything of what, according to The Independent, is one of “the biggest celebrity hacks of all time”? Celebrities who crow and drape themselves over each other for the next ghastly “selfie” rush to lawyers and authorities when their fleshier items are revealed.  Starring in the list of photos hacked from Apple’s iCloud service are images of Jennifer Lawrence, Mary E. Winstead and Kirsten Dunst.  The website 4Chan proved to be a happy recipient.

For most of us, being funny, especially extremely so, leaves us looking like a shaded relief map: The funny part juts out, while the rest falls into shadow. When we make another laugh, the catharsis the listener experiences is realized viscerally, like twitching funny bones. Even when comedy takes darkness as a subject (such as Williams’ musings on the Grim Rapper), the listeners see the pain inherent to their lives decontextualized enough to hold close to the heart, and from it, they heartily guffaw, feeling recalibrated. They are healed, if but for a moment.

Two short weeks ago, art students from an Offenbach university located in the heart of Germany occupied every floor of a closed-down, multi-tier soap factory building. They used the space to excitedly display their art to the public. Considered by a few of these students to be the ‘Detroit’ of Germany, Offenbach itself is situated on the outskirts of Frankfurt—the German banking city responsible for maintaining most of Germany’s wealth.

Walter White, the main protagonist in the hugely popular Breaking Bad (AMC 2008-13) cable TV series, starts as a struggling high school chemistry teacher who is diagnosed with lung cancer. As such, Walter turns to the fast money lane of methamphetamine formulation to secure a financial future for his family before he dies, leading to a lifestyle conversion from protagonist to antagonist, an evolving metamorphosis from sympathetic to callous, brutal, and hardnosed.

Contra Arendt, one may speak of the “’evil’ of banality”—certainly a pervasive cultural pathology at the present time. Although the average American is not guaranteed sufficient panem, he almost always has access to circenses; i.e., the cornucopia of amusements and games which may soothe and refresh his otherwise battered, humble self. TV sitcoms and the like can be said to offer a kind of low-grade therapy—if by therapy we refer merely to a temporary catharsis of tension rather than deeper insight.

This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.
There are men who can’t be bought.
The fireborn are at home in fire.
— Carl Sandburg, from The People, Yes

bad Jews acting badly; education’s leaders a la Walmart; culture bought and paid for by whitey